I worry about using the term, not because I'm ashamed of it, but because I fear it'll lead you to think my work is a lot filthier than it is, and then you'll be disappointed.

I'd like my work to be filthier, a lot of the time. I think some of my stuff might be more interesting if it were. Sometimes I say to myself "Ooh, I'm gonna put something really raunchy in this one," and "really raunchy" inevitably turns out to be a little more full-frontal than I usually go, or something tame like that.

I'm not very good at writing sex. That's a pretty startling claim for someone whose only published fiction -- not the only fiction I've gotten paid for, but the only fiction where someone has said "hey, I want this in my book" and sent me a contract for it -- has been smut. Well, "erotica," but I hate that word. It's tame and cowardly, meant to provide a curtain of respectability. I hate the word "erotica" for the same reason that I am perfectly willing to claim to be a pornographer out of solidarity.

Because here's the thing: it's getting really, really dire for the people who make smut. Very bad. Unbelievably bad. Worst it's been since smut went more or less aboveboard in the 1960's. And it's not just a case of being herded back into the closet. The haters and the zealots and the bluenoses and the people they get to believe their crap don't want us to be covert. They don't want us to be illicit. They want to drive us out of existence.

And the worst part is that many of the people who should be our allies buy into this bullshit, because there is a general sensation that it is morally OK to be anti-smut; that it's a position with no downside, just like a lot of politicans feel "tough on crime" is always a safe bet because who the fuck's going to dare speak up for the opposite position?

Well, here I am. I am pro-pornography. Pornography is important. Pornography is good. Pornography is being driven out of existence by fascists and theocrats and the people they manage to cow or coerce. And if you don't believe me, then we need to have some strong words, because this is definitely a case where if you're not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

"Come on, Col," I hear you cry. "The world is a trashfire in every single possible way. There is a not a single bit of good news anywhere, we've got a group of people actively trying to institute fascism and roll human rights back to the Stone Age; you, as a trans person, are fully aware of how much they want you dead, and that's just one group of many; every time we open up the newspaper or social media we're depressed for hours. Do you think pornography is anywhere near the top of that list? Do you think it should be on the list at all?"

Well, yeah, I do. Because porn has always, and always will be, the canary in the coal mine. They always come for the pornographers first, you know, because they're the easiest targets. It's safe to go after pornographers because most people won't object, they're too embarrassed to. Or they actually do think it's a good idea because "oh, think of the children" or just "eww, icky."

I mostly surround myself with ostensible leftists. I can't count the number of conversations I've had that distill to:
Me: Racial justice!
Them: Yeah!
Me: Women's rights!
Them: Goes without saying.
Me: Gay rights!
Them: Absolutely!
Me: Trans rights!
Them: Uh, don't see why not ...
Me: Pornographers' rights!
Them: ...

I reiterate: these are conversations with people who are supposed to be my allies, and often, my friends. I don't try to hold those kinds of conversations with my enemies -- they're hopeless -- but you folks theoretically on my side disappoint me tremendously a lot of the time.

It is very difficult to be openly pro-porn in the United States because nobody has your back. Ever. Even people who agree with you don't want to say so anywhere anyone will hear, because sex (and porn, but really it's sex) is so stigmatized in this country and always has been.

(I have one friend whom I no longer have this conversation with because he believes it's better if sex and pornography is stigmatized; he feels that part of its allure is the forbidden, and that if it were all more acceptable to be overt about, the thrill would be gone. My response is: My bro, that may be your kink, but it is not helping the climate for the rest of us a bit. But I do wonder sometimes how many people in this country think the way he does.)

A nation that does not tolerate pornography is a nation that secretly, or not-so-secretly, doesn't tolerate a lot of other things. And these days, with the fascists having largely dropped the mask, it's pretty overt how many things they'd like to drive out of existence. Why do you want to separate out porn? Why are you possibly prepared to defend my right to exist as a trans person (or say you are; frankly, this kind of makes me doubt your commitment there), but not defend my right to create pornography and show it to other people who are interested?

Here is a fundamental truth that no one admits. Sometimes you'll say it in a conversation and people will nod, but they don't really believe it or absorb it:

No, really, it is. Porn is always the first thing in a medium that really starts to make money. Porn is what made video rentals take off, no matter how much Blockbuster tried to deny it later. Nobody ever wanted to watch porn in a movie theatre except an occasional exhibitionist; they did it because there was no other way to get it at the time. Watching porn is an intrinsically intimate act. As soon as they could take those videotapes home, the theatrical porn film died. Porn made the early web go; porn is always the first thing people think about in a new medium; porn is eventually going to be what finally makes VR viable if we can get around certain other logistics issues (like needing a dedicated room in your home free of furniture). Porn is always what paves the way. But we deny it. Over and over we deny it.

Most people lie about consuming porn. They claim not to when they do; or they claim they do it less than they do; or they claim to not be into the things they're actually into. They are trying to be safe. They don't want to get those side-eyed, suspicious looks. Because we've internalized that consuming porn is for sleazes. It is not true.

Even putting aside the basic fact that porn is such a useful and necessary outlet for some of our drives, the idea that porn is a toxic pit of slime through and through is false, an oversimplification. I admit that in the 1970s it was hard to find areas of the porn industry that weren't in the hands of very gross people -- not that this stopped Deep Throat, for example, from being a milestone film in its way, nor did it prevent some women from sneaking in to see it -- sometimes with their husbands.

But along about the time of my late adolescence there was a small revolution in women-run, women-centric porn; an attempt to "take back" the industry and provide better working conditions for the women in it, including a bigger cut of the cash. This went along with the availability of safe, non-sleazy places to buy things like sex toys and lubricants. The rise of Good Vibrations and its ilk went more or less hand-in-hand with a rise in (let's call it) somewhat more ethical pornography, and the end goal was the same in both cases: so that women could admit to being consumers of these goods safely and with a clear conscience.

If you are under thirty you may take this stuff for granted, or even have some contempt bred by familiarity. I remember wincing the first time I saw someone on social media being highly critical of Erika Moen's Oh Joy Sex Toy series. I have my issues with Moen too, but I don't think you realize that the very existence of Oh Joy Sex Toy would not have been possible, not in this form, without two revolutions: that women-led partial reclamation of porn, and the ubiquity of the web. In 1975 something like that would have been an underground postal newsletter out of California and the Postmaster General would be busily trying to ban it.

Do you know what "pegging" means? Unless you're over sixty, you probably do. You know what pegging means because of Carol Queen's Bend Over Boyfriend videos that came along just as video was dying, in the late 1990s. Queen and her partner Robert Lawrence did not coin the term; it was a submission to a neologism contest, but it was describing the specific idea of a woman anally penetrating a man using a strap-on ... which before those videos, I think it is safe to say, very few of the "normal" people in the world realized was even a thing. You may not understand in 2024 how big a deal these videos were in some circles. It wasn't just the idea that there were women strapping it on and putting it up someone's ass, but that there were women -- normal women! everyday women! women you might work with in your office, even! -- who were looking at these videos and going, "Y'know, that looks like fun, I think I want to try that, let me figure out how I can talk Bob into it." While the Bend Over Boyfriend videos were not pornography -- they were instructional videos, and in fact the first one was criticized for being too sterile, like bad driver-education films -- this, to me, is still evidence of the power, and good works, of porn.

Another very interesting development, beginning around the time the web was really becoming ubiquitous and people could get at this kind of content without needing the nerd-knowledge overhead to find it in places like Usenet, was the growing realization of the extent of explicit fanfiction. Note how that was phrased. Slashy fanfic is not by any means a new thing; the slash in "slash" originally was between the names Kirk and Spock -- need I say more? What's changed is that in recent years even the "normal" people (there they are again) are becoming aware of just how much of it there is, how there's fanfic of everything and you may even know someone who writes a lot of it. (You may be someone who writes a lot of it.) Fanfic is a very democratic form of pornography; it's got something for everyone, and anyone can make it. It's often not very good, but that doesn't really matter.

It's hard to say these days whether pornography as a whole is reverting to its prior levels of sleaziness -- whether the positive developments of the 1980s and 1990s have lasted -- because there is a set of forces that wants very much to keep you from hearing about any positive developments in sex and pornography, ever. They want you to think it's sleazy and horrible all the way through. The theocrats and theocrat cosplayers -- it is sometimes hard to tell the difference, but see the next paragraph about specialized kinks -- mostly oppose porn because of its good effects, though they will never tell you that; they will claim porn is godless and leads to degeneracy and so forth, but really what they are into is suppression -- keeping people, and especially women, under their thumbs -- and it's harder to suppress people who have healthy sexual outlets and are open about enjoying them. Guilt is a key step to suppression, in other words. You closet something first, that's the way it works. Then you lock the closet door.

The thing that would be wryly amusing, if this weren't all so dangerous, is that many of the people who want to suppress and eliminate pornography are either big secret consumers of it, or have some serious and specialized kinks, or both. Some people's suppressive urges are their kinks. For a lot of tradwife people -- you know, the men who want Stepford wives, smiling and pregnant and waiting at the door at six pm with a cocktail and a hot meal in the oven and absolutely no agency of their own and definitely not shotgunning Valium while he's not looking -- this is a kink, plain and simple, but they will never admit it, nor ever understand that it could be satisfied by their wife agreeing to do tradwife roleplay on Tuesdays and Fridays without needing to sign away her soul or contribute materially to theocracy. You might even find some women who are legitimately into it! After all, they have kinks too.

(I can't tell you how many US fascists right now just have a fascism cosplay kink. They don't really care about the suppression, they just want to wear the clothes and do the goosestep because they think it makes them the cool kids. The problem is, the distinction between "wants to be a fascist" and "wants to roleplay a fascist" is not worth making, nor is either group any less dangerous than the other.)

I'm just saying, if some of us were a lot more honest in the mirror about our kinks, maybe a smidgen more self-aware, we might not have some of the problems we presently do. I agree with an online friend of mine that some folks are just in dire need of an outlet. They wrote, famously, some years ago, about Jesse Singal (a relentless pusher of bad and damaging information, and a person I suspect of having his various weirdnesses about transfolk because he is a closeted chaser) "Why can't he just work out his issues by writing werewolf porn like the rest of us?"

See, if we were better about porn, this dream could become a reality.

I admit it is difficult to defend pornography unilaterally on principle. There are a lot of nasty things in the well, and it's a deep well. I don't mean in the "oh, she nasty" sense. I mean genuinely vile.

I still look at a great deal of pornography, even after all these years ... though these days I mostly look at it from the position of a jaded observer (especially since most porn does nothing for me, see below). When someone likes a piece of my work on DeviantArt, the next thing I usually do (assuming I care enough, or am bored enough, to check) is to go look at their favorites. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I will be able to tell you exactly what the inside of this person's head looks like from those. Your porn choices are my crystal ball, my tea leaves. I have been a semi-pro observer and creator of smut for nigh forty years and I have learned many things. And some of you are giving yourselves away a little more than you probably care to.

Yes, I realize I said above that we should all be less quick to judge someone for consuming or creating porn. But, dear readers, I am here to tell you that sometimes the kind of porn does make a big difference.

This is of great personal import to me because I do a lot of kink which involves ... uh ... situations which would not be tolerable, let alone advisable, in the real world. I write a lot of what is called "dubious consent," mostly because I write a lot of stories involving mind control, and it is my long-standing policy that someone who is under the influence of anything, be it mesmerism or alcohol, and has sex that they might not ordinarily have while under that influence, is dubcon, no matter how much they seem to be into it at the time.

I also do some forced and involuntary transformations, e.g. a person being put into the Large Sinister Device and turned into a robot. Women being robotized (and yes, here it does mostly have to be women, though there are always a few who go the other way) is actually a very big and reliable kink on DeviantArt, and my robotization stuff always gets good traffic. When someone likes one of my robotization items, I usually want to go check to see which of these groups they're in:

- Men who fantasize about robot women because they have no idea how to relate to actual women and they want a waifu mommy maid sex toy that doesn't actually want to have a conversation with them;
- Men who fantasize about doing genuine violence to women, for whom the breakdown and mental abuse of the victim, not the control, is the primary point;
- Dom men (and sometimes women) who just happen to like their subs to be metallic;
- People who just think robot women look hot (hey, it doesn't always have to be complex);
- Women (or male subs) who fantasize about being the person being robotized.

And those are, as far as I've ever been able to tell, the only choices for that particular kink. I am fond of the fifth group, think the third and fourth groups are harmless, tolerate the first group (hey, it's a better outlet for them than getting an actual waifu, or shooting a school out of frustration) ... and wouldn't mind driving the second group completely off the face of the earth.

Apologies for the extended example; I discuss it at that depth to show that sometimes "use the porn as an outlet for things you shouldn't do in the real world" only goes so far. There are people who actually want to do violent and horrible things, and while I should accept porn as a safe outlet for those drives, I'm too busy worrying about their having those drives in the first place. I mean, I don't think it is an acceptable thing to contemplate putting a woman into a meat grinder no matter how much you insist it is only fantasy. (And that statement is coming from someone who has been known to tolerate a rape fantasy scene, in certain very careful contexts and if it's absolutely clear that there was no real-world slopover.)

I spent years railing against the "all porn is violence against women" position, and in particular Andrea Dworkin, one of its loudest advocates. I felt that whatever point she was making was far eclipsed by the level of censorship she was calling for. I also knew that she was sometimes wrong; that there was plenty of porn that was not misogynistic. But I came gradually to realize that Dworkin was an extremely intelligent person who was not just playing Carrie Nation, and I also became aware of the sheer amount of porn that was misogynistic -- something I had never fully realized because my own personal tastes shielded me from most of that particular pile of crap; when I see genuine misogyny in porn, I avoid that particular porn henceforth ... because, among other reasons, for me misogyny is an instant buzzkill, so it destroys the point of having porn in the first place.

Anyway, I came to realize that my gripe with Dworkin was not her principles but the absolutism. If the position had been "some porn is violence against women" or even "a lot of porn is violence against women," I wouldn't have had beef. But the problem then is, once you go there, someone's gotta sort the stuff into stacks -- this is OK, this is not OK -- and no one seems to want to do that.

As an additional example here, let's venture foolishly into an area which is even more clearly, and justifiably, off-limits; sex with, or sexualization of, children. Now, we all agree that this is an enormous no-no, I hope, yes?

The problem is that as a culture we unfortunately do sexualize children much more than we should -- in every aspect from advertising right down to those fucking gender reveal parties -- and this has big ripple effects. We have created our own problem there, in other words. And meanwhile we are trying to overcompensate for that by tagging things as CSAM which are not, and never were. We are conflating actual child porn (again: always bad!) with some things which are not, and willingly throwing the baby out with the bathwater (uh, so to speak) because, as usual, no one will speak for the people who run afoul of this.

"You're going to need to be a little clearer on that, Col," you say warily as you pick up the phone to dial the FBI. See, there you go. That's a conditioned reflex, right there. OK, I'll be more direct, but don't blame me if you have a hugely strong Not My Kink reaction.

I like age regression stories. I particularly like forced (involuntary) age regression stories, where the kink is the helplessness of having everything adult removed from you -- losing your ability to speak, walk, etc. There is absolutely nothing sexual in them; it's all about the brain. But you have to be very, very careful about such stories, just like you have to be very, very careful about ageplay (adults dressing up and acting like children or babies, but voluntarily) in any form. You have to be careful about how you depict regressed or ageplaying adults, because it is much safer to depict them as adults dressed as, or mentally in the state of, children than it is to depict adults physically transformed into children. Someone's going to come along and see that latter and not realize they're secretly adults, and then you're in trouble. Again, no sex or sexualization whatsoever! But we've gone so far over the edge on this that even depicting children in a story at all, in situations where no sexual content gets within ten miles of them, is sometimes considered problematic.

We have lost all nuance here, because a whole lot of people find it easier to ban indiscriminately than to go to the effort of making these distinctions, especially when it's something that makes a lot of people go "eww." They can't be arsed to tell the difference, and so when some bluenose runs to the mods and screams "ageplay!" the mods don't bother to analyze, they just get out the hammer. It's much worse with ageplay and regression material than any other kink I can bring to mind (and I can bring to mind a lot of kinks), because the threat of being accused of sheltering CSAM is so strong that no one is willing to check that claim; they don't want to take the risk.

"No one wants to take the risk" is actually the core of the storyline here, the main thrust of Here Lie Our Troubles.

It began with the major credit-card networks -- you know, MasterCard and that lot. They began to get increasingly leery of dealing with porn sites. They claimed they were more trouble than they were worth. Some of that was justified -- porn sites have been known to be linked with money laundering and all kinds of other shadiness -- but most of it, in my opinion was simply that once again, they didn't want to do the sifting; they didn't want to try to sort the aboveboard sites from the bad ones, and because it was porn, they could say "You know what, zero tolerance" and no one would come to the rescue. Because porn has no friends, not in public.

When we began to see the rise of various systems that were trying to fill the void where we could use a good, nationwide, extremely-low-overhead, reliable micropayments handler -- we still don't have one -- in particular, as we saw the rise of the sleazes at PayPal (whom I have never worked with and never will, because they have terms of service which say, almost in as few words, "we can screw you any way we like if we decide to, and you will have no recourse"), we also saw that they had policies which were, at best, extremely leery of adult content of any kind.

But the real problems began when the Apple app store began a ferocious campaign of eradication of anything that looked even vaguely like adult content. Apple claims they were scared of running afoul of certain laws, but they're not always clear and consistent about what they say they're afraid of, and it's all bullshit anyway. Apple just doesn't want to be arsed to sort out the piles, like everyone else; they don't want to have to decide what's acceptable and what's not, and it's easier to just ban it all, because porn has no friends.

Apple's ban has had what jurists call a "chilling effect" throughout all of the web and a lot of other things as well. This one act has singlehandedly done more to make the world unsafe for porn than anything else in the last thirty years. And meanwhile, the god-kissers and bluenoses are cheering. They've known for years that you can't ban porn by trying to change or affect consumer behavior -- remember, porn is always the killer app -- but you can, perhaps, kill it by tying off its arteries -- the money supply.

I released a mildly filthy computer game in 2020. It was more deeply strange than filthy, but it did have its share of explicit situations. I bought into the Steam game release program -- an utterly non-refundable one hundred dollars I will never see again -- and then Steam sat on the game in its approval cycle. They have, formally, been sitting on it since then. They will sit on it forever. They're scared of some of the content in it. (Specifically, they are scared of an involuntary regression scenario in the game. Everything else is probably fine with them, given some of the stuff they do approve.)

I eventually gave up and put the game on itch.io ... where I learned I couldn't charge money for it. itch.io worked with two fulfillment companies, PayPal and Stripe, both of which have weasel language in their terms of service that say something like "adult content isn't allowed ... well, maybe some adult content is allowed ... but we're not going to spell out exactly what is and what isn't, that way when we decide to deny you service you won't have any recourse."

I set up a tip jar. It's collected less than thirty dollars. Or at least it had last I looked. I was so disgusted by the whole thing -- that game had taken me nearly two years to make -- that I haven't actually been back to check the tip jar or the itch.io page since a few months after releasing it.

This is where the war on porn gets us. Can you look me in the eye and say that my cute little filthy game deserved to be starved and die just because you think smut is icky? Is this a referendum on me? Do you think I'm a horrible person just because I have kinks and make smut? Do you?

Well, it sure feels personal.

If I had to name my biggest complaint against pornography as a whole, at least the bulk of it in the United States, it's that it's boring as hell. But I try to be careful where I make that complaint, because I suspect the real problem is that people are boring as hell.

The difference between the pro porn industry and the amateur porn makers is that the pros have a market to think of at all times. Just as grocers don't waste precious shelf space stocking products they've learned not enough people buy -- which is why some good products don't survive -- pro porn makers don't waste time and money making porn that only appeals to a small niche audience. Even the "specialty" pro pornographers don't make anything particularly wild or interesting, to my mind. Usually it just means that someone gets tied up, or maybe somebody licks someone else's foot. Nine-tenths of American mainstream porn is a pneumatically overbuilt woman bouncing up and down on the dick of a ridiculously overendowed man. Always was. Always will be, I bet.

God, you are boring.

Well, maybe not you personally. Most of my friends have deep veins of personal weirdness. But collectively, American tastes in pornography are highly unimaginative and thoroughly uninteresting.

The worrisome thing is that the boring porn will be the last to go. It's the safest, you see. It threatens the theocrats and bluenoses the least. It's innocuous. Meanwhile, those of us who like something that's actually interesting will be completely driven underground. This site will have to largely be taken down. DeviantArt, already hampered by their own bad choices, will finally succumb. AO3 will realize they can't keep their legal fund flush enough. All the small sites, all the furry sites and kink sites and so on, which are already acting as refuges now, will be hunted down one by one and exterminated. And then we'll have a long period before they get around to getting rid of the Clints and Brandys where there will be no other game in town. Just to add to the suffering.

If you're curious -- and I'm not sure why you'd have made it this deep into the essay if you weren't -- my taste in pornography, both in the stuff I consume and the stuff I write, tends to focus far more on the mental than the physical. The physical aspects of sex bore me, to be honest, and I'm also not good at writing them, as I said at the beginning. To me, getting in a particular state of mind is the sex scene -- the buildup is the fun part. When they actually get into the bed, the show's over and I bring down the curtain. It's not like I need to show you the rest anyway. There are a million ways to get horny, but there are only a tiny handful of ways to bump bodies together, and you know what all of them look like.

Often the only reason I put a sex scene into the comic-style stories at all is to make it clear "yes, they really did have sex," because I've learned it often does need to be spelled out. Sometimes I have a sex scene to show (and/or abuse) a power dynamic. This is particularly important in mind-control stories, as in "now I have you! come over here and lick my cunt, puppet!" There are very few other compelling reasons.

(And I've never gone out of my way to put sex in a story anyway; I put sex in if the story seems to demand it and I leave it out if it doesn't. Sometimes, if I think I need to write something where the sex or kink is the story, I'll do that, and these chunks of kinkfluff are always well received, especially by the people -- and there are many -- who think plot is a detriment to smut. Sometimes I think "OK, I haven't done kinkfluff in a while, let's go make some." But I have never given in to the urge to cram some sex into a story simply for audience-pleasing reasons -- though it undoubtedly would -- because that's simply not the way I want to work, and besides, I feel that that road leads to me just posting robotization or TG/forcefem images over and over because I know they always play well. The easy route. I am not known for taking it.)

There was one porn performer, not too many years ago, who did some scenarios which stood out in my mind because no one in the pros ever does things like that. There was a pig transformation, complete with prosthetic snout makeup applied at the appropriate time, and a weight-gain/ballooning one, and I think maybe a robotization one. I wonder sometimes what became of her, and if she made enough money from those specialty clips to justify their production. Mostly the people, like me, who are making specialized kink material know that they will never reach enough people to make any kind of money from it.

And if they did, the bluenoses wouldn't let them collect it.

Not everyone who rails against porn is a theocrat, or a bluenose, or a "think of the children" handwringer. Some people's gripe with porn is that it is an inescapable part of our culture -- yes, this despite all the attempts to crack down on it. And they have a point.

This is where the web works against us, because the web is what drove porn into ubiquity. Before the web, you had to go looking for porn. Ironically, these days, it's difficult to accidentally stumble onto porn on the web -- or is that just me because my circle of regular sites has gotten so small? But it's there. It's everywhere. As soon as you take a single step outside the more well-lit streets into the web's more shadowy alleys, you'll be surrounded by it.

Because my position is that pornography is intrinsically fantasy material, and always should be, and should never cross over into the real world at all, I do admit I find it disturbing that "porn values" now permeate advertising and dress and who-knows-what else. I mean, I'm about as far from a prude as one can be, yet I'm pretty sure that's a bad sign, especially since it means setting standards it might be impossible and/or undesirable to meet.

What I mean is, you don't want young women or men looking like porn stars, because it's an unrealistic standard. I don't want to say "an unrealistic standard of beauty," because porn stars (at least mainstream ones) do not, to my mind, usually look particularly beautiful. They look plastic. They look fake. Do we want to set a standard of looking fake? Is that really the way we want to go?

(I try to find reasonable limits here, though; for example, I dislike the idea of passing judgement on what people wear, because that road, it seems to me, leads straight to the theocrats and their Stepford wives, where we're measuring necklines for inappropriate plunge and policing hem lengths.)

More importantly, I think that mainstream porn sets a standard of sex that is nothing at all like actual sex ... and it's falling on a couple of generations of too-responsive eyeballs, kids who are unprepared for anything because they have spent their childhoods hermetically sealed in structured activities, or with their phones. They have done nothing freeform and unsupervised in their lives, they get no formal sex education and (usually) no parental advice on this, and thus when the web tells them "porn sex is what real sex looks like," they believe it.

You probably think I am exaggerating, but remember those men I mentioned above who have no idea how to actually interact with women? Some of these men are running the planet right now, you know. These incels and techbros, for whom women usually might as well be an alien species, formed their ideas not only of what sex is but what women should look like from porn ... specifically, boring mainstream porn ... and it shows. Oh, god, it shows. And these people are a real danger. They are causing active harm.

The problem is, I don't know what to do to fix that -- to get porn seepage out of our culture -- without the kind of ban that I really don't want for other reasons (e.g. did you actually read this essay?) I suspect the real answer is to bring back that nuance, that ability to tell good from bad. I say "bring back" but I'm not sure to what extent we ever, culturally, had it.

We need to be able to say not only "this porn good, this porn bad," but also "there is a time and place for everything and this ain't it." But to do that, we need more aware, engaged parents -- something we seem to not be very good at right now, collectively -- and we need better and more comprehensive sex education -- something we have historically always failed at miserably.

And, of course, we need to be able to keep the theocrats, bluenoses, fascists, etc far, far from any kind of power. Forever.

Will we succeed at that? It's October 2024 as I write this. Ask me for a revised prediction in a month or so.