Across a four-day span in late August, porn star Siri Dahl invites her followers to “cum on in” on OnlyFans, goes live on YouTube (“100% raw, organic, grass-fed” content, she advertises with a wink), hawks “Corn Star” T-shirts via her personal store, posts about appearing in a live podcast taping of Lovett or Leave It on X, where she has nearly half a million followers, and uploads eight videos to Pornhub, alternating between role-play (“Sexy Mean Starfish Babe Gives You Femdom Ass Worship”) and kink-friendly (“Cozy naked yoga by the fireplace”) content.
It’s a typical week for Dahl: demanding, a little all over the place, and very online, but one she’s totally in control of.
It’s also very different from the world of studio porn where she got her start. Dahl debuted in adult entertainment in 2012, with credits in projects by Vivid Entertainment, Naughty America, and Girlfriends Films. At the time, she says, the industry was still very much a boys club; she had no independence and even less say over the direction of her career. “It was like five CEOs who completely dictated what was attractive and what kind of person was allowed to become a porn star,” she says. “Performers were essentially at the bottom. I’d be on set for 12 hours all for one check, and there are no royalties in porn. The power dynamic was inverted compared to what it is now.”
Today, Dahl does a little bit of everything: girl on girl, solo and fetish content, naked workout videos, group scenes. She’s on “basically every fan platform”—Fansly, LoyalFans, and ManyVids, with OnlyFans being her “biggest income generator.” She also uploads free content to Pornhub, where she makes ad revenue based on views. Some of her most popular work is role-playing a badly-behaved stepmom: “MOMMY’S BOY - Naughty MILF Siri Dahl Caught Naked in the Kitchen!” is her most-watched video on Pornhub, with 29 millions views. She’s grateful for the autonomy the internet has given her over her career.
But that could come to a crashing end, with the widespread adoption of age-verification laws in the US and UK, which require visitors to upload an ID or other personal documentation to validate that they are not a minor before viewing sexually explicit material.
Already Dahl has seen “an absolutely massive drop in traffic,” she says from her home in Los Angeles. “I’ve made 30 percent less money this year than I did last year.” (She declined to say exactly how much.)
So far at least 24 US states have sanctioned some form of ID verification, each with unique stipulations. Legislators argue that these laws are intended to keep minors safe from content deemed harmful to them. Critics say that argument doesn’t hold any weight because there are “easy solutions” to the moral panic conservatives have created around the issue. They say the laws infringe on privacy rights and set an irreversibly dark precedent for the future of free speech.
Perhaps even more terrifying is what it all signals: the death of the free web and an ushering in of a more puritanical version of America.
That’s been a goal of Project 2025 all along. A line from the 900-page Heritage Foundation document, a right-wing blueprint of sorts for President Donald Trump’s second term, says “people who produce and distribute [porn] should be imprisoned.” In a video recording leaked last August by the Centre for Climate Reporting, Trump ally Russell Vought, who coauthored Project 2025, says the age verification laws are a “back door” route to a federal ban. “We’d have a national ban on pornography if we could,” says Vought, who is director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration, in the video. “We’ve got a number of states that are passing this, and you know what happens is, the porn company then says, ‘We’re not going to do business in your state,’ which is entirely what we were after,” he explains. In the same video, Vought says his wider goal is creating a “culture that values babies and the life that’s created and is focused on the birth rates and makes them a positive good as opposed to a burden.”
People who work in the adult industry are not especially shocked at what is unfolding. Porn censorship has been an ongoing battle—payment processors like Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal have instituted strict controls around what is permissible; Instagram routinely kicks adult creators off its platform and, in 2022, removed Pornhub entirely.
It’s “death by a thousand paper cuts,” says Alex Kekesi, vice president of brand and community at Pornhub. She says the laws are establishing an appetite for “perfectly legal but private behavior” to be surveilled by the government online. “On the surface, it sounds like this can be a really positive thing for kids and for parents. In reality, it’s just going to cause a lot more harm and a lot more danger.” (Age verification is also impacting industries beyond porn, including gaming and social media. In August, Bluesky became the first social media platform to go dark in response to a Mississippi law, blocking access to users in the state.)
A former producer of gay erotica, Dominic Ford is the founder and CEO of JustFor.Fans, an adult fan subscription platform that launched in 2018. He says the war on porn is really about “legislating morality” more than anything else. “This isn’t about kids. Could you imagine if they thought this way about [the lack of] gun control, which is actually killing children?”
Insiders tell WIRED the biggest misconception about the adult industry is that it is either incapable of content moderation or not interested in self-regulating when it comes to protecting kids. “Our site, and most adult sites, participate in voluntary tagging so that filters and blocking software can easily block us,” says Ford, who describes the tools as “highly effective and easy for any parent to use to restrict their child’s access to parts of the internet.” In 2022, Pornhub introduced a chatbot that encourages people searching for child sexual abuse content to get help. The platform was subject to a 2020 New York Times investigation alleging it monetized videos showing child abuse, but it has since started issuing transparency reports and buttoned up on its verification of performers.
But generational attitudes around sex and porn are shifting, if only slightly. Young people are hooking up less and less, masturbating is on the decline, and according to a 2025 study from the Survey Center on American Life, a project supported by center-right think tank American Enterprise Institute, Gen Z men are increasingly in favor of more restrictions on porn. Many young people express shame and guilt around their consumption habits—an estimated 50 percent of teens, according to a 2022 survey by Common Sense Media—but they also say that porn is an effective learning tool, particularly for LGBTQ+ youth coming into their sexual identity.
A more nuanced conversation is needed, but it is happening in a “problematic and repressive way that isn’t necessarily helpful,” says Pantea Farvid, a professor of applied psychology and director of the New School’s SexTech Lab in New York City. The real crisis has to do with America’s poor sexual education, and the failure to openly teach kids about sex. “Why do we have such little access to honest, early, and important health and sexual health education, but complete access to sexually explicit material without perhaps the tools or the skills or the knowledge to make sense of that at any age, actually? This is the conversation we should be having.”
Since the mid-1990s, the federal government has spent $2 billion in funding for abstinence-only education, a directive that has only increased under Trump. A recently published midyear report by Sex Ed for Social Change found that 25 percent of the 650 state-level bills introduced this year want to “limit or fully eliminate access to quality sex education,” a 35 percent increase from 2024.
While kids are the focus of culture war discussions around porn, it’s sex workers and performers who often have to deal with the biggest risks that come from increased censorship.
For decades there have been repeated efforts to criminalize the adult industry, and the people who make a living off of it, most notably with the passage of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA-SESTA) in 2017. Legislators argued that that law was designed to combat sex trafficking, but the consequences were harshest for sex workers: It effectively shut down websites that they relied on for income, many of which had no ties to sex trafficking at all.
Natassia Dreams, a Black trans porn star, started working in the adult industry in 2004 because it was “a safer occupation than escorting” and gave her more control. “To me, it was a means to an end,” she told WIRED in an interview preceding the Pornhub awards in May. Dreams, who was nominated for favorite trans model at the event, says porn has been a “great platform for me to be elevated as a marginalized person, and that helped me to dive into it full force, because it was a place where I was finally celebrated and uplifted and respected.” The adoption of age-verification laws could ultimately force people like Dreams back into the same harmful environments they worked so hard to get out of.
Data also suggests that increased restrictions actually push people to bad-faith websites that illegally host free content and that don’t comply with these laws. According to researchers, age-verification laws are marginally impactful at stopping people from watching adult content. So far they have decreased traffic on Pornhub; daily visits dropped by 47 percent in the first nine days of August, after the UK’s Online Safety Act went into effect, according to Similarweb. But Pornhub has also voluntarily blocked its site in states with age-verification laws, which has contributed to less overall traffic. People also use VPNs to get around these laws. Nearly half of US adults currently use a VPN, and cybersecurity experts anticipate that number will only increase as people seek more privacy online. In July, after the Online Safety Act went into effect in the UK, VPN apps experienced “explosive growth,” one analyst told WIRED.
That same study found that driving traffic to bad-faith sites could exacerbate issues of revenge porn and deepfakes. In 2023, WIRED reported that deepfake porn was on the rise. At the time, researchers estimated that over 90 percent of deepfake videos online were of porn, and the majority were nonconsensual deepfakes of women. At least 23 states have since passed some form of deepfake law as the abuses of AI have become more widespread.
Cherie DeVille has worked as a performer for 16 years and says her biggest concern is that the restrictions will end ethical free content. Because most people consume porn for free, on platforms like X or aggregator sites like XVideos, along with the spread of AI, “you're going to be at a point where if you watch free content, you have no way to know if these people are consenting or happy, and that is a terrifying way to live,” she says.
What often gets lost in the latest culture war over porn is just how diverse the landscape has gotten. The past few years have seen an explosion of people entering the industry for a variety of reasons. Less gatekeeping meant new and different representations of sex flourished online, with performers capitalizing on a market where independence was celebrated. But as more states adopt age-verification laws and limit free speech, indie porn platforms that have helped to expand the representations of sexual content won’t be able to compete and may ultimately die out. In Texas, sites that don’t comply can get hit with fines as high as $10,000 a day, with additional penalties up to $250,000.
The version of the porn industry that does survive is going to look vastly different than it does today. DeVille says what’s coming may be close to total devastation. “It’s going to eradicate individual dotcoms. There’s no performer, no matter how rich, that can afford it. It’s unattainable. It will only leave the behemoths for us to play ball with. You’re going to lose a lot of your most interesting creators,” she says “All you’re going to be left with is the pop music of porn. And I’m not saying Taylor Swift is bad, but she’s not everybody’s cup of tea.”
Over Zoom, Dahl tells me she doesn’t want creators to be pushed underground. It’s why she continues to use her platform to speak out. I ask her what she thinks the future of business might look like in an age of eroding freedoms. One possibility that may become even more commonplace is creators “exchanging money for a private Dropbox link.” But “none of these laws are going to end porn, our access to, or the desire of adults to watch it.”
On September 4, Dahl will host the second annual Corn Telethon. It’s a 12-hour fundraiser benefitting mutual aid organizations Sex Workers Outreach Project LA and Sex Workers Mutual Aid Las Vegas, and what’s being described as the “Jerry Lewis telethon meets USA Up All Night.” Dahl will split hosting duties with adult creators Zariah Aura, Ryan Keely, Ify Nwadiwe, and others to “sound the alarm” on free speech and sex worker rights. Most of all, they want to use the event as a megaphone to dispel the false narrative that legislators have created around age-verification laws.
“We all go to bed at night knowing that we do a job that people appreciate,” Dahl says. “And I’ve never felt any ethical concerns about the fact that I’m a porn performer and that I run a business in this industry. In fact, I actually feel really wholesome about what I do.”
Manisha Krishnan contributed to the reporting of this story.
