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.