Your Favorite Porn Stars Are Sick of Being Censored. But They’re Not Going AwayNEWS | 14 May 2025Asa Akira doesn’t want your teenager learning about sex from her videos any more than you do.
“It's devastating to me that someone's first experience of sex could be a gang-bang scene of mine. Like, that's not OK,” says Akira, 40, from inside a spacious villa at the Sunset Marquis hotel in West Hollywood, where she and other adult stars are getting their hair and makeup done for the seventh annual Pornhub Awards at the nearby Saddle Ranch Chop House.
The suite, which features a grand piano currently topped with different styles of fake eyelashes, has the distinct slightly burnt smell of recently straightened hair. A TV plays music videos by Lady Gaga and Avril Lavigne—I’m told a Katy Perry track was mocked relentlessly earlier in the day.
Akira, a 5'2'' titan of the industry who, according to the Internet Adult Film Database, has appeared in more than 900 adult films, understands the concerns about minors looking at porn, but she doesn’t think it’s a problem for her industry to solve. More so, she thinks it’s a societal issue that should be addressed with more practical sex education.
Asa Akira at the Sunset Marquis hotel. Photograph: Skye Battles
“If we had better sex ed, young people would not look to porn as education, just like they don't look to a movie to learn how to act in the world … When it comes to sex, or even being nude, we talk about it so little. Of course, when they're naturally curious at a certain age, the only thing to look at right now is porn, and of course they're gonna look.”
They might have a harder time looking these days, depending on where they live. Last week, the Arizona House of Representatives passed a bill requiring adult websites to verify that their visitors are at least 18. If signed into law by Governor Katie Hobbs, Arizona will become the 21st state to pass a similar measure since Louisiana started the trend in 2022. But in most cases, rather than rely on third-party services to collect people’s identification data, Pornhub has opted to remove its content from the impacted jurisdictions, meaning it is no longer available in at least 17 states.
Alex Kekesi, vice president of brand and community for Pornhub, says the site agreed to verify user ages in Louisiana, but it resulted in an 80 percent drop in traffic because people didn’t want to hand over their IDs. While Kekesi says Pornhub is in favor of preventing minors from watching porn, the company doesn’t believe these bans are the right way to go about it. Still, Pornhub remains one of the most visited websites in the world, which shows that the consumption of pornography, despite being controversial, is in fact extremely mainstream.Author: Noah Shachtman. Manisha Krishnan. Paige Oamek. Julian Chokkattu. Reece Rogers. Elana Klein. Kate Knibbs. Molly Higgins. Gabriel Nicholas. Naveena Sadasivam. Source
