OK. My interest in the politics of porn is related to its increasing legitimacy within mainstream popular culture. On talk radio (Howard Stern, Ron and Fez.com, e.g.), on MTV's Loveline, around rock bands (Insane Clown Posse, e.g.), on mainstream cable (The X Show), and elsewhere, it seems to be becoming legitimate to openly consume porn. And what the mainstream is legitimizing is pretty reprehensible in general. You say that porn runs the gamut from mob-financed mass pap to self-professed feminist fare. But what is largely being consumed? The mass pap or the SPFF? I don't follow porn closely, but my strong sense from working briefly at Video Shack in NY in the early 80s (at the time the largest video store in Manhattan), watching some videos, looking at the covers of others, scanning through some of the online reviews of porn, and just taking note of what's said about it in the mainstream media, is that the bulk of what is consumed is, as I said before, largely about men taking incredibly one-sided pleasure at the expense of women. Tell me, what is not political about the fact that mass-marketed porn movies seem to privilege a man coming on a woman's face? Or about the extraordinary prevalence of anal sex ("great wailing walls of glossy video" devoted to it, as Hitchens puts it in his Harper's review of Podhoretz's book)? When I hear Howard Stern ask his female guests in his pathetically leering way whether she's "into anal," and then hear the replies of uncomfortable silence or demurral, I see mass porn's aggressively one-sided approach to pleasure legitimized in the mainstream in a more direct way than ever before. I heard the same thing when Ron (of Ron and Fez.com, generally a show I find amusing) said during an on air conversation with his female producer that he could only watch porn that had "anals and facials," a comment that seemed to silence the woman (at least for that part of the conversation). How many women do you know like to have de rigeur anal sex and end with semen landing on their face? I'd guess that the viciousness of contemporary mass porn is a sort of compensation for the destabilizing of male social privilege in recent years and is related to the weakening of the feminist movement.
A bit vaguely, I recall an article by Mark Dery in the Village Voice a few years ago that noted the increasing pop culture focus on anality ("Dumb and Dumber" etc). Through a reading of Bataille he suggested that this could be a sign of healthy subversion of the social order, but he also left open the possibility that this could have regressive implications. I opt for the latter. The aggressively one-sided nature of the sex I've seen in mass porn alienates people from consensual sexuality I think and generally serves, more brutally than ever, to marginalize women's pleasure and bolster men's (and it strips the asshole of its Bataillean potential!).
Still, I am not for forbidding it. But I am against it.
Uday