“Is it like the old Playboy?”: Justice Alito asks if anyone visits Pornhub for articles

While Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is an outspoken scholar of occult symbolism on the American right, he is not familiar with recent trends in pornography.

The conservative justice and Donald Trump confidant heard oral arguments in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a case challenging a series of red state laws that prevent Internet users from accessing pornographic sites without first verifying their age. Seeking an understanding of the general content of some of the websites that were opposing the laws, Alito asked whether anyone had looked to sites like Pornhub for articles.

Free Speech Coalition attorney Derek Shaffer noted that many of the sites feature non-pornographic content in their blogs and podcasts, prompting Alito to ask whether any of the public intellectuals are known for their work on the adult tube site.

“Is it like the old Playboy magazine, where you had articles written by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?” Alito asked.

Shaffer didn’t want to stretch the truth, taking issue with Alito’s repeated conjectures about what percentage of Pornhub sites were pornographic and his virtual haven for Internet-age literati among smut.

“Not in that sense, but in the sense that you have health posts about women recovering from hysterectomies and how they can enjoy sex,” Shaffer offered.

Pornography has a history in the Supreme Court, where it often prods and tests the limits of free speech laws. Much of the middle of the last century was spent grappling with the notoriously difficult-to-define idea of ​​obscenity. Justice Potter Stewart muddied matters considerably in 1964 when he defended theater director Nico Jacobellis’ right to show Louis Malle’s The Lovers. “I know it when I see it,” Stewart wrote, concurring with the majority opinion that found showing the film protected under the Constitution, and said of obscenity. A more stringent test was established in the 1973 case Miller v. California, a three-pronged question to help define obscene material under the law still in use today.

Whether websites can be forced to verify the ages of their users has been addressed by previous courts. In 2004, the Supreme Court narrowly ruled that the requirement was unconstitutional and violated the First Amendment.