Across a four-day span in late August, porn star Siri Dahl invites her followers to “cum on in” on OnlyFans, goes live on YouTube (“100% raw, organic, grass-fed” content, she advertises with a wink), hawks “Corn Star” T-shirts via her personal store, posts about appearing in a live podcast taping of Lovett or Leave It on X, where she has nearly half a million followers, and uploads eight videos to Pornhub, alternating between role-play (“Sexy Mean Starfish Babe Gives You Femdom Ass Worship”) and kink-friendly (“Cozy naked yoga by the fireplace”) content.
It’s a typical week for Dahl: demanding, a little all over the place, and very online, but one she’s totally in control of.
It’s also very different from the world of studio porn where she got her start. Dahl debuted in adult entertainment in 2012, with credits in projects by Vivid Entertainment, Naughty America, and Girlfriends Films. At the time, she says, the industry was still very much a boys club; she had no independence and even less say over the direction of her career. “It was like five CEOs who completely dictated what was attractive and what kind of person was allowed to become a porn star,” she says. “Performers were essentially at the bottom. I’d be on set for 12 hours all for one check, and there are no royalties in porn. The power dynamic was inverted compared to what it is now.”
Today, Dahl does a little bit of everything: girl on girl, solo and fetish content, naked workout videos, group scenes. She’s on “basically every fan platform”—Fansly, LoyalFans, and ManyVids, with OnlyFans being her “biggest income generator.” She also uploads free content to Pornhub, where she makes ad revenue based on views. Some of her most popular work is role-playing a badly-behaved stepmom: “MOMMY’S BOY – Naughty MILF Siri Dahl Caught Naked in the Kitchen!” is her most-watched video on Pornhub, with 29 millions views. She’s grateful for the autonomy the internet has given her over her career.
But that could come to a crashing end, with the widespread adoption of age-verification laws in the US and UK, which require visitors to upload an ID or other personal documentation to validate that they are not a minor before viewing sexually explicit material.
Already Dahl has seen “an absolutely massive drop in traffic,” she says from her home in Los Angeles. “I’ve made 30 percent less money this year than I did last year.” (She declined to say exactly how much.)
So far at least 24 US states have sanctioned some form of ID verification, each with unique stipulations. Legislators argue that these laws are intended to keep minors safe from content deemed harmful to them. Critics say that argument doesn’t hold any weight because there are “easy solutions” to the moral panic conservatives have created around the issue. They say the laws infringe on privacy rights and set an irreversibly dark precedent for the future of free speech.
Perhaps even more terrifying is what it all signals: the death of the free web and an ushering in of a more puritanical version of America.
That’s been a goal of Project 2025 all along. A line from the 900-page Heritage Foundation document, a right-wing blueprint of sorts for President Donald Trump’s second term, says “people who produce and distribute [porn] should be imprisoned.” In a video recording leaked last August by the Centre for Climate Reporting, Trump ally Russell Vought, who coauthored Project 2025, says the age verification laws are a “back door” route to a federal ban. “We’d have a national ban on pornography if we could,” says Vought, who is director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration, in the video. “We’ve got a number of states that are passing this, and you know what happens is, the porn company then says, ‘We’re not going to do business in your state,’ which is entirely what we were after,” he explains. In the same video, Vought says his wider goal is creating a “culture that values babies and the life that’s created and is focused on the birth rates and makes them a positive good as opposed to a burden.”
