Given the current political climate, I would say it's less likely to be because of some start up and more likely to be part of the wider GOP effort to claim the world is full of predators who are trying to corrupt your child's innocence and groom them into sexual beings before their time. They're using the same augument to ban drag and any books the governor's team hasn't preapproved in Florida. We're entering satanic panic 2.
It does seem to be starting in the conservative states probably because they would be most open to it. It's also being proposed in the UK. You could be right. Either way this should be stopped because when it reaches critical mass then it's just a matter of time before it becomes federal law. Should that come to pass I would hope they lean towards empowering parents by using the RTA header vs. some 3rd party site that would initially used to protect children and then more controls get added quarterly to protect the next thing and then the entire internet goes the way of Twitter.
Except it's not irrational this time. Porn has gotten much more extreme and way easier to access than before. When I was a kid - I could only access porn magazines that were relatively tame.
Porn industry is not doing anything to prevent children from watching it.
If self-regulation is non-existent then the government has to step in.
Or... parent better? Kids are going to see messed up stuff. Teach them why it's wrong, and that coming to you about it is good. That they should respect women, and other human beings in general, and that porn is almost as fantastical as Star Wars. And restrict their internet yourself if it's that big of a deal.
I'm sick of people sucking at their responsibilities so much that they think the government doing it for them is a great option. It's lazy.
As much as I agree, it is a little unsettling to see how extreme porn can be, specifically because of how easy it is to accidentally stumble across something extreme even when you didn't intend to. Even "hardcore" porn seems to have gotten harder-core in my lifetime alone, and if it weren't for the Web I'd probably never have seen anything other than old-school softcore stuff until much later in my life.
People are absolutely entitled to their own tastes, on or off camera, in a consensual setting. But I also think we can come up with better "on-ramps" to pornography and the wide variety of sex acts that exist in the world, without allowing young people to wander without warning into STEPMOM LET ME PUT IT WHERE?? DONT TELL DAD and YOUNG ANGEL TRIPLE GANGBANG and THINKING ABOUT MY CRUSH WHILE DOING FAIRLY EXTREME THINGS TO MY BUTT (a real title that I will never forget, and yes they were "extreme" even by today's standards).
Not to mention the subtle racism and often-not-subtle misogyny that still exists in traditional porn tropes, and IMO might be more harmful than actually watching porn itself.
Also the sheer amount of step-sibling porn on the free porn "tube" sites is especially weird and disconcerting, given that young people are most likely to see porn there and not on, say, an private OnlyFans channel or a production studio site like Brazzers.
Of course, we can't ever guide our children to healthy relationships with sex and pornography unless we actually talk about pornography with our children, which as a society we are not well-equipped to do.
I was not able to access messed up stuff when I was a kid. We didn't have phones and internet. My parents didn't have to do anything special. But in today's environment - you just can't. Unless you lock your kid up and homeschool them. You can set up all sorts of parental controls on their computer and phone, but you can't do anything about their friends' phones and computers.
Not the porn I watch, but the porn that's easily accessible nowadays. BDSM, choking, simulated rape, incest and other more extreme stuff wasn't accessible anywhere when I was a kid. It wasn't something that you could find in your dad's or uncle's mancave.
