I think we need to be more vocal about the simple undeniable fact that ordering society around the priority "it should be impossible and ideally illegal for someone under 18 to see sexual content" is fascist.
also that "I* know it when I see it" is an absolutely deranged standard for determining what speech is and is not protected by the first amendment. we're not talking about art criticism here gang we're talking about whose books it is legally acceptable to burn, based on some guy's determination of vibes. and it's not going great in this country!
*a judge in a court of law, not an artist, critic, historian, art viewer &c
It's so easy as an adult now to say "well but obviously you can't let the minors see the porn" and forget about all the porn I found online as a teen and that it truly was harmless to me. You used to be and to make a Tumblr account, tell it that you're 14, and just follow hundreds of gay porn blogs and nothing bad happened. And of course even with everything being consolidated into fewer and fewer websites it's all pretty easy to just tell websites that you're 18 and access everything anyway.
Adolescents are young adults and they can handle seeing sex. What we want to avoid is situations of specific adults showing them porn as part of an ongoing relationship of grooming. 90% of the time someone doing this is someone they already know and the other 10% of the time it's still happening in private messages. It's not happening through someone on their own sneaking around looking for pictures of cocks and boobs. As long as they're not talking to anyone I really don't see how it needs to be made impossible for them to find it. It should be their own little private experience but who are we to deny porn to someone going through puberty.
While of course we don't want to be supporting human traffickers, the fact of the matter is that the #1 group being targeted and exploited in the trafficking industry is immigrants and if we actually cared about trafficking victims we would kill the industry at its root by eliminating movement restrictions across the border. If you didn't need to hire someone to smuggle you or your children across the border then there wouldn't be a human trafficking industry in this country at all.
And the traffickers are hardly making porn games, furry art, or erotic ASMR audio files.
It is impossible to prevent minors looking at porn. Full stop. I still remember pretty vividly what it was like to be a teenager - if there had been more barriers in place to prevent me finding porn I would have found a way to outsmart them. I was tech savvy from an early age - if I had needed to use TOR or a VPN I would have figured it out just fine, and in fact, when I was 17 I was using these kind of tools to get around blocks at school so I could read webcomics during lunch. If I didn't have the internet, I would have been reading racy books at the library or writing my own porn or trading erotic comics and art at school. Well actually, I did all those things anyways. Because the unbearable horniness of puberty is a driving force unlike any other, and teens will go to some pretty extreme measures to explore their sexuality.
What would actually help keep minors safe is to increase education around grooming, consent, and abuse from an earlier age. Making sure they can recognize and escape an unsafe situation should be a top priority. Also, as barriers to porn increase, the more minors there will be that need to ask for help to access it, and the higher the chances will be that they will wind up interacting with an adult with bad intentions.
Sure is interesting how laws making it harder to access porn only ever seem to hurt marginalized communities like queer/trans folks and sex workers, and don't take any measures that would actually protect minors from groomers.