Are you 18 or older?
Yes / No
There. Done.
The UK government is bracing itself to face legal challenges when it implements controversial smut age check rules, and has said it could cost up to £10m in the first year alone. The plans to require online porn providers to check users are over 18 before granting them access to the site have been in the offing since 2017, …
Except one particular "parent" in question (who couldn't figure out how to enable age barring on her browser) started all this BS.
I'll leave the name of the Conservative MP who I'm thinking of as an exercise for other readers.
As much as I hate to propose the idea, could we not have an OS login level age ID optin service? I'd rather give android my ID rather than porn sites
Protip: my favourite porn method is just to use Google image search with a search like "hot sex .gif" usually the 4chan nerds have .gifed all the really good shots, plus you also get to watch 5-10 great GIFs at the same time, AND it won't be regulated by the above. I'm guessing the Google cached .gifs are less virus probe than darker smutwebs too.
Children start becoming sexually aware around the age of 10 and once that awareness has occurred, and the accompanying urges have started, there's no way of stopping it.
The real problem here is that parents can't cope with, and are in denial of, that little aspect of reality.
Rather than solving a problem, Age Verification just helps brush it further under the carpet.
Remember, this isn't about age controls to protect children from pornography, it is to appease the Traditional Tory Voters and Social Justice Warriors who want to ban pornography outright. Of course, it won't appease them at all, only move the ball a little closer to their goal posts ready for the next turn of the ratchet.
If the Government actually gave a damn about children, a third of British children wouldn't be living in poverty - up 100,000 on last year.1 Chronically not having enough food, or decent food, is a lot more damaging to a child's development than accidentally stumbling on some slap-and-tickle.
1https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/child-poverty-increase-children-family-benefit-households-a8268191.html
"Traditional Tory Voters" are the main consumers of porn - they just deny it of course like everything else, BREXIT? No problem, Age Verification? - that will be easy, Irish Border? Blame the EU ...
Every "problem" is either not a problem or someone else's problem.
This is just the classic TOTC softening up BS so beloved of the data fetishists who support this to help populate their what-sort-of-person-are-you database.
Check the categories.
You'll find they include "Anorexia advocacy" and "Esoterica"
BTW I'd say most fetishists are normally harmless and only indulge their thing with like minded people.
OTOH Data fetishists want to do their thing with (or rather to) everybody, all the time. Forever.
Given the membership of just one online paid-for forum (Alt - which had over half a million UK members at one point) and the number of votes that Labour lost at the general election after the 2008 law that they introduced, there is good reason that the conservatives don't want to repeat the same mistake by going too heavy.
Also, Erotica, at Olympia, at its height, had more visitors than the BBC Good food show at its peak. Nearly three times. So sex is almost three times more popular than good food, apparently.
And Labour know this, because I told them. Repeatedly. And I've given the figures to the conservatives. But they've still gone ahead with this. Political suicide IMHO.
You've been into every single sex shop? Wow, that's dedication.
Which reminds me of a joke I heard from a German friend, translated badly here for your pleasure. A Bavarian woman goes into a sex shop and starts openly admiring a 12-inch mains-powered vibrator. The proprietor comes over and says, "Impressive, isn't it?" "Yes", the woman replies, "it is a triumph of engineering!"