Bad porn reprise:

Many people wrote me with comments on my essay Why Does Porn Got To Hurt So Bad?. For all of those who sent praise, thank you. It's actually nice to know there are so many people who would like to reject the bad-porn aesthetic. For all of those who refrained from calling down fire and brimstone on me for messing with smut, also thank you. I'd have ignored you, but thank you anyway.

I got two responses I thought were particularly interesting. One was from a gentleman who works as a pornographer. He opined that I overestimated the porn industry by supposing that bad porn reflected market demand. The real problem (he claims) is that it's hard to find women who simultaneously don't look hard and jaded yet are willing to bare all for the camera. Most outfits, he said, don't even try. They settle for the fake-pearl-and-synthoboob look out of laziness, knowing it's crap but will sell well enough.

This doesn't explain to me why, if Veronika Zemanova can look like a girl one might willingly take to bed in one picture and an unnatural womanoid-thing in another, they don't try to photograph women like her in the more natural mode more often. But perhaps this one was just a trick of the light.

Another respondent proposes the interesting theory that the girls are dressed (or rather undressed) to look inaccessible because if they weren't, there might be an epidemic of stalking as various creeps and wackos tried to get next to them.

It would be touching to believe the porn industry cares that much about its performers, but I'm skeptical.

Finally, I got mail from "German Lucy", who said she was honored to appear in my essay and quite enjoyed it. Rather to my astonishment, her email style suggests that she really is "as sweet-natured and unjaded as she looks". She answered my questions plausibly and thoughtfully and didn't even pitch me to sign up for her site.

Holy Diogenes, Batman! I think I might have found the one honest porn star...

After reading too much political news:

Top Ten Reasons I'm Not A (Left-)Liberal:

1. Gun control. Liberals are completely wrong about this. A fair number of them know better, too, but they sponsor lies about it as a form of class warfare against conservative-leaning gun owners.
2. Nuclear power. They're wrong about this, too, and the cost in both dollars and human deaths by pollution and other fossil-fuel side-effects has been enormous.
3. Affirmative action. These programs couldn't be a more diabolical or effective plan for entrenching racial prejudice if the Aryan Nations had designed them.
4. Abortion: The liberals' looney-toon feminist need to believe that a fetus one second before birth is a parasitic lump of tissue with no rights, but a fetus one second afterwards is a full human, has done half the job of making a reasoned debate on abortion nigh-impossible.
5. Communism. I haven't forgiven the Left for sucking up to the monstrous evil that was the Soviet Union. And I never will.
6. Socialism. Liberals have never met a tax, a government intervention, or a forcible redistribution of wealth they didn't like. Their economic program is Communism without the guts to admit it.
7. Junk science. No medical study is too bogus and no environmental scare too fraudalent for liberals. If it rationalizes bashing capitalism or slathering on another layer of regulatory bureaucracy, they'll take it.
8. Defining deviancy down. Liberals are in such a desperate rush to embrace the `victimized by society' and speak the language of compassion that they've forgotten how to condemn harmful, self-destructive and other-destructive behavior.
9. William Jefferson Clinton. Sociopathic liar, perjurer, sexual predator. There was nothing but a sucking narcissistic vacuum where his principles should have been. Liberals worship him.
10. Liberals, by and large, are fools.

Top Ten Reasons I'm Not A Conservative:

1. Censorship. The complete absence of evidence that exposure to pornography or sexually-explicit material is harmful to children or anyone else doesn't stop conservatives from advocating massive censorship.
2. The War on Drugs. We found out that Prohibition was a bad idea back in the 1930s -- all it did was create a huge and virulent criminal class, erode respect for the law, and corrupt our politics. Some people never learn.
3. Creationism. I don't know who I find more revolting, the drooling morons who actally believe creationism or the intelligent panderers who know better but provide them with political cover for their religious-fundamentalist agenda in return for votes.
4. Abortion. The conservatives' looney-toon religious need to believe that a fertilized gamete is morally equivalent to a human being has done the other half of making a reasoned debate on abortion nigh-impossible.
5. Racism. I haven't forgiven the Right for segregation, Jim Crow laws, and lynching blacks. And I never will.
6. Sexism. Way too much conservative thought still reads like an apologia for keeping women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.
7. Anti-science. Stem cells, therapeutic cloning -- it doesn't matter how many more diabetes, cancer and AIDS patients have to die to protect the anti-abortion movement's ideological flanks. Knowledge -- who needs it? Conservatives would try suppressing astronomy if the telescope had just been invented.
8. Family values. Conservatives are so desperate to reassert the repressive `normalcy' they think existed in grand-dad's time that they pretend we can undo the effects of the automobile, television, the Pill, and the Internet. And should try to.
9. Ronald Wilson Reagan. A B-movie actor who thought ketchup was a vegetable. His grip on reality was so dangerously weak that the Alzheimer's made no perceptible difference. Conservatives worship him.
10. Conservatives, by and large, are villains.

Jane, baby, we have to talk...