IN PRAISE OF PORNOGRAPHY (C)1995 Alan M. Schwartz Pornography is simply defined. Pornography is that which elicits tumescence - hot, wet, scented, burning, delicious tumescence. Catherine Mackinnen and Andrea Dworkin are self-proclaimed custodians of radical lesbian realpolitik. They make their careers of squawking at others' delights. Their belligerent dialectic is wrought of obese women and politically correct hirsutism. It hucksters rubes and suckles government grants. Pornography is a splendid tool for bestowing political and social coercion, if such perversion is your livelihood. I prefer pleasure. Frank Zappa knew pornography: "Just get me wasted and you're half way there, 'cause when my mind's tore up then my body don't care." How many of your lovers ever knew your ears, neck, the underside of your breasts, your nipples, belly, thighs; your lips, your entrance, your anus (or your perineum, scrotum, shaft, frenulum) and on and on and on until "your mind's tore up and your body don't care?" Enclose that in a sensual context, publish it in a book or as a movie, put it on audio tape or sculpt it, paint it or photograph it, capture its smell or taste, do whatever you have to do to make me ache with lust. Pornography! Yes! People are not demeaned by accepting remarkable sums of money to spread their legs before a photographer. Women are not liberated for allowing their underarms and legs [and upper lips] to grow hair (naughty in Japan; sexy in Mexico) or for removing their pubic hair (but never in Playboy). Rites of passage like buzz cuts or shaved heads, piercing, branding, tattooing and even fisting may set celebrants apart, or lose them in the crowd. Sex is the exercise of power. When millions of men masturbate to some toothsome bimbo's Hustler pictorial, who goes to the laundromat and who goes to the bank? I will not deny that women are exploited as mere body parts. Vice laws, the constabulary and the courts conspire to siphon off their earnings. Go to a Happy Hour and watch a lady cast bait by running her hands over her buttocks. Imagine what she can do with her brain. It is no tragedy that men are driven by fantasy and lustful frenzy borne of a peek at a taught nipple. Pornography is not obscene when a person can spread cheeks, be reduced to an orifice, and earn in an hour a day's wages. Pornography is not obscene for tits and ass and shiny tongues. Pornography is obscene because Larry Flynt is scorchingly wealthy and his models are poor. Pornography is obscene when whores die of AIDS while pimps feed on them. Pornography is obscene if an inconsequential Canadian hole in the wall called Little Sister's Bookstore is $100,000 into legal fees to defend its business against Ottawa censors, while the streets of Ottawa bristle with strip joints catering to those same censors' lurid sexuality. Pornography is obscene not because it reduces people to body parts, but because they are valueless to themselves while others reap the benefits of their display. Each year Canada sets aside 06 December as a day to wallow in the bathos of fourteen Ecole Polytechnique women admitted to an engineering program for their gender, and murdered in the classroom by an enraged man tossed out for lack of space. They died squalidly because not a one of them hazarded her life to escape, or to bring the rogue down. Why are their deaths mourned? Why are they not reviled for their stupidity as willing victims? Militant feminist rhetoric is a whining disavowal of being the Bottom. Without a steady supply of victims it withers of its own stridency. Ownership is the ability to destroy. Where is the call for being owners instead of the owned? Pornography will not succumb to "Take Back the Night" or 120 kg. lesbians bellowing about their more shapely sisters' meal ticket. Pornography touches something very deep within the human psyche, bringing forth powerful ambrosial response. Control over pornography means owning its infrastructure and profits . A cadre of prosperous female pornographers is a solution - assuming there is a problem (certainly not in the content; possibly in the mechanism). Sexual pleasure exists in all but infinite abundance, wanting only skilled and adventuresome participants. Our intelligence and material wealth render us heirs to the most varied, intense and sustained ecstasies - at will. Then, sated, we go on to do other things. I don't have a problem with that, either as participant or voyeur.