It may come to a surprise to you but one of my best friends is a feminist. Ive known her for about 6-7 years know and itts very odd that we are friends, seeing as how I am in the porno industry and she is a staunch defender of the Feminist Mystique, however life works in strange and peculiar ways. Anyways the first day that I told her that I had landed a job at an adult company she lecture me for about an hour on how this would destroy my life and how I was contributing to the demise of exploited women. I took it in grace and told her not to worry, and that it was a job between jobs. A year and a half later Im still in the industry and shes still on my ass for being in the industry. Everytime we get in a fight she brings up the porno industry and attacks me from that angle. I got sick of it one day and sent her this article written by Mike, some dude. We still get into fights, but after that day, she has yet to attack me from the porno angle. So if ever the time comes when you need to defend yourself for watching porno, liking porno, or working in porno, bust this article out and own that mutha fucka who’s trying to get you down.

1. "Pornography exploits children". Obviously, this assumes that all porno is child porno, which is a totally unreasonable generalization. I’ve seen a lot of porno, but I’ve never seen child porno. Snuff films exploit death; does this somehow mean that we should ban action movies?

2. "Pornography degrades women". Again, this is an unreasonable generalization. It is unfortunately true that some porno depicts women as mere objects of sexual exploitation (although it should be noted that some porno also degrades men, particularly the sadomasochist porn in which a female "dominatrix" humiliates and abuses male "slaves"). However, one can’t generalize about porno based on its worst examples, any more than one should generalize about mainstream films based on movies which glorify violence or promote and/or affirm racial stereotypes. If we should ban all pornography which depicts acts of sexual assault and domination, should we also ban all movies which glorify violence?

3. "When people view pornography, it is more likely that they will commit sexual assault." It is infuriating that this is almost always stated as a fact, even though there is no supporting evidence for this conclusion (even the shaky statistical correlations favoured by sociologists don’t exist). We are reminded that most rape involves porno, but that proves nothing because porno is a multi-billion dollar business with many tens of millions of customers, the vast majority of whom are not rapists. In fact, there are numerous European countries in which both pornography and prostitution are widespread and legal, yet the incidence of rape is much lower than it is in America (in Germany, for example, explicit pornography and prostitution are both legal, yet it has less than one quarter of America’s rate of sexual assault). Furthermore, even if we do accept these grossly unscientific claims of a causal relationship, this kind of reasoning is equally applicable to mainstream films which depict violence or promote or affirm racial and sexual stereotypes; should we ban them too?

(Read on …)