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.”

One of the most powerful inventions of the 20th century is also an object that no one ever wants a reason to use. The sexual-assault-evidence collection box, colloquially known as the “rape kit,” is a simple yet potent tool: a small case, perhaps made of cardboard, containing items such as sterile nail clippers, cotton swabs, slides for holding bodily fluids, paper bags, and a tiny plastic comb. Designed to gather and preserve biological evidence found on the body of a person reporting a sexual assault, it introduced standardized forensics into the investigation of rape where there had previously been no common protocol. Its contents could be used in court to establish facts so that juries wouldn’t have to rely solely on testimony, making it easier to convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent.

The kit, conceived within the Chicago Police Department in the mid-1970s, was trademarked under the name “Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit,” after Sergeant Louis Vitullo. The Chicago police officer had a well-publicized role in the 1967 conviction of Richard Speck, who had murdered eight student nurses in one night. Vitullo’s second claim to fame is more complicated. The Secret History of the Rape Kit, a revealing new book by the journalist Pagan Kennedy, doubles as an account of the largely unknown history of the collection box’s real inventor—a woman named Martha “Marty” Goddard, whose broader goal of empowering survivors led her to cede credit to a man. In a cruel irony, a woman who drove major social change failed to get her due as a result of politics and sexism.

Kennedy became obsessed with the rape kit in 2018, after hearing Christine Blasey Ford testify during the confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and wondered, “Had anything ever been specifically invented to discourage sexual assault?” Her investigative dive begins in 1970s Chicago, where the women’s-liberation movement was gaining ground and the police had a reputation for corruption. The brutality of the police crackdown on protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention was still fresh in the public mind. Rape was also rampant throughout the city, Kennedy writes—in 1973, according to an article in the Daily Herald, an estimated 16,000 sexual assaults took place, only a tenth of which were reported. And less than 10 percent of those 10 percent led to a criminal trial. In court, the proceedings usually devolved into “he said, she said.”

In 1974, Goddard was a divorcée in her early 30s working for a philanthropic organization that tapped into a local family department-store fortune to help Chicago’s needy. The job gave Goddard, whom a friend once described as “fucking relentless,” access to a wide swath of the people who formed the city’s civic backbone. She also volunteered for a teen-crisis center, where she heard stories from runaways who had experienced sexual abuse. Goddard, who grew up with an abusive father and had briefly run away from home as a teenager, became consumed with the question of why so few women reported rapes—and why perpetrators were rarely punished.

That year, she met with the state’s attorney Bernard Carey to discuss the “failure points in the sexual assault evidence system.” He soon appointed her to a new citizens’ advisory panel affiliated with the city’s new Rape Task Force. Goddard thus gained access to the police department and, more important, to its crime lab. She discovered that it was a mess. Cops told her that they didn’t even receive usable evidence from the hospital, such as properly collected swabs of semen, saliva, and blood. This was in part because hospital staff had never been trained to collect it properly. But even when police officers did have evidence, they weren’t always trained to preserve it.

Goddard approached Sergeant Vitullo, the crime lab’s chief microanalyst, with a written description of her vision: a sexual-assault-evidence collection kit. As one of Goddard’s colleagues told Kennedy, Vitullo “screamed at her” and told her to leave his office.

A few days later, Kennedy reports, Vitullo invited Goddard back and, to her surprise, showed her a complete mock-up of exactly the box she had described. Both the sergeant and the State’s Attorney’s Office wanted the credit for Goddard’s idea. As a compromise, Goddard agreed to have the kit recognized as a collaboration among them. Her accommodation was realistic and also strategic. She knew that “[Vitullo’s] name could open doors—and hers couldn’t,” Kennedy writes. Goddard was a visionary, but she was not a lawyer, a cop, or an expert, and she had no formal experience in forensics.

[Read: American law does not take rape seriously]

In 1978, a nonprofit group Goddard had formed, Citizens Committee for Victims Assistance, filed a trademark for the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit. With this move, Goddard had, as Kennedy puts it, “seemed to collaborate in her own erasure.” That same year, The New York Times noted that the “Vitullo kit” was being used in 72 hospitals across Chicago, citing Goddard as the kit’s co-creator. Mentions of her in the media were otherwise glancing at best. Upon Vitullo’s death in 2006, Kennedy writes, “an obituary in a local paper celebrated him as the ‘man who invented the rape kit.’”

Many women inventors have shared a similar fate. This past November, Kay Koplovitz, a co-founder of the business accelerator Springboard Enterprises and the founder of television’s USA Networks, noted in an interview with The New York Times that “if a woman co-founder has at least one male co-founder, the woman somehow does not get credit for raising the capital.” In science, this phenomenon is so common that it even has a term of art: the Matilda Effect, named for the writer and women’s activist Matilda Joslyn Gage. There are scores of examples of the Matilda Effect, but to pick just a couple: Lise Meitner described the theory behind what she named nuclear fission, but credit went to her former lab partner Otto Hahn, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944. Eunice Newton Foote described the greenhouse effect in 1856, but posterity remembers John Tyndall, who presented his own experiments three years later. No known photograph of Foote remains today.

Every one of these backstories carries its own particular ironies. In Kennedy’s telling, Goddard’s obscurity stems from the sacrifices she made for the rape kit to exist. Not only did she relinquish credit for her invention, but she also did all the grunt work to get it out into the world—including the fundraising. Conservative philanthropists were just as squeamish as Sergeant Vitullo had initially been about the idea of being associated with sexual shame; the word rape simply carried too much stigma. And so she turned to an organization that had made shamelessness its mission; through her nonprofit, she applied for and received a grant of $10,000 from the Playboy Foundation. “I decided,” she later said, “we had to put aside our feelings for objectification of women in [Playboy] magazine.”

Taking money from the philanthropic arm of a nudie-magazine publisher turned out to be a canny move. Playboy’s foundation, also headquartered in Chicago, gave generously to progressive causes. Hugh Hefner, the founder and editor in chief of Playboy, considered the feminist movement “a sister cause to his own effort to free men from shame and guilt,” Kennedy wrote in The New York Times, in an opinion article that fueled the book.

Kennedy does not mention that Hefner was the subject of several accusations of sexual assault, both before and after his death in 2017. (The director Peter Bogdanovich claimed in his book The Killing of the Unicorn, published in 1984, that Hefner sexually assaulted Bogdanovich’s late partner, the playmate Dorothy Stratten. Hefner denied the allegation.)

Still, when it came to Goddard’s invention, Playboy stayed true to its public mission, and the organization donated more than money. The magazine’s graphic artists designed the outer box of the original rape kit to feature a bright-blue line drawing of a woman’s face swathed in a thick mane of wavy hair. An early “Vitullo kit” was recently acquired by the Smithsonian.

In 1982, New York City adopted the Vitullo kit, and Goddard commuted to the East Coast to train doctors, nurses, and cops. The Department of Justice paid her to travel to other states that wanted to develop their own rape-kit programs. Goddard invented not just the box but the entire training system, teaching hospital staff and the police to collaborate on evidence collection.

Without that essential training to help surmount powerful systemic barriers, the kit would have been useless—and in that sense, the job is still woefully unfinished. Untested rape kits have languished across the country: In 2009, more than 11,000 were discovered abandoned in Detroit; in 2014, Memphis had backlog of more than 12,000 kits, and 200 more were found in a warehouse. One study estimates that from 2014 to 2018, 300,000 to 400,000 kits remained untested in the United States. Since then, aggressive fundraising efforts with help from survivors, combined with $350 million from the Department of Justice, have whittled down that backlog significantly.

[Read: An epidemic of disbelief]

Kennedy examines the gaps that still remain in the medical system. In 2021, just over 2,100 Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner–certified nurses were registered with the International Association of Forensic Nurses. The examination requires survivors to undergo hours of waiting and testing, and can feel invasive and re-traumatizing. This may be one reason so few people—only one-fourth of victims— report rapes, she writes.

Some of these limitations can be traced to a lack of effective innovation in the 50 years since the Vitullo kit was developed. In recent years, several women have conceived of and even sold at-home rape kits that would allow a victim to collect evidence of her assault herself. These ideas and products were met with strong resistance—and in one case, death threats. Detractors argued that self-collected evidence would never be taken seriously by juries. Apparently, accusers were still considered unreliable. Only after COVID made virtual doctor visits a necessity did the push for at-home testing gain a modicum of traction. With an at-home test, the victim received instructions, sometimes via a virtual nurse, on how to swab her own body, collect other physical evidence, and seal the kit.

In the late 1980s, Goddard abruptly disappeared from public life and lost contact with friends and family members. Kennedy painstakingly traces the confluence of events that may have led to her decline: In the late ’70s, she survived a violent rape while on vacation in Hawaii. A workaholic, she seems to have reached the point of burnout by the end of the decade. Somewhere along the line, she developed a problem with drinking. Kennedy concludes that she “bounced around the country, taking odd jobs and drinking heavily,” until finally settling in Arizona.

Kennedy works deftly with sometimes scant information, weaving her reporting on Goddard’s life and contribution into the narrative. The result is less a true-crime story, as advertised in the subtitle, than a page-turning mystery. The subject is also personal for Kennedy, who was molested in childhood. She confesses that her book was fueled by rage, pain, and her desire to restore “the woman who had believed little girls” to her rightful place in history.

As Goddard’s life shrank, the influence of the rape kit grew exponentially—especially after DNA fingerprinting was invented in 1984, eventually making it possible to trace a single drop of sperm or blood to a specific person. Evidence stored in the kits, sometimes for decades, allowed cold cases to be solved and wrongful convictions to be overturned.

Goddard’s last years were marked by alcoholism, erratic behavior, and diagnoses of dementia and “manic depression.” In 2015—the year of her death—a CNN reporter managed to track Goddard down. The resulting article credited Vitullo with the invention but noted Goddard’s role in distributing it, describing her as the “formidable woman” behind the “successful man.” During the interview, Goddard expressed anger at how her role had been downsized, calling Vitullo “an asshole.” The sergeant “had nothing to do with it,” she told the reporter. But those comments never made it into the story, partly because Vitullo was no longer around to defend himself and partly because Goddard struck the journalist as an unreliable witness—a woman who couldn’t be believed.

Thanks to Kennedy’s dogged reporting, CNN’s story wasn’t the final one, and Goddard can step out from the shadows of history. Upon Goddard’s death, no ceremonies or memorials marked her passing. In accordance with her wishes, there was no funeral or obituary. Nevertheless, her work leaves a remarkable legacy. The rape kit reoriented the public attitude toward survivors—as not potential liars but “an eyewitness whose body might reveal real evidence of a violent crime.” Yet Kennedy’s book isn’t just the hero’s journey of a forgotten heroine. It acknowledges that the system works best when it can be improved by those who are most affected by sexual assault—and the women who are willing to risk obscurity or damage to their reputation in order to finish the job Goddard started.