As if Britain didn’t have enough poor policy on its hands already, Parliament just voted to begin implementing an aspect of its Digital Economy Act that would enforce the regulations for viewing sexually explicit content. While Britain claims that it wants to protect youths from unrealistic ideas about sex, its failure to provide an effective incentive for people not to masturbate to contemporary porn ensures that these efforts will prove futile. More than that, this vote stigmatizes sexual pleasure by connecting masturbation and porn to illegality, ultimately preventing teenagers from developing a healthy relationship with their own sexuality.

While porn has been frowned upon in society for decades, Britain’s Digital Economy Act differs from previous adult content regulations in that its supposed goal is not to completely prevent teenage sexuality. However, citing porn’s misleading depictions of sex, as well as the malleability of the young mind, the Act tasks the British Board of Film Classification with ensuring that everyone who watches porn is really over 18. So, after July 15, all potential viewers of pornography must submit an official identification document proving that they are of age.

The idea of shielding teens from pornography is an admirable one, as adult entertainment comes with a whole plethora of problems. For instance, by mostly employing models who are extreme examples of western beauty standards, mainstream porn fails to represent those with other body types. Furthermore, by creating racial porn categories, such as “Asian” and “Black,” and placing those categories alongside kink tags such as “BDSM,” pornography websites are perpetuating the fetishization of non-white races. To the young and impressionable mind, these misleading and problematic images of sex may cause lasting consequences in how minors view women, consent, race, and sexual pleasure.

These issues definitely need to be addressed, but Britain’s regulations are not the solution. Since Parliament doesn’t support any sort of cleaner medium to help people get off, and because there is no punishment for watching porn as a minor, there is very little practical incentive for teenagers to stop masturbating to porn. This is only made worse by the ease with which Britain’s age requirements can be circumvented, since it is still legal to use a VPN to reroute your computer’s location to a country that doesn’t have as stringent age requirements.

At the same time, these porn regulations imply a stigmatization of both porn and, by extension, masturbation. The idea that teenagers will develop unrealistic attitudes about sex from porn also implies that they’re too young to properly understand sex and sexual pleasure on their own. By saying that minors aren’t mature enough, Parliament is discouraging teens from engaging in any form of underage sexual pleasure, be that masturbation or sex. Therefore, the failure to effectively reduce access to porn will allow teenagers to continue masturbating to sexually explicit content, while at the same time increasing the stigma associated with both porn and masturbation. This same stigma might also deter people from enjoying sex once they are of age, because they will still have that negative association with sexual pleasure.

It’s essential not to write off the value of recreational sex. While preventing the formation of a healthy relationship with one’s sexuality may not have been a goal of the Digital Economy Act, preventing casual sex certainly was, as shown by Member of Parliament Drew Hendry’s warning that viewing porn as a minor leads to the undesirable outcome of “casual attitudes towards sex and sexual pleasure.” This point of view is indicative of a time when we lived in a religious society that only accepted sex for procreational reasons and fetishized purity. But we no longer live in such a puritanical time (I hope), and religion no longer forms the basis for all of our moral judgments, meaning that most people don’t seriously think that premarital sex will lead to eternal damnation. The fact that there is no legitimate moral reason to look down upon casual sex, combined with the ineffectiveness of actually restricting porn viewership, calls into question the true motives of the Digital Economy Act.

Instead of discouraging minors from watching porn, and by extension harming their relationships with their own sexuality, Parliament should attempt to fix the issues in the porn industry as a whole, which would benefit both adults and teenagers. One way in which the government could try to solve these issues is by supporting the development of educational pornography. While all adult entertainment companies are businesses and therefore create whatever sells the best, the government could implement policies that would offset the costs of making more realistic but potentially less appealing pornography. By providing tax breaks or governmental grants to companies that produce representative porn, Westminster could provide a way for both teenagers and adults to continue masturbating while also learning about the realities of sex. Instead of trying to stop minors from viewing sexually explicit content, Parliament could create a sort of age rating system for pornography similar to movie ratings (PG, PG-13, R, etc.). Only adult entertainment that depicted realistic sex would be suitable for viewership by minors, and the more unrealistic or problematic the porn, the older you would have to be to watch it. While such a solution creates new problems, like questions about whom porn should represent, it at least ensures that by the time people are exposed to the misleading aspects of porn they are old enough to critique those aspects and make their own judgments.

Daniel Knopf is a member of the class of 2022 and can be reached at dknopf@wesleyan.edu.