Over the course of 2024, Aella cried on 71 different days, showered on 24, and took ketamine on 14. We know this because she meticulously gathers and posts information about people’s personal, emotional, and sexual lives—including her own. The crying number was unusually high, she says, because of a bad breakup. For many fans, the more boggling statistic was that last year, she had sex on only 41 days, but on one of those days, she had sex with nearly 40 people. We’ll come back to that.

After years of following Aella’s online outrages and unexpected insights, I wanted to meet her for myself—to understand her unusual occupation as a cam girl turned sex researcher, and to hear her perspective on what the internet has done to human sexuality. But my first IRL encounter with her, one day last spring, involved staring at a closed front door.

Aella had invited me to her home in Austin, but then slept through our designated appointment time. Even my frantic knocking and texting didn’t rouse her. Eventually, though, once she had woken up and been for a swim in the local springs, her assistant let me into the house and made me a mushroom coffee. Explaining that she was gradually bringing order to Aella’s life, the assistant opened a closet to reveal a rail of neatly hung bras. This was a first in my journalism career—being invited to appreciate an interviewee’s underwear. Not that Aella would mind, because her entire appeal is based around her lack of filter. Polaroids of her, masked and topless, were stuck to the fridge.

[Jane Coaston: The nudes internet]

“I can’t really get canceled,” she told me when I finally met her, “because what are you gonna do?” By then she was sitting with her legs curled up underneath her on a chair, wearing only a robe and underwear, next to a giant, curved monitor of the type beloved by crypto day traders.

Aella is her longtime pseudonym; the 33-year-old keeps her birth name private. Describing precisely what she does for a living is difficult: Her X bio describes her as a “whorelord” and a “vexworker,” by which she means that she is an OnlyFans star, occasional escort, and organizer of sex parties. She is unabashedly a nerd, once describing herself as “a gremlinesque neckbeard who found himself in a hot woman’s body.” And she has turned her experience of selling sex into a large-scale research project.

Thanks to her talent for virality, she has been able to create huge online surveys that, despite the limitations of the medium, provide some of the broadest insights that we have into sexuality in the 2020s. More than 700,000 people have responded to her “Big Kink” survey. She has learned, among other things, that “pigtails” are a more popular fetish than “armpits.” She is as uninhibited about asking inflammatory questions as she is about posting nudes: She has written about whether penis size is correlated with race (“We haven’t had a good, high-n study”) and asked her followers if they would support the creation of realistic child-size sex dolls for pedophiles (77.4 percent said no).

One of the biggest problems in sex research is recruiting participants who can be induced to answer questions honestly. This is where Aella’s experience of capturing the internet’s attention gives her an advantage. The Big Kink survey takes about 40 minutes to complete—long enough to weed out trollish and spam responses. But how could she expect to keep unpaid respondents interested for that long? Her solution was to promise them a freakiness rating at the end, like a classic BuzzFeed personality quiz.

Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist who serves as the executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, sees Aella as the young-Millennial version of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the sex educator whose grandmotherly charm made her a disarming advocate of sexual liberation. As Dr. Ruth understood, many Americans’ lives were once blighted by their inability to articulate, much less confront, their relationship needs. Even today, people withhold details about their sexual interests from their partners, their doctors, and academic researchers. Yet they’ll spill quite a lot to a sex-positive internet personality, and all those revelations add up to a huge body of information.

Like much American social-science research, Aella’s sample skews white and college-educated. Liberals are overrepresented in her data; most of her followers are men, but most of her survey respondents are women. Online polls like hers have limitations, Garcia told me. “But,” he added, “they do tell us what people are thinking about.”

Aella was raised in Idaho in a fundamentalist-Christian family that was so socially conservative, her parents showed her and her two younger sisters a censored version of Titanic. Her father is an evangelist and a radio host who used to be flooded by hate mail from atheists and other Christians. That turned out to be a preview of Aella’s own experience of threats and abuse, and good practice for life online. On a recent seven-and-a-half-hour episode of the podcast Whatever, she was part of a panel of 10 women who were hectored and mocked by Andrew Wilson, a fellow guest and self-described Christian “bloodsports debater.” When he insinuated that she didn’t understand science, she kept her cool and calmly explained basic statistical methods to him. His argumentative tactics, she said afterward, reminded her of her father’s.

She always felt like an outsider, she says now. She remembers writing in her teenage journals that “everybody else has access to a secret script that I don’t know what it is.” She left home at 17 after an argument. Once she started seeing flaws in her Christian beliefs, her faith crumbled quickly. “I have a tendency to take things to an extreme,” Aella once told Playboy. She flipped from devout teenager to libertine 20-something, barely passing through the dull span of vanilla dating and low-key Sunday churchgoing.

After dropping out of college in northern Idaho, Aella became a cam girl—because streaming explicit content for money couldn’t be worse than her day job on an electrical-equipment assembly line, she reckoned. She both enjoyed and excelled at it, and she soon started researching what made some girls more successful than others. Her findings surprised her: Viewers liked idiosyncrasy and theatricality as much as nudity and straightforward hotness. And so she began to stage surreal scenes—dressing up as a mime, pretending to seduce a chair, doing a “dinosaur moonwalk,” playing the accordion. On an internet filled with horny nerds, the juxtaposition of weird and sexy can be lucrative. She earned more than $100,000 in her best month on OnlyFans, and has thousands of paid subscribers on Substack.

Her first moment of virality outside the camming sites came in 2013, from a series of photos that showed her undressing, before being dragged off camera by garden gnomes. The “Getting Gnaked” set was viewed more than 2 million times within a year. Aella also found that, contrary to many of the stereotypes about online porn, a physically submissive woman was not what most straight men wanted. Instead, her customers fantasized about scenarios in which they were essentially passive—a “basic hot girl” just fell into their arms. “Like, Oh, we’re the last people on Earth, right?” she told the podcaster Lex Fridman. In a conclusion that might unsettle some feminists, she finds that the proportion of women who are interested in feeling submissive is greater than the proportion of men who want to feel dominant. Perhaps my favorite Aella claim is that she can arouse her escorting clients just by expressing enthusiasm as they explain high-level concepts to her. (Her current rate is $4,000 an hour.)

During her early career, she bounced around the U.S., living in Boston, New York, and the Bay Area, as well as Portland, Oregon. She gravitated toward a scene known as rationalism, wherein self-professed nerds apply a coldly rational lens to subjects that are often clouded by emotion or dogma, such as the heritability of intelligence, whether you should altruistically donate a kidney to a stranger, and whether it’s acceptable to have sex with your sister. “once i threw a party for the bay area rationalists, and the rules to attend were you had to be wearing a full-face coverage mask, and be naked,” she wrote on X in 2021, during the pandemic. “Many came; they all bravely stripped, donned weird masks … and then proceeded to sit in a polite circle and debate global trade.” Her bracingly unfiltered posts put her in my peripheral vision years ago; while I am worried about the potential for abuse and exploitation in sex work, her originality and openness have always intrigued me.

Last February, somewhat infamously, she enrolled 42 men to have sex with her en masse via a Google Form, then rented a venue, recruited eight women to act as fluffers, and asked the men to put on matching commemorative bathrobes. The resulting Substack post is a masterpiece, starting with an epigram from Nelson Mandela: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” (She detailed how two of the attendees, waiting in line, bonded over the fact that their start-ups had received support from the same venture-capital fund.) This was how she managed to have sex on so few days last year, but with so many different people. It is also one of many, many incidents in Aella’s life that most people would regard with awe, horror, or both.

[Helen Lewis: The outrage over ]100 Men only goes so far

Aella originally felt drawn to sex research because her own sexual interests are outside the mainstream. She practices polyamory and freely discusses her fetish for “consensual nonconsent”—which is to say, scenarios in which she pretends to be taking part against her will. If she were “super normie” about sex, she told me, “I don’t think I would have the need to dissect it.” This places her in the grand tradition of American sex researchers who defied convention in their own personal life and, whether they acknowledged it or not, became advocates for greater sexual permissiveness. Alfred Kinsey, a pioneer in the field in the 1940s and ’50s, was married to a woman but had sexual relationships with at least one of his male students. The biologist shocked the country with his first book about human sexuality, which claimed that only half the population is exclusively heterosexual throughout adulthood. “I suspect that Kinsey’s great project originated in the discovery of his own sexual ambiguities,” the author of a 1972 Atlantic article hypothesized. Kinsey’s ostensibly objective scholarship was a concealed polemic: He wanted to expand the scope of “normal.”

In the 1960s, the gynecologist William Masters and and his research partner (and later wife) Virginia Johnson also defied prim scholarly norms by serving as consultants to Playboy, reasoning that the magazine was a good way to reach young men, and they supplied female “surrogates”—therapeutic escorts—to single men with sexual inhibitions, erectile disorder, and other conditions.

Throughout the 20th century, sex researchers willed themselves to suspend moral judgment. Kinsey had a saying, Justin Garcia told me, that is often quoted at the institute that bears his name: “We are the recorders and reporters of facts—not the judges of the behaviors we describe.” Yet the field still has taboos, just different ones. The feminist commentators Catharine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, whose work is highly influential on university campuses, have argued that pornography is inherently harmful to women. Some of Aella’s findings challenge that view. She finds that men who watch online porn, rather than being desensitized to what real-life sexual partners want, are better at guessing what women want in bed.

Aella is not familiar with the academic traditions that have shaped modern sex research. When I asked her about Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, she told me that she hadn’t read their work. This irritates some mainstream researchers: J. Michael Bailey, a Northwestern University psychology professor who studies sexual orientation and arousal, told me he was “annoyed” by what he saw as her casualness, and denied being merely territorial. “She hasn’t bothered to learn things,” Bailey told me. “Sex research is not just asking a few questions to a lot of people. If it were, we would know a lot more than we know.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: Don’t fire people for making pornography in their spare time]

Nonetheless, Bailey said, “she talks about things without worry, and we should all be doing that a lot more.” He thinks that some mainstream academic sex research has suffered from “the encroachment of ideology,” becoming queer or feminist activism by other means. (Bailey’s 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, which argues that some gender transitions are sexually motivated, prompted some transgender activists to accuse him of research misconduct—claims that a subsequent investigation did not substantiate.) Bailey invited Aella to join an email discussion group he runs, and he asked her to promote a survey on sadomasochism that his graduate student was running. If he thought her work was worthless, he said, “I wouldn’t have asked for the help.”

Garcia noted that, because sex research is a prime target for political scrutiny, institutions like his take great care with study design, researchers’ conflicts of interests, and gaining approval from review boards. “Aella, her work blurs those boundaries,” he told me. “But they were created by a field to protect itself, and add rigor and protection from political attacks.”

Unconstrained by such concerns, Aella has spelunked through the extremes of modern sexuality. Among them is vore, a rare fetish “around swallowing someone whole or being swallowed whole, typically by a much larger creature,” as she put it. Researching the phenomenon is tricky. Trying to find, say, 300 people who like vore within the results of a bigger survey would require a huge initial number of respondents. Recruiting participants on a vore forum solves that problem, she has written, even if it does introduce some sampling bias: “Maybe these people are less ashamed about their fetish; maybe they’re lonelier in real life; maybe they’re much more into vore than the actual population of people into vore,” Aella argued. Or, of course, they could be lying.

[Helen Lewis: Nobody should care about a woman’s ‘body count’]

Still, as Aella and others have shown, the universe of niche sexual interests is enormous. And really, this is the big change that the internet has brought to sexuality itself—not just the study of it. Anyone who grew up with a latent vore fetish 100 years ago, or even 30, might have gone their whole life without meeting a fellow enthusiast for being swallowed whole. Bailey published research on people who both desire amputees and fantasize about becoming amputees. “What’s wonderful is that, today, people with these weird sexualities find each other online,” he told me. “It’s really a heyday for studying unusual phenomena like that.”

That raises some obvious follow-up questions: What if the internet is not just connecting people with weird sexual interests, but creating them? Should there ever be a time when sex researchers say, Hang on, that’s far enough?

Aella, who considers herself a libertarian, had come to Austin in the hope of meeting like-minded people, away from the default leftism of the Bay Area. But even in America’s supposed heterodoxy capital, she felt shunned. She joined an invitation-only society for freethinkers called Based in Austin, but was quickly kicked out of the group by fellow anti-woke warriors. Her offense was to post, in a chat thread about venue suggestions, a recommendation for a space where she had once held an orgy. She also didn’t last in a support group for OnlyFans creators, because other women—who she said were “very, very, like, social justice, very leftist”—objected to her provocative posts.

Aella thinks that America still has a deeply hypocritical attitude to sex. “It feels like we simultaneously have a culture where we say sexual liberalism is good, but in action, we find reasons to not allow individual expression to happen,” she told me when I caught up with her again over Zoom, a few months after my visit to Austin. She cited PornHub’s refusal to host videos of sleep fetishes. But there was a good reason for that policy, I said—the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other French men revealed that Pelicot had recruited men to rape his unconscious wife under the pretext that the couple were indulging a consensual fetish about “sleeping beauties.”

My main point of disagreement with Aella is that she has a much sunnier vision of human nature than I do. While some people do like consensual nonconsent, others clearly relish actual violation and sadism in and out of the bedroom. Aella’s blitheness about the risks of her job—she wrote a guide to escorting, in which she describes one client aggressively biting and choking her—seems to be born from the same off-kilter approach to life that makes her such a good amateur anthropologist. In Austin, I was surprised that she invited me, a total stranger, to meet her at home. Eighteen months earlier, a man had appeared at her door and attempted to kidnap her. (Police later found a garrote at his home, alongside a knife, duct tape, and the names of two other sex workers. The man took a plea deal and is already out of jail.)

[Helen Lewis: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Ultimately, she left the Texas capital after a different episode of personal turmoil. She had hoped to have children, only to discover in August that her primary partner wasn’t interested in starting a family. When she revealed the breakup online, a predictable storm of schadenfreude ensued. For “posting publicly about being devastated from a breakup,” she wrote on X, her reward was “people laughing how you deserved it.”

She packed up her belongings and moved back to California. Her new housemate is one of the fluffers from her orgy—a woman who was also dating Aella’s boyfriend but broke up with him too, in solidarity. “We were both dating my ex, and then we’re both not dating him,” she told me. With her living arrangements sorted, Aella wants to work on a book and co-author some scientific papers, both of which might allow her to gain the respectability she needs to attract more funding. She might seek out what she calls “performative credentials.”

In the meantime, though, she still embraces the queasily intimate dynamics of internet celebrity—an openness that provides rich fodder for cruel armchair psychologists. Isn’t she just getting back at Daddy? How will she ever find love? I find something endearing about her refusal to be bowed by this kind of jeering. Aella bravely voyages to the frontiers of American sexuality, collecting data on people’s darkest desires, uncovering the hidden economics of the online sex trade, and refusing—despite all the mockery—to filter herself.

In the pre-internet era, turning 18 in America conferred a very specific, if furtive, privilege: the right to walk into a store and buy an adult magazine.

Technically, it still does, for those hypothetical teenagers who prefer to get their smut in print. For practical purposes, however, American children can access porn as soon as they can figure out how to navigate a web browser. That’s because, since the 1990s, America has had two sets of laws concerning underage access to pornography. In the physical world, the law generally requires young-looking customers to show ID proving they’re 18 before they can access adult materials. In the online world, the law has traditionally required, well, nothing. Under Supreme Court precedent established during the internet’s infancy, forcing websites to verify the age of their users is burdensome and ineffective, if not impossible, and thus incompatible with the First Amendment.

That arrangement finally appears to be crumbling. Last week, the Court heard oral arguments in a case concerning the legality of Texas’s age-verification law, one of many such laws passed since 2022. This time around, the justices seemed inclined to erase the distinction between accessing porn online and in person.“Explain to me why the barrier is different online than in a brick-and-mortar setting,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett requested of the lawyer representing the porn-industry plaintiffs. “Do you agree that, at least in theory, brick-and-mortar institutions shouldn’t be treated differently than online?” asked Justice Neil Gorsuch.

If the Court indeed allows Texas’s law to stand, it will mark a turning point in the trajectory of internet regulation. As more and more of our life has moved online, the two-track legal system has produced an untenable situation. And lawmakers are fed up with it. Roughly 130 million people today live in states that have a law like Texas’s, all enacted in the past three years.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Pornography shouldn’t be so easy for kids to access]

Technology has come a long way since the Court first struck down age-verification requirements. Age verification services are now effective, easily used, and secure enough to be widely deployed. However the Court rules in this particular case, the era of the online pornography free-for-all seems to be coming to a close.

Before the internet, limiting children and teens’ access to porn was pretty simple. Businesses weren’t allowed to sell porn to kids, and to ensure that they didn’t, they were generally required to ask to see some ID.

The Communications Decency Act of 1996 was supposed to establish a similar regime for the commercial internet, which only a few years into existence was already beginning to hint at its potential to supercharge the distribution of adult material. The law made it a crime to “display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age” any sexual content that would be “patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards.”

The Supreme Court unanimously struck down this section of the law in the 1997 case Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, concluding that it amounted to a “blanket restriction on speech.” The law’s biggest problem was its vague and overbroad definitions of prohibited material, but practical concerns about the difficulty of compliance also played a large role in the Supreme Court’s ruling. It repeated the lower court’s finding that “existing technology did not include any effective method for a sender to prevent minors from obtaining access to its communications on the Internet without also denying access to adults.” And in a concurring opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, “Until gateway technology is available throughout cyberspace, and it is not in 1997, a speaker cannot be reasonably assured that the speech he displays will reach only adults because it is impossible to confine speech to an ‘adult zone.’”

After that defeat, Congress passed a new, narrower law designed to survive First Amendment scrutiny. The Child Online Protection Act of 1998 required websites to prevent minors from accessing “prurient” or pornographic material. That law, too, was struck down, in part because the Supreme Court opined that optional parental filters would solve the problem more effectively while restricting less speech. In the end, parental filters were never widely adopted, and within a few years, kids started getting their own devices, which were mostly out of parents’ reach.

The Supreme Court decisions, and the legislative inaction that followed them, bifurcated the rules around kids’ access to porn. In the physical world, their sins were tightly controlled—no strip clubs, no nudie mags, at least not without a fake ID. Online, they did as they pleased. According to a 2023 report, 73 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 have watched online porn. A young boy or girl can take out their smartphone, type a free porn site’s URL into their browser, and be met with an endless array of quickly loading high-definition videos of adults having sex, much of it rough. Seeing an R-rated movie at a theater would require infinitely more work.

The first crack in this regime emerged in 2022, when the Louisiana Republican state representative Laurie Schlegel first decided to act. Schlegel, a practicing sex-and-porn-addiction counselor, had been inspired to act after hearing the pop star Billie Eilish describe how porn had affected her as a child. “I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” Eilish said on The Howard Stern Show. “I think it really destroyed my brain, and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”

[Read: The age of AI child abuse is here]

Schlegel was also inspired by the new technology available for online identity and age verification. In 2018, Louisiana had implemented a digital-ID-card app, called LA Wallet, that state residents could use instead of a physical ID. Schlegel realized that the same system could be used to share a user’s “coarse” age—whether they are older or younger than 18, and nothing else—with a porn company. The “gateway technology” that O’Connor noted didn’t exist in 1997 was now a reality.

Schlegel’s bill, which passed the State House 96–1 and the State Senate 34–0, required businesses that publish or distribute online porn to verify that their users are at least 18, using either a digital ID or another reasonable method. The law initially flew under the national media’s radar. (“I think there were only two [journalists] that called me in 2022 asking about the law,” Schlegel told me.) But legislators in other states took notice, and by 2024, 18 more states had passed similar legislation. In states without a digital identification program like Louisiana’s, porn sites must pay third-party age-verification providers to use software to compare a user’s face with their ID photo, held up to the camera, or to use AI to determine if their face looks obviously older than 18. According to a report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the average margin of error for these commercial face-estimation services is about three years, meaning that those older than 21 are unlikely to ever need to show ID. In practice, this is much the same as a porn shop back in the day: Most people get through with a quick glance at their face, but people who look particularly young have to show ID.

These state laws have some weaknesses. They apply only where at least one-third of “total material on a website” is pornographic. (At oral arguments, discussion of this fact prompted Justice Samuel Alito to quip, referring to porn sites, “Is it like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays on there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?”) The law is also toothless against websites that are hosted abroad, including the Czech porn giant XVideos, which hasn’t complied at all with state age-verification rules, a fact that millions of teenagers in those states likely already know. Underage users can also evade the restrictions by employing virtual private networks to disguise their IP address.

Still, even prohibitions that can be circumvented tend to screen many people away from a given activity, as the country’s recent experience with sports gambling and marijuana suggests in reverse. Three of the biggest porn sites in America—xHamster (which contracts an age-verification provider called Yoti), Stripchat (which uses Yoti or VerifyMy, user’s choice), and Chaturbate (which uses Incode)—have chosen to comply with the state laws.

The big holdout is Pornhub, the most popular porn site in America and one of the most viewed sites on the internet, with billions of monthly visits. It has stopped operating in all but one age-verification state. (The exception: Louisiana, thanks to its digital-ID program.) In an emailed statement, the company said that the laws “have made the internet more dangerous for adults and children” by failing to “preserve user privacy” and nudging them toward “darker corners of the internet.” A Pornhub spokesperson who goes by Ian (he declined to provide his last name) told me that age-verification laws will lead children to seek out porn from even more troubling sources.

Joining Pornhub and other porn distributors in opposition are free-speech groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. They argue that the age-verification laws are “overinclusive,” because they would restrict young people’s access even to a hypothetical website that was one-third porn, two-thirds non-porn. At the same time, they point out, the laws are “underinclusive,” because, thanks to the one-third rule, they leave kids free to access porn on general-interest platforms such as Reddit and X, which have quite a bit of it. And, the free-speech groups say, device-based content filters are still a better, less restrictive way to achieve the desired result.

Much of the supposed burden on free speech centers on the notion that verifying one’s age requires surrendering a great deal of privacy. That fear is understandable, given the long history of internet-based companies violating their stated privacy commitments. But a company such as Yoti is not analogous to, say, a social-media company. It isn’t sucking up user data while offering a free product; its entire business model is performing age verification. Its survival depends on clients—not only porn sites but also alcohol, gambling, and age-specific messaging sites—trusting that it isn’t retaining or selling user data. Its privacy policy states that after it verifies your age with your ID, or estimates it with AI, it deletes any personal information it has received.

[From the May 2023 issue: The pornography paradox]

“From a data-protection perspective, all of our data, all the data we collect, is only used for the purpose it was collected for—i.e., to complete an age check—and it’s immediately deleted after the age check’s completed,” Andy Lulham, the COO of VerifyMy, told me. “This is standard across the industry.” (One company that appears to trust the industry’s assurances of privacy: Pornhub. Following a 2020 article by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times that drew attention to the site’s hosting of rape videos, Pornhub began requiring online age and identity verification, conducted by Yoti, for every performer on the site. Ian, the Pornhub spokesperson, conceded to me that extending Yoti to its users would not raise privacy concerns.)

Recent estimates suggest that most kids have watched porn by age 12. Societally, America long ago agreed that this wasn’t acceptable. Now, finally, technology has caught up to the intuition that kids shouldn’t have unfettered access to porn just because it’s on the internet.

At oral arguments, the Supreme Court seemed inclined to allow Texas’s age-verification law to stand, although it might first send the case back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals with instructions to subject it to a higher standard of scrutiny than it originally did. Either way, some form of age-gating is likely here to stay.

“Were we to lose in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, we’ve got some new legislation ready to go,” Iain Corby, the executive director of the Age Verification Providers Association, told me. “They’re fighting a rearguard action in the porn industry, but I don’t think they’re going to be able to fight for long.”

The internet, a friend of mine once argued to me, is like a sprawling city: Everyone knows there are neighborhoods you shouldn’t wander into, but it would be wrong to prohibit people from entering them.

The problem with my friend’s view is that whereas one has to go looking for bad neighborhoods, the internet’s dangers—specifically and most perniciously, pornography—come looking for you, even if you happen to be a child. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation found that dummy accounts that specified their age as 13 were regularly served up soft porn by Instagram’s algorithms. Upon the accounts’ creation, Instagram began showing the imaginary users “moderately racy” content, such as women dancing seductively or dressed provocatively. Once these accounts lingered on such videos, Instagram began introducing more graphic videos and posts. “Adult sex-content creators began appearing in the feeds in as little as three minutes,” the Journal reported. “After less than 20 minutes watching Reels, the test accounts’ feeds were dominated by promotions for such creators, some offering to send nude photos to users who engaged with their posts.”

In fact, porn is so ubiquitous online that it’s tempting to dismiss the preponderance of porn available to children as mainly harmless in most cases—a rite of passage for kids growing up on the internet. But childhood exposure to porn is a public-health concern with serious, long-term ramifications for children. Their interests are essentially collateral damage in adults’ right to consume porn as they please, and a massive industry’s interest in preserving its billions of dollars a year in revenue.

[Read: The age of AI child abuse is here]

Some websites take greater care than Instagram or X in preventing minors from accessing sexual content, and recent legislation across the South has begun requiring age verification before a user can browse sites such as Pornhub. But whatever safeguards are in place to protect minors online, they don’t seem to be working. A 2023 report by Common Sense Media found that the average age of first pornography exposure in American children is 12, and another 2023 survey conducted for the Children’s Commissioner for England revealed that a quarter of British youths ages 16 to 21 had been exposed to porn for the first time in primary school. An Australian survey last year, meanwhile, placed the average age of first pornography exposure at a little over 13. Just more than half of the American minors surveyed said that they had encountered porn accidentally; 38 percent of the British young people surveyed reported the same. If safeguards are in place to protect children from coming into contact with porn, they appear laughable.

Childhood experiences with pornography can be distressing for children and can negatively affect their sexual development. Research presented at the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychology Association in 2017 found that the earlier a man’s first exposure to porn was, the more likely he was to desire power over women, suggesting that contact with porn at an early age may contort a child’s sexual development. One 12-year-old interviewed for the British survey said that her boyfriend had strangled her during their first kiss—part of a trend teenagers I interviewed in 2021 also brought up. A Taiwanese longitudinal study of youths further found that early porn exposure predicted an earlier sexual debut and participation in unsafe sex. A third of respondents in the Australian study indicated that they relied on porn for information about sex, a concerning substitute for proper education—the sort provided by people who know and care for children, not by people attempting to sell them sex. Along with these specific risks, children are also subject to all of the usual problems cited with the adult use of porn: internalizing unrealistic standards for sex, developing excessive consumption habits, becoming desensitized to sexual violence. The main difference is that when porn use begins in childhood, it steps in to miseducate desires that have yet to fully form.

Proponents of porn use generally crusade under the banner of free speech—the Free Speech Coalition, an organization currently fighting a Texas law that would require porn sites to collect proof that users are over 18, is a porn-industry lobbying group. On Wednesday, the FSC argued against the state of Texas over these age-verification laws before the Supreme Court, claiming that these laws abrogate the exercise of free speech. (Pornhub, along with other major porn distributors, has already withdrawn operations from several southern states with age-verification laws on the books.) Even an FSC attorney admitted at the Supreme Court that the organization recognizes the government’s compelling interest in preventing porn from reaching minors.

My friend who analogized the internet to a city with good and bad neighborhoods perhaps failed to consider that the people traversing those streets are in many cases children, and in our society, children’s issues are especially fraught—see recent conflicts about which books should be available to children in their school libraries, and about whether children should be allowed to change their identity at school or their body. All of these debates really are, as the scholar Rita Koganzon wrote in a Yale Law Journal article published last year, “part of an ongoing culture war between factions of adults.” It’s unfortunate that arguments over how to protect children from exposure to porn are very likely to be proxy battles between adults’ differing views on whether porn is good, bad, or neutral—each debate deserves to play out separately, without the interests of children being made subordinate to the interests of adults. The risks associated with childhood porn exposure are real, and worthy of society’s special attention.