The day after Inauguration Day, Oklahoma Senator Dusty Deevers introduced a slate of legislation to "restore moral sanity" to the state, including criminalizing pornography.
The bill, SB593, would prohibit pornography, and those who produce, distribute, or possess porn in the state would face up to 10 years in prison. Project 2025 (the conservative policy wishlist for Trump's second term) calls for exactly this: a ban on pornography and the imprisonment of its creators.
Oklahoma already has an age-verification law in place, meaning that those who want to view a website with a "substantial portion" (over a third) of explicit content must verify their age with personal information like a digital ID. As a result, Pornhub is no longer available in the state. (The Supreme Court recently had a hearing about age verification, but the result is still pending.)
The bill also heightens 10-to-30-year penalties for "organized pornography trafficking," though it's not immediately clear if this is referring to sex trafficking.
"Pornography is both degenerate material and a highly addictive drug," Deevers said in the announcement of the bills. "It ruins marriages, ruins lives, destroys innocence, warps young people's perception of the opposite sex, turns women into objects, turns men into objects, degrades human dignity, and corrodes the moral fabric of society. Any decent society will stand against this plague with the full weight of the law."
"Porn addiction" isn't recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as a mental disorder due to lack of evidence, and the American Psychological Association (APA) points to a study that suggests porn can be used compulsively rather than an addiction. But many activities can be done compulsively, like eating or shopping. Another study suggested that one's perceived addiction to porn leads to more psychological stress over time.
As for how porn impacts perceptions, this seems like a great argument for comprehensive sex education. Among other things, sex ed teaches students media literacy — that porn is fantasy and not what sex is like — and teaches anatomy, so students can know their own bodies. But the first Trump administration sabotaged sex education in the country, and the pandemic disrupted it, too.
Only 36 states and DC require either sex education and/or HIV education at the time of publication. Oklahoma falls into the latter (mandating HIV education), and it stresses abstinence. It also isn't required to cover healthy relationships, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization for advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Additionally, the bill calls for heightening the penalties for possession of child sex abuse material (CSAM) from up to 20 years in prison to 10-to-30 years.
Deevers introduced several other bills as well, calling for measures such as abolishing abortion, ending no-fault divorce, and prohibiting Drag Queen Story Hour.
