It occurred to me the other day that anyone working in the adult industry who is under the age of 28, depending on which month their birthday falls in, likely hadn’t been born when I uploaded content to an adult website for the first time.
Beyond making me feel quite old, this thought also led me to reflect on how much the industry landscape has changed over those years. Many sites and brands that dominated the market at the time are entirely gone now, while others may still exist, but serve largely as historic curiosities.
Many people have come and gone, too. Some have moved on to retirement, others have sadly passed away. Many have simply cycled out of the industry to pursue a career in some other field.
One of the biggest changes over that time has been the degree to which the online adult industry has been subject to government regulation, going from essentially no regulation at all when I started, to the current environment, in which it seems like not a week passes without some national or state government announcing a new measure designed to limit access to adult content, or eliminate such access altogether.
For some industry veterans who have been kicking around this space even longer than I have, the increase in regulation might feel a bit like history repeating itself, or at least a familiar pattern imposing itself on a parallel sector.
When I first started, the “old school” adult industry in the United States was still reeling from the aggressive posture taken towards the industry by the U.S. Department of Justice of the Reagan/Bush years. Back then, obscenity prosecutions weren’t occasional, almost novel events; they were pursued with regularity as part of a socially conservative agenda designed to bring the industry to heel at a minimum, or even to wipe it out, altogether.
When the commercial internet first sprang to life, it presented an environment so new, so different, legislators around the world seemingly were caught off guard. They didn’t understand the emerging technology, appreciate its significance or grasp the extent to which the internet would come to alter the game in terms of communications, media, security, entertainment and a host of other areas.
Early attempts at regulating the internet – and the adult internet, in particular – mostly fell flat. The collective misapprehension of the internet by legislators (which is still a problem, of course) led them to write laws that might have been well-intentioned, but which couldn’t pass court scrutiny and/or had no practical enforcement mechanisms to speak of, rendering them toothless.
I recall having many conversations with older members of the industry at that time, people who had worked for years in the print and video sectors, who confidently predicted that in a matter of months, there would be a pile of laws regulating the online adult industry in the same restrictive manner the ‘traditional’ adult industry had been constrained.
Now, it appears their predictions have come true, albeit after hundreds of months more than they had projected. Across the U.S., through much of Europe and around the world, legislative bodies have imposed new rules and regulations seeking to tame a space that has long been regarded as the digital equivalent of the “Wild West.”
What does it all mean to you, as an individual adult industry entrepreneur, content creator, employee or vendor? It means you need to pay attention. It means you can’t be as cavalier as some of us were back in the late 90s. It means you probably need to establish a relationship with a good lawyer, if you don’t already have one.
You also should expect the trend to continue, expect the regulatory net to draw tighter and expect it to be more difficult to achieve visibility, profitability and sustainability in the months and years to come.
I don’t believe for one moment that the architects of Project 2025, some of whom now occupy prominent positions in the Trump Administration, will ever realize their goal of banning pornography outright in the U.S. Nor do I think it’s remotely possible for the internet to ever be truly and universally reined in, given its very nature. Be that as it may, I think we can safely say the days of the adult web being the Wild West are now over.
Photo of man on horseback by Mehmet Ali Peker from Pexels
