May is Masturbation Month, and one classical music fan might have treated herself to a little self-love in the middle of a concert to celebrate. Numerous people who attended a recent Los Angeles Philharmonic performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony said they heard a loud scream or moan from the balcony, and many of them identified it as the unmistakable sounds of an orgasm.
A music composer in the audience described it as “a loud and full body orgasm.” A music agent who was also there said, “One can’t know exactly what happened, but it seemed very clear from the sound that it was an expression of pure physical joy.” Another audience member told the Los Angeles Times that she saw the person who made the sound after it happened, “… and I assume that she ... had an orgasm because she was heavily breathing, and her partner was smiling and looking at her — like in an effort to not shame her.”
Rather than being annoyed, the concert goers who spoke to the media seemed impressed. The audience member quoted above described the whole thing as “quite beautiful.” The music agent said it well-timed to a “romantic swell” in the symphony and added, “I think everyone felt that was a rather lovely expression of somebody who was so transported by the music that it had some kind of effect on them physically or, dare I say, even sexually.”
While this could be a sweet story to usher in a month designed to remind us that masturbation is healthy and harmless, the brief commotion might have another explanation. One audience member who was sitting behind the woman in question says that it looked more like she was having narcoleptic sleep attack (a symptom of narcolepsy in which a person falls asleep suddenly and may wake up unaware of where they are or how long they’ve been asleep.)
The woman has not come forward to claim her 15 minutes of fame. I truly hope it was full body orgasm brought on by nothing more than the beautiful music because I don’t like the other explanations, even the one that has her taking command of her own pleasure. Masturbation is good for you, but it’s not fair to the musicians to do it during their performance. No matter how good you think you are, they practiced playing their instrument more than you practiced having orgasms silently so your roommate wouldn’t notice.
Pornhub Blocks Utah Because of Age Verification Law
Utahans are going to find it harder to celebrate Masturbation May after Pornhub turned itself off in the Beehive state. As of last week when a new age-verification law went into effect, web visitors with Utah-based IP addresses no longer have access to the top videos about MILFs, big booties, cream pies, hentais, or Mormons (yes Mormon was the top Pornhub search in Utah last year). Instead, they’ll get a message that says that the new law is impossible to implement and suggests they lobby their elected officials for a better solution. (And then they’ll look up how to set up a VPN so they can jerk off already, dammit.)
The law in question is SB287 which was introduced by state Senator Todd Weiler, passed by both chambers, and signed by Governor Spencer Cox in March. It requires porn sites to verify a user’s age before allowing them to view content. Though the law offers a few methods of age verification, Pornhub believes many users would end up having to upload a copy of their state-issued ID every time they visited the site. That seems like a mood killer and a privacy red flag, despite language in law that say sites cannot store identifiable data.
Part of the problem is that while Utah offers residents an electronic version of their driver’s license, the system is set up more for in-person use. Pornhub says it won’t help the site verify age. The porn mega-site didn’t pull out (pun intended, of course) of Louisiana when it passed a similar law because that state has a better system for verifying ID online.
Weiler makes the law sound reasonable when he talks about children accessing what is clearly adult content: “It’s part of our job as society — and maybe a subset of my job as a lawmaker — to try to protect children.” He still sounds relatively reasonable when he adds, “I’m not gonna blame all of society’s ills on pornography, but I don’t think it’s helpful when a kid is forming their impressions of sex and gender to have all of this filth and lewd depictions on their mind.”
The thing is that Weiler does seem to blame pornography for all of society ills. He has a long legislative history of going after porn and has even described himself as the state’s “porn czar.” A few years ago, I suggested he might be the second coming of Anthony Comstock (remember him from 1873 and, you know, last month?). Weiler, like Comstock, was personally concerned about porn use; he once told the New York Daily News that he wished he’d never been exposed to pornography as he grew up in the 1970s.
In an early legislative act on the subject, Weiler authored a resolution that warned parents of the dangers of “sexualized images in media and advertising,” which he called “gateway pornography.” (Quick, take away Tiger Beat so you son doesn’t start beating something else?)
In 2016, he authored another resolution, this time declaring porn a “public health crisis.” The resolution asked lawmakers to accept as fact that porn is addictive, that it changes the way our brains function, causes low self-esteem, increases risky sexual behaviors and violence, and is the reason why young men don’t want to get married anymore. Science has found some of these statements (like porn is addictive or more porn leads to more violence) to be false; others (like the link between porn and self-esteem) may be backed by correlation, but causation has never been proven; and still others (like the connection between porn and marriage) seem to be a product of Weiler’s imagination. While Senator Weiler has compared pornography to cigarettes and believes that someday the clear harm of pornography will be universally recognized, the science just doesn’t support his view. (Of course, that didn’t stop the Republican Party from adopting similar language as part of its 2016 platform.)
In truth, I agree with some of the statements of fact in Weiler’s resolution. I do believe that “exposure to pornography often serves as children’s and youths' sex education and shapes their sexual templates” and that “because pornography treats women as objects and commodities for the viewer's use, it teaches girls they are to be used and teaches boys to be users.” I just wish that Todd’s solution to this were to institute sex education that includes helping teens think critically about pornography and understand the fallacy of strict gender roles. But Utah has always had terrible sex education laws. Until recently, for example, the state prevented teachers from talking about homosexuality “in a positive light.”
It looks like Weiler would rather blanket the state in Net Nannies than fix sex ed. Sure, SB287 was only meant to block access to porn for people who couldn’t prove they were over 18, but I’m betting the good Senator is not crying about Pornhub’s decision to back away from the state entirely.
Oddly enough, Weiler and Pornhub seem to agree on one answer to the underage viewership problem. Pornhub is telling its users to demand a device-based solution that would identify certain users as children and block inappropriate content. It makes sense that Pornhub would want this as it takes the onus off of content curators and puts it on parents and electronics manufacturers/retailers. Weiler wants this too. He authored a bill two years ago that would force all manufacturers that sell internet-enabled devices to set them to automatically block porn right out of the box (that one might be a pun, I’m still deciding). That bill was passed and signed by the governor, but doesn’t go into effect unless five other states pass similar bills as lawmakers understood it would be impossible for manufacturers to make these changes just in Utah.
Critics of the anti-porn bills say they violate free speech, endanger privacy, and are easily hacked. The Free Speech Coalition, the non-partisan nonprofit trade association for the adult industry, has filed a lawsuit against the new age verification bill for infringing on the free speech rights and privacy of adults. Cherie Deville, an adult entertainment star, also came out against the law in a PSA that all Utah-based Pornhub visitors will see when they try to log on. She warns that only the legitimate sites will comply with the laws, and this will ultimately make the situation worse because, “… residents will likely go to the far-off corners of the internet, where evil, foreign-based actors ignore every law and rule.”
Possibly the biggest question is whether this Utah law or the next one or the next one (because as much as he hates porn, Weiler never gets tired of debating it) could possibly be effective in blocking porn access especially for tech savvy teens. Anyone who knows how to set up a VPN can bypass this law by getting themselves an ISP address outside of the state. Some media outlets reported that google searches for “how to set up a VPN” spiked in Utah last week.
Deville is helping Pornhub push device-based blocking solutions. She said, “Adult entertainment companies and porn performers hate minors watching our content. We also understand the internet better than anyone. After all, everything from streaming to chatbots to video chats began with our industry. Why not listen to our solutions instead of those of old politicians who’ve never heard of VPNs?”
While she is right that porn built the interwebs, her argument seems to contain the seeds of its own counter argument. If teens are such good technologists, then they’ll get around any device-based solution as well. (I can’t be the only adult who—when forced to get a new phone or computer—hands it over to one of my children to set up, can I?) This makes me wonder if Deville and Pornhub are just paying lip service to the device-based blocking solution possibly in the hopes that Apple, Samsung, and Nokia will take up the fight for them.
In the end (this one was not a pun, I promise), the solution to young people viewing porn is not going to be found in technology but in education. We have to assume they’ll see porn. Our job then is to help them process it and give them some decent sex education so porn isn’t the first or only thing they see on the subject.