French Digital Minister Jean-Noel Barrot announced Monday that the French government would block access to online pornography for minors. “I intend to put an end to this scandal,” he said. “In 2023, it is the end of access to pornography websites for our children.”
To do this, he will require that any adults who want to watch porn must “install an application for government-licensed digital certification on their mobile phones to prove that they are at least 18 years old.” Porn sites that fail to comply with this directive will be banned.
Americans may be surprised that this action is happening in France of all places. After all, the country has been home to such people as the Marquis de Sade, who was one of the earliest composers of perverted smut, Serge Gainsbourg, who always sang about sex and even propositioned Whitney Houston on French TV, and Pepe Le Pew, the cartoon skunk whose sexually aggressive tendencies made him inappropriate for today’s young audiences. Did a Great Awakening dawn on the sexually liberal French to turn into prudish puritans on pornography?
Not quite. This new policy is coming from the same place as France’s other policy of banning smartphones at public schools. There’s simply no benefit to allowing children to consume pornography, and there are some very real harms. It’s an addictive habit that warps minds, ruins relationships, destroys personal drive, and is utterly exploitative and depraved by any moral standard. For a once-proud country such as France, banning
