On May 19, 2025, Congress passed the “Take It Down Act”, a bill that makes both actual and AI-produced nonconsensual explicit content, also known as “revenge porn,” illegal. Additionally, other issues related to pornography have been widely discussed in state legislatures across the country, with 24 states passing laws that require pornographic websites to implement age verification systems to access their content. Other states have also introduced similar bills. This Spotlight Analysis examines Americans’ views on the legality of pornography.[1]
Recent PRRI data shows that a slim majority of Americans (52%) say that pornography should be illegal in most or in all cases, compared with 47% who say it should be legal in most or in all cases. Current views on pornography are comparable to those of over a decade ago, when PRRI found that a majority of Americans (56%) favored making it more difficult to access pornography on the Internet in 2013. That same survey also found that around two-thirds of Americans (65%) believed viewing pornography is morally wrong.
In 2025, nearly six in ten Democrats (58%) and less than half of independents (47%) say pornography should be legal in all or most cases, compared with 35% of Republicans.
Around two-thirds of religiously unaffiliated Americans (68%) and the majority of Jewish Americans (57%) and members of other non-Christian religions (57%) support the legality of pornography, as do less than half of white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (49%), Black Protestants (46%), and white Catholics (43%). More than one-third of Hispanic Catholics (35%), about one-quarter of Hispanic Protestants (28%) and white evangelical Protestants (23%), and only 14% of Latter-day Saints say pornography should be legal in all or most cases.
Americans who qualify as Christian nationalism Rejecters (72%) are most likely to support the legality of pornography, followed by 50% of those who qualify as Skeptics, 28% of Sympathizers, and only 18% of Adherents.
Men (59%) are nearly twice as likely as women (34%) to say pornography should be legal in all or in most cases. About half of white Americans (49%) agree with legal pornography, as do 46% of Black, 44% of AAPI and multiracial, and 38% of Hispanic Americans.
The majority of millennials (57%) and half of Gen Zers (50%) favor pornography legality, followed by 47% of Gen Xers, 35% of baby boomers, and 25% of members of the Silent Generation. Americans with a four-year college degree or more education (54%) are more likely than those without a four-year degree (43%) to say pornography should be legal in all or most cases.
[1] This survey was designed and conducted by PRRI. View the survey topline here. The survey was conducted among a representative sample of 5,024 adults (age 18 and up) living in all 50 states in the United States who are part of Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, and an additional 412 who were recruited by Ipsos using opt-in survey panels to increase the sample sizes in smaller states. Interviews were conducted online between May 16-28, 2025. The margin of error for the national survey is +/- 1.76 percentage points at the 95% level of confidence, including the design effect for the survey of 1.8. In addition to sampling error, surveys may also be subject to error or bias due to question wording, context, and order effects. Additional details about the KnowledgePanel can be found on the Ipsos website: ipsos.com/en-us/solution/knowledgepanel
