I want to justmake a plea if I can for taking pornography more serious than we do and having written on this now for a while I'm always amazed at how I myself find myself at times timid about acknowledging that I write on pornography and that I know people in the porn world In fact I've even written scripts for porn movies and shot behind the scenes for a porn movie so I have some experience in the world but you know Quagmire mentioned this and I think it's very very important that the battle over obscenity and pornography in the 1960s and 50s would were absolutely necessary to the sexual revolutions It would not have taken place if it weren't for those defenses of public speech about sex sexual speech as well We can't underestimate how important pornography is in that Pornography is also and probably I hesitate to say but maybe I will just risk it I think it's the most important form of discourse about sex and sexuality that currently exists unfortunately it's a discourse that is constrained and riddled by all kinds of cross currents of privacy People will almost never admit to which porn movies they like which porn star they like or talk about the porn in any explicit way with their friends If you wanna test it just ask your friends about their favorite porn movie But the other thing that is valuable about pornography is it's historical value and historical value hinges on in fact one of the aesthetic criteria also necessary and that is what I call the reality effect or the way in which pornography to be effective has to have a real erection real sex at least appearing to be real but at least a real erection and a real orgasm And those things mean that real sex at some level has to take place And so that means that pornography is in part a history a historical record a documentary even of sex and the sex lives that we've lived to the present
