Hi, I’m Vanessa Cliff, CEO of Cliff Media, and I’m here with Pixie Mae, our Community Organizing and Safety Director. 

Cliff Media is a women and queer-led porn production company rooted in community organizing. We host group shoots open to all enthusiastically consenting adults who lift up sex-positive stories about loving community, joyful kink, healthy non-monogamy, empowered female and queer sexuality.

Usually, we love sharing fun, silly, sexy videos that make you smile, feel loved, welcome, and seen. Unfortunately, today we have to share some tough news.

You may have heard about the wave of anti-porn laws, also known as “age verification” laws, sweeping the country. These laws, now in more than 20 states, require adult websites like Pornhub, xHamster, and even Cliff Media to verify viewers’ age, not just by clicking a button that states that you’re over the age of 18 and consent to viewing adult content, but by uploading your I.D.. 

These laws say that they’re to prevent kids from viewing porn. But what they really do is make it harder for everyone to view porn and for legitimate, aboveboard porn companies like ours to survive. Porn companies can now be fined huge sums of money, and in some cases can face criminal charges, for allowing viewers in these states who have not provided their I.D. to access content.

At Cliff Media, we believe that collecting IDs is a huge violation of your privacy, and it’s also really difficult to implement. Like many adult companies, in order to remain compliant with the law, we’re having to block viewers from states where these laws are now in place. This makes us really sad because Cliff Media’s number one purpose is to use porn as a medium to build inclusive, loving community everywhere, in-person and online.

We come to you today because we want you to know exactly what these laws are censoring. Cliff Media operates with a core value very similar to what Martin Luther King Junior expressed, that people should be judged not by the color of their skin or any other part of their physical appearance or identity, but by the content of their character.

When people apply to participate in a Cliff Media shoot, we don’t care how your body looks or how your body works. All good-hearted people are welcome and wanted here. We invite anyone to join us if they submit STI results, sign release forms and come ready to learn and grow together. 

We challenge junk narratives in society that tell a lot of people that they aren’t desirable or worthy of love. They’re too fat. Their dicks are too small. They’re the wrong gender, or too gay, or too queer, trans, too black or brown, too old, too disabled, too neurodiverse. We hope that people watching us see that people who look like them are getting sweet smiles and hot sex. We hope it reminds them that they are worthy of love and desirable too. 

At our shoots and in the media we share online, we invite people to join us in being their authentic selves. Society teaches us to feel shame and to keep quiet about so many things like being queer, being slutty, being kinky, being polyamorous. Although the truth can be scary, we also know that being honest about who you are is freeing, and it creates space for other people to do the same.

We’ve heard from many people who have said that after watching Cliff Media content, they felt empowered to come out. They felt desirable in their bodies for the first time. They felt able to express stigmatized sexual desires to their partners. We’ve heard from people who said that Clift Media had a huge impact on their mental health, who said they finally feel free or feel less alone.

At Cliff Media, we laugh a lot and have really good orgasms. You know what laughter and orgasms have in common? They’re healing and they bring people together. We expand the impact of healing beyond people in the room by sharing our inclusive laughter and orgasms with the world. We want to be able to continue to share this with all consenting adults.

But elected officials in some states are no longer allowing that, because what they believe about porn is incorrect. These laws are about censoring art. Porn is the most widely viewed art out there, and it is one of the most universal human experiences in our harsh world. Art helps the soul survive. 

The Free Speech Coalition has challenged the first of these anti-porn laws in Louisiana. The Supreme Court has now said that it will consider the case. Until then, Cliff Media will have to say what we hope is a temporary goodbye to folks in these states.

This is a huge challenge for us as a company and as a community, including a huge financial hit. If you have the capacity, we ask for your help to sustain us. We are trying to figure out how to keep doing the work that means so much to us and so many other people in a political climate that doesn’t support or understand what we do or who we are. 

And to our friends in states where content is blocked, we want to leave you with this. Whether you’re queer, trans, disabled, fat, black, brown, union, neurodiverse, whether you’re monogamous or have lots of partners, whether you feel confident about your sexual desires or worried that you’re too weird, too slutty, or too perverse, whether you feel sexy in your body every day, or you worry that no one will ever love you: 

Please know that you are perfectly imperfect exactly as you are. There’s a huge community of people who love you, and you are not alone.