Here's a more interesting suggestion: read Laura Kipnis' Bound & Gagged -- I know that Doug doesn't like LK personally, but I think she's brilliant -- which is a genuinely creative examination of what counts as porn (which is not obvious) and what function it serves in society. Her class analysis of Hustler (yes!) as a liberatory (!) enterprise is especially interesting, real ice cold water in the faces of the PC crowd and the MacDworkinites. Of course this is from a woman who wrote a book defending adultery, so she's high on the shock value scale.
Porn is a huge industry, as has been pointed out. That suggested that a lot of its conditions of production and much of the product is going to be, like with any huge industry, industrial and lowest-common-denominator. Not all industrial product is bad, btw.
Still, it's real easy, as McDworkinism shows, to slide from worry about alienated, exploited labor and low-grade production into simple puritanical anti-sex mentalities that are so prevalant in our society, or into contempt for deviant sexual practices. On the left it is tabu to be prejudiced against gays, but as people's reaction to Brian's open defense of BDSM shows, it's not hard to scratch a leftist and find a prude. With porn, I think we really need analysis and thought about its effects and functions and roles rather than simnple condemnation.
To tie this discussion back to our earlier one about sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, Posner suggests an ES/SB explanation for why porn is "misogynistic" -- by which I mean here that the typical porn film shows pretty and typically young women with unlimited sexual desire and as much willingness of indulge it as men generally have, without the usual transaction costs of courtship or the commitment to stay. THe explanation has a number of dimensions, but P's point is that such porn should not be taken as propaganda for the idea that women are or should be the way they are depicted in pornography, much less that it makes men treat them as if they were (try it and you'll learn pretty quick).
I am being deliberately cryptic here to encourage some research and thought rather than knee-jerk reactions.
jks
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