One Thing I Learned Today

I think this is the third week that Snuff has been on the New York Times bestseller list. Meanwhile, The Garden of Last Days is looking to fall off the list after, like, one week. Lesson learned: If you want to write a bestseller, write about a gangbang, not strippers.

Peek-a-Book Porn

I love this post. Man goes to local Goodwill in Booksboro, Georgia. An online bookseller, man is browsing books section when woman comes over, starts asking questions, states she has a book collection at home a few blocks away. Man follows woman home, surveys woman's books, concludes they suck, but buys them anyway, $15 for the lot of 100. Man gets home, picks up book near the bottom of box, book makes strange noise. Man opens book, which appears to be a copy of The Caine Mutiny, and discovers a stack of pornographic Polaroids stashed in a hole cut into the middle of the book.

"I've now gone through all the boxes and looked at all the books and a surprising number of them have been hollowed out with Polaroids stashed inside. The women depicted are varied (ethnically and size-wise) and the pictures range from softcore to extreme hardcore. Some of the images are very bizarre, at times grotesque."

I wonder if MoSex would be interested. (via Kottke)

Big Penis Party

Tomorrow night, Taschen and Coco de Mer are hosting a launch party for The Big Penis Book. Balk asked me if I wanted to cover the event for Radar Online, but I said I couldn't, which is tragic, really. After all, this isn't just a book about penises, it's about style: "...the big penis never goes out of fashion." Editor Dian Hanson discusses the book and big penises. I'm thinking it's for the ladies and the gays.

Ron Jeremy v. His Ghostwriter, Round Two

Ron Jeremy responds to the Great Porn Ghostwriter Debate:

"He says people only care about who I fucked. All I’m saying is people care about furry puppies more than my dick. So, how about a chapter on my work with PETA?"

Considering how many people visit this blog every day while searching "ron jeremy penis," I'm dubious about that point.

Judith Regan, My Hero

Yesterday, I wrote a post about recently deposed HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman being a douchebag and literary lightning rod Judith Regan publishing books about sex.

"While Friedman's archenemy Judith Regan was no princess, at least she had the balls to publish daring books about sex, even if they weren't all very good. Friedman, on the other hand, remained the Erica Jong of publishing. Unable to get over whatever fantasy of power she believed she had at the dawn of the feminist revolution all those decades ago, in today's climate of sex-sex-sex, Friedman was nothing but a bore, a literary erection killer, everything Regan wasn't."

And then I got an email from Judith Regan.

"Actually most of the sex books I published were fabulous, even the ones Jane Friedman cancelled.
SEX TIPS FOR STRAIGHT WOMEN FROM A GAY MAN
SHE COMES FIRST
HE COMES NEXT
THE SURRENDER
HOW TO MAKE LOVE LIKE A PORN STAR (a cautionary tale) and much maligned and misrepresented by the media
Many burlesque art books and so much more…which titles did you find poorly done…just curious.

Keep up the good work and listen to my radio show on SIRIUS STARS 102 every Wednesday."

My work here is done.

Ceci N'Est Pas L'Écriture Féminine

Charles McGrath hangs around with Andre Dubus III (House of Sand and Fog) who hangs around at some strip clubs in Florida to write some novel that reads like thong-heavy pulp.

"Eventually Mr. Dubus decided that he needed to visit clubs in Florida. He thought it would be helpful to see the Florida light, to feel what Florida was like. So he bought some plane tickets, rented a convertible and enlisted his brother and best friend from high school — because they are big guys whom nobody messes with. To finance the expedition he raided some money that he had set aside from a Guggenheim grant he won in 2001. 'At first I thought, I have a Guggenheim for just this kind of thing — research,' he said. 'And then I thought, "This can’t possibly be appropriate."' But he went anyway, after what he recalls as a somewhat awkward conversation with his wife. 'Honey, I need to go to Florida and I need to see some strip clubs.'"

(Image via Autumn.)

The Story of X

Rachel Kramer Bussel points to a new Chronicle book forthcoming from Susie Bright, X: The Erotic Treasury, a collection of erotica that includes stories by Robert Olen Butler and Carol Queen.

I love the cover.

"Designed in a 'gotta-touch-it' slipcase with a cloth-covered book, the package cultivates the quality and taboo satisfaction of the ­stories themselves."

Phonesex Coming Soon

Coolhunting reports photographer Phillip Toledano has a new book coming out from Twin Palms: Phonesex. For the project, Toledano shot thirty phone sex operators to reveal the real people behind the voices.

"Phone-sex is theater," Toledano writes. "An artificial passion-play in real-time, directed by a skilled verbal fantasist, with only one possible conclusion."

Each photo is accompanied by the phone sex operator's words, giving a peek inside what it's like to talk dirty for a living. The woman pictured here offers: "I'm Scheherezade. If I don't tell stories that fascinate the Pasha, he will kill me in the morning."

New York Times Trashes Snuff

I'd wondered if the New York Times would review Chuck Palahniuk's new novel, Snuff; I thought they might but figured they wouldn't because of the provocative nature of the content. But, so they did, with a masterful, eviscerating take down by Lucy Ellmann.

"Revulsion is expressed indiscriminately: Palahniuk is contemptuous of everything and everybody! Including, I suspect, us. The people in this novel don’t merely speak in clichés, their every action is clichéd. It’s as if, like some grumpy groundhog, Palahniuk has come out of his burrow only to tell us he has nothing to say — unless it’s that porn has ruined sex. But we knew that already."

My review and further thoughts.

Best Selling Porn Scribe Bites Back

Earlier today, New York's culture blog, Vulture, ran an item about running into porn legend Ron Jeremy at BookExpo America. Jeremy expounded at length upon his best-selling autobiography, Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz, now in paperback, particularly that it was a bestseller.

Jeremy opines book publishing is a harder business to understand than porn, declares he beat Jenna Jameson in European book sales, and disses his ghostwriter: "[Jenna Jameson] gets Neil Strauss, and I get Eric Spitznagel. He got a lot of stuff wrong. We were delayed by one year, the things he got wrong."

Spitznagel is a Reverse Cowgirl pal, so I shot him on email on the matter. His response follows.

"I don't recall the book being delayed for a year because of factual errors. From my memory, it was delayed because Ron was too busy hosting wet t-shirt contests and signing tits at strip clubs to meet with his ghostwriter. He was also unamused that I decided to write the book rather than, say, just transcribe his long, rambling monologues word for word, directly from the tape.

I do remember that he wasn't pleased with my first draft. He thought my version of events placed a little too much emphasis on his porn career.

'Every page is just sex, sex, sex,' he yelled at me. 'Why does it all have to be about sex?'

'Well, you're a porn star, Ron," I reminded him. 'I'm pretty sure that's what people are expecting.'

'What about my work with PETA?' He suggested. 'Can't we include a chapter about that?'

'Unless you fucked a sheep, I don't think anybody cares.'

I sincerely apologize to Ron for not being Neil Strauss. But honestly, I suspect that even Strauss would've been flummoxed with instructions like 'less stories about the Golden Age of porn, more stories about hanging out with Mickey Rourke and Frank Stallone.' I stand by my decisions, even if they weren't popular at the time. If I didn't argue with Ron, there would've been no mention of his ability to self-fellate, or that he was once involved in a 14 women gangbang and somehow didn't have a heart attack. Instead, the book would've had at least sixteen more stories about how Slash is a close, personal friend of his and, like, totally respects him. Ron may feel like he was shafted, but I like to believe I made the world a better place."

Headline of the Day

"Breslin Stiffs Palahniuk's Snuff." -- Trevor Dodge

The Girl With The Golden Vagina

It looks like a tell-all by Natalie McLennan, better known as the $2,000 an hour escort featured in New York's now infamous "New York's #1 Escort Reveals All" cover story, is set to be published this fall.

The Price: My Life as Natalia, New York's $2,000-An-Hour Escort is due to arrive in bookstores on October 1, and the publisher is Phoenix Books, making Natalie/Natalia's publishing mates with Gene Simmons and Larry Flynt. Uh, congratulations? I, for one, would rather see a book like this only far, far better written by somebody else. You know who are, woman.

Where's Judith Regan when you need her, indeed? I wish the mainstream book publishing industry would start publishing books by sex workers who can really write, dammit.

Congratulations, LA Times. You Are Retarded. [Updated] [And Updated Again]

The other day, a writer for the LA Times interviewed me for a story about a new book by Melanie Abrams, the wife of novelist Vikram Chandra--both teach at my alma mater--and the author of Playing, a novel in which the central character explores her inner-submissive by getting spanked. I wouldn't have known the book existed, but this journalist was calling to ask me about it, so I weighed in with some commentary about how nobody writes about sex in literature--except, you know, for the time Joyce called his wife "fuckbird." I yammered on about not liking erotica, said this book looked like erotica with a pedigree to me, and pondered the pending cultural significance of Snuff. The piece, "Literary Fiction Gets Kinky," ran in the paper today, and they got the URL of my blog wrong. They directed LA Times readers to ReverseCowgirl.com, which redirects to Condom Country. I just really hope that someone buys the Trojan Her Pleasure Vibrating Touch Massager because of me. While several other sites run by so-called sex writers were linked to not only correctly but directly in the article, my blog was not, continuing a legendary history of such incidents that began years ago with MSNBC.com and, I thought, had ended recently with Time.com. I'm not surprised, and the bottom line is that I don't really care, but it underscores that when it comes to publishing and sex, they never get it right. In other news, Bookslut Jessa Crispin attended the London Book Fair and wrote a very funny piece about what happens when people who write try and get sexy.

Update: So, later I went back to the LA Times website to see if they'd corrected the URL. And they had. They'd even linked it. To a new wrong URL. The link goes to ReverseCowgirl.blogspot.com, which would be great if you were looking for a fake blog entitled "Florida Lifestyle," filled with non sequitors and written by "faizal." Sigh.

Update #2: The link has been fixed. Hello, Hollywood. You're hot.

We are gathered here together in the conference center at 9:30 a.m. to “start a conversation on how to make publishing sexy.” At least that is how the London Book Fair Daily explains a panel titled “The Publishers Association Keynote: The Value of Publishing to Society.” And when the panelists shuffle in — some government wonks, a physicist, and the head of Random House, the least sexy conglomerate publisher I can think of — it’s clear I should have gone to the panel on the Romanian book market instead.

Fuck You, Creative Process, I Win

Today was the first day since I started working on Happy, my novel-in-progress based on my experiences in Porn Valley, blah-fucking-blah, where I was stumped, stucked, whatevered. I did a lot of writhing and procrastinating, surfing the interneting and eating of potato salading, self-hating and then finally lying on my bed with my head stuck in my pillow, imagining myself into the head of my main character until I finally had some idea of where I could start with it. Time is not something I have a lot of due to other obligations, so I wanted to, you know, get with the fucking program and also not have to spend the night tossing and turning and wondering what the hell is wrong with me for the 45th time. I was trying to make a point here, but I have practically forgotten it. I wrote anyway, and it was OK, and then I got something good at the end that I wasn't expecting. Wow, that was my point? How anticlimactic. I think it seemed more interesting when I read this afterwards via Boing Boing. It's COOP writing about what happens when the art gets away from you and becomes something else altogether, something better. ("I felt like a safe cracker, listening through a stethoscope as the tumblers fell behind the steel door, locks clanking open to reveal...") By way of another example, you can see the creative process at play on the page in the image above, as well, which is from Graham Rawle's collagist Woman's World. ("I decided on Mr. Hands for my antagonist because the word hands is easy to come by in adverts for nail polish, soap powders, and the like. The name also describes his licentious, groping nature.") And here's Rutger Hauer talking about improvising tears in the rain. ("I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.") Art will make you believe in God, dammit, because how else can you fucking explain it? Chance? Fate? Destiny? At the end of my scene, I wrote something unexpected. As I wrote, the words written on the man I was writing about began to shift, to writhe, to move. Maybe this pornographer is the story itself, and the story I'm writing is one in which pornography comes to life.

Win a Free Copy of Best Erotic Comics 2008

[Update: I have picked a winner. Details are forthcoming shortly.]
Today, I got my contributor's copy of Best Erotic Comics 2008 in the mail. I heard the UPS guy leave it on the front porch with a thump. Then I went down and got it. It looks great, and it's very big. It was strange to see my comic, "My, My American Bukkake," in print and so large. This is, in fact, the third time this comic has appeared in print. Previously, it appeared in Dirty Stories Volume 3 and Headpress 23. Now, here it is again. The second installment, "My, My American Bukake Too," lives on Artbomb. As I wrote once upon a time, bukkake never dies. In any case, Best Erotic Comics 2008 includes works by Phoebe Gloeckner, Dan Clowes, and Gilbert Hernandez, so being included was an honor. Far and away, I must say, my favorite contribution was by Cephalopod Products. A long time ago, I got to know Mr. Cephalopod, and he, out of the blue, as I recall it, sent me a package of his work in the mail. It's insane, his work--so obscene that it's beautiful. And I respect that. In this anthology, he's got a terrific piece called "Is Pornography Bad for You?" that I love. Generally speaking, this book is dir-ty. Lots of things going into things and substances rocketing and bodily orifices yawning. Not for the faint of heart. In any case, Last Gasp and the book's editor, Greta Christina, were kind enough to send me two copies of the book. Would you like to have one? If you would like to have your own personal copy of Best Erotic Comics 2008 to have and to hold, you are 18 or older, and you live in the US, send me an email telling me why you deserve it. I don't care how you do it--be creative, robotic, or psychotic--and the best reply will get a copy. Right now, it's wrapped in plastic wrap, so I could send it like that, or I could sign it, if you like. Inspired, I was, so I created a new panel for the third installment of the "My, My American Bukkake" comic series: "My, My American Bukkake... Never Ends." I hadn't worked on it for a while. It was a good time. The fact of the matter is that I'm not a very good artist. I can't draw, and I don't even know how to Photoshop very well. But with art, for me, it's different. I don't really give a shit. Writing, of course, is another story. Speaking of stories, I spent quite a bit of time today working on the essay I posted about yesterday. It's coming along well. Clocking in at 3,000 words for this rough draft, I estimate it will be 5,000 words when done in, I hope, the not so distant future.

Your Filthy Mind: Review: Beautiful Children

Today, I am starting a new series of reviews, Your Filthy Mind, in which I will review books, but I will only bother reading the filthy parts. Actually, I have no idea if I will ever do this again. So, there's that. A few weeks ago, I read something somewhere that said you could download a copy of Beautiful Children online for free. (Too late for you! You can't download it for free anymore. Oh, well.) Generally, I don't even bother reading books anymore because I have read too many already. For this one, I made an exception, minorly because everyone said it was totally great, and majorly because I read one of the characters was a porn star. This year will see a bevy of porn stars in starring literary roles, from Beautiful Children to Money Shot to Snuff. Why? Who the hell knows. Maybe "A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction." Perhaps "pornography could be a superstitious offering to the gods of a dying race." Or because "Porno is the unconsciousness of culture, the libido of humanity." Increasingly as of late, I am starting to feel that porn is the defining medium of our culture, but, hey, that's just me, and what the hell do I know? At the same time, I'm also interested in how people read online versus in print, and I was vaguely curious to know if reading a book in PDF form would be different from reading a book in... book form. Apparently, it was; this time around, at least. It made me have less respect for the book, which I felt guilty about for about two seconds, seeing as I'd read that Bock had spent, like, a decade writing the book, and, well, I respect that for reasons some of you who read this blog on a regular basis may understand. Anyhoo, back to the book. Or the PDF. Or the thing that was on my computer. While I had read both the profile of Bock in the New York Times Magazine and the review in the New York Times, I got bored with the book about halfway down the first page, literally. I idly wondered how many pages the book was, something I would have been able to intuit immediately if I'd had the thing in my sticky hands, but I couldn't instantaneously tell how long the book was from my PDF file because I'm slow like that. Also, "Wedding Crashers" was playing in the background and I hadn't really seen it before and I was vaguely curious as to what all the hullabaloo was about and what kind of chick had gotten knocked up by Borat. So, I started skimming by the time I got to the bottom of the first page. Sorry, Chuck! Then I realized pretty quick that I was only interested in how the author had depicted a porn star. Because I have known some porn stars. And I mean that in the purely non-Biblical sense. (Sorry, lesbian enthusiasts!) I wasn't sure how much porn stuff would be in the book because the stuff I'd read about the book hadn't really said. I figured it wouldn't be a lot. Just enough to make you want to buy the book. You know, for the porn. The first mention of Cheri Blossom was found on page 110. At this point, she's a stripper with a special trick. She's got fake boobs that make it so she can light her nipples like candles. (One time, I saw a really awesome stripper at Jumbo's Clown Room do a fire routine. It was awesome. No, it was not Courtney Love.) I frowned somewhat on Bock's idea of a porn star name, as Cheri Blossom is kinda corny, and I thought the name he picked for the strip club where she works, the Slinky Fox, was kinda corny too, but whatever. Anyway, Bock's depiction of Cheri is OK. The part of her he gets right is how she sees herself in her mind's eye as starring in a movie of her own making. This is the way she dissociates from her less than glamorous reality. At the same time, Bock can't really get over the, um, hump of being a man writing about a woman, falling into sort of viewing her as an object, a thing, a sex machine. I do believe, though, that Bock had some lap dances as part of his "research." Kudos on that part, Bock. The other grosser half of Cheri's character is her loser, wannabe suitcase pimp, punk, gross, nasty boyfriend Ponyboy. Again, I thought Ponyboy was kind of a weird name choice, as for me there will only be one Ponyboy. (Stay gold, people!) Anyway, there's a lot of pages about Cheri writhing around and taking off her clothes and dry humping guys and setting her tits on fire. If you like that sort of thing, you will enjoy Beautiful Children. (Do you think that quote will appear on the back of the paperback edition? I hope so.) So, nothing else much interesting that I can remember happens with Cheri until Ponyboy gets this idea to put her in a porn movie. Because porn movies are like the area of my expertise, I thought, wow, this is my chance to really see what Bock has got to offer. The producer porn guy was named Jabba, as in the Hutt, who I saw on TV earlier today, as I was watching some A&E special on "Star Wars" for reasons I will never be able to explain, especially because I don't really like "Star Wars" or any of the sequels, although Jabba was an awesome kind of guy. If you want to forget the whole rest of the book but the porn part, I recommend skipping to page 304 because that's when it starts. Yeah, I left out 200 pages of this book. But can I be all things to all people? I think not. The porn movie that Cheri's love sets her up to do takes place in some skank motel near the airport in Vegas. The whole novel takes place in Vegas. Bock grew up there. All the critics make a big deal about this. Duly noted here. The porn scene is interesting and, well, true because it's pretty gross and generally uncomfortable. There's another ill-named individual in this scene: Rod Erectile. I would like to say that male porn star names may be of the penis (take, for example, Arnold Schwartzenpecker), but they are not about erections. Read Susan Faludi's "Waiting for Wood" if you want to know how anxiety producing erection discussions are on porn sets. Anyway, Rod has what is referred to as "five-pound cock," which is, well, a lot of cock. (By the way, for the last several weeks, one of the most common search engine phrases that brings readers to this site is "ron jeremy penis." Can someone explain this? What are you people looking for? I do not have Ron Jeremy's penis, if that helps illuminate the situation for you. Although, I did see him perform once. Live. And in person. In Mexico. On a porn star vacation. People paid to hang out with porn stars. There were a lot of hookers there, too. And some guy who won Howard Stern's smallest penis competition. Ron's chest hair had been waxed into the shape of a heart. He was not a five-pounder. To that I can attest.) Then, there's, like 40 pages of other stuff, so you have to skip ahead to page 344 to get to the porn scene itself. Like I said, it's all kind of weird, and gross, but, hey, that's behind the scenes on a porn set for you. Basically, Cheri said she'd do the scene as long as she got to do it with her boyfriend, Ponyboy. In the moment, it turned out she's supposed to do Ron. So, everyone gets all nervous and freaked out. Here are a few moments when Bock gets it right. As the camera turns on her, Cheri is described as "A woman taking in exactly what had been said to her, precisely what was happening, not only the ridiculousness, but how scary the vibe was, how predatory." (This is not what it's like on all porn sets, but it is what it's like on some porn sets. This is what it was like when I was on the set of "The World's Biggest Gang Bang III." There were a lot of guys there, and there was a moment after it started that is hard to describe, when the tone in the room shifted, and the men got a little primitive, and the whole thing got a little dangerous. Of course, by that point, for the girl, it's in for a penny, in for a pound. There is no turning back, no matter how daunting the task.) After that, !spoilers!, Rod goes limp, shoves Cheri, and injects his penis with some Insta-Erect. Around page 362, Cheri kind of gives up spiritually, and balks at the entire porn affair. Ponyboy observes: "...Jabba was talking to Cheri, explaining the way the porn business works. And at first glance Cheri looked like she was following every word; but, really, Ponyboy could tell she was somewhere else. In fact, ever so slowly, Cheri was, like, inching down the wall, her skin making this sick sound against the wallpaper." I liked that part. At which point Ponyboy, a total scumbag, jumps in and saves her. Which is pretty ridiculous. Because life in porn is like life in the jungle, and nobody saves you. After that, Ponyboy has lost his girl. What a dumb ass. "Every one of those sinners, out here in the night, standing in Ponyboy's way, talking, watching the band, tripping out, zoning, whatever the fuck, all of them looking for something that might sustain them, that might keep them going the way that a cold hard motherfucker was sustained by the voice of the girl he loves, by the feeling that he was the most special and important person in the world to her. This is what any strong relationship provides, allowing a human being to survive in this miserable and fucked-up world. You fuck that up, all bets are off." Porn is love's Grim Reaper. In the end, we don't know what happens to Cheri. I guess it's hard to say. Generally, I would say Bock gets an A for effort in terms of trying to get the porn right--in the acknowledgments, he thanks "Certain people in the world of adult entertainment [who] were kind enough to take me into their clubs and onto their sets"--but I would say it's hard for a guy to get inside the mind of a porn starlet. He can see the fissures, but what he can't really get is the break. In the end, Beautiful Children declares Ponyboy too far gone to save, but what about the porn starlet? Maybe some of us spend the rest of our lives recovering.

Best Sex Writing 2009 Call for Submissions

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Never Send a Human to Do a Machine's Job

This weekend, I bought and read a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. It's a terrific book, and I highly recommend it. In it, Ehrenreich undertakes a series of low-wage jobs in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota to find out what it's really like to be one of the working poor. She works as a waitress in Florida, a maid in Maine, and a Wal-Mart employee in Minnesota. This is embedded journalism of the not-so-glamorous kind, but the tenacity with which Ehrenreich tackles the Herculean tasks before her and the biting humor of her tales from her days spent walking the poverty-line tightrope are riveting and moving. To boot, Ehrenreich was in her 50s when she undertook this endeavor. If you've ever worked the grueling hours of a waitressing job, you can't help but be impressed. While the stunt memoir has become one more trend in book publishing as of late, there's something, in spite of all that, particularly powerful, if done right, about the experiences of those writers who dare immerse themselves so deeply in their stories. Escaping unscathed and unchanged is impossible. The best case scenarios is that the story bleeds. For those writers, their stories are like the mob. Just when you think you're out, you're pulled back in.

Who are these nutcases who would volunteer for an artificially daunting situation in order to entertain millions of strangers with their half-assed efforts to survive? -- Nickel and Dimed

The First Thing You Should Know About Me Is That I'm a Whore

On the (hooker) heels of Wednesday's post, in which I asserted whores are the new black, blogger Clay Hornik sent a link to the first episode of "The Secret Diary of a Call Girl," a UK TV show based on the blog-turned-book Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl. The star of the series is Billie Piper, who's better known as Rose Tyler from "Doctor Who." I watched the show and liked it. It's smart, and funny, and a little risqué. You know you're in a different kind of territory when the main character says "fuck" in the first few minutes, gives a to-camera look straight out of "The Office" while masturbating with a purple vibrator, and concludes the show by riding a guy who likes like Austin Powers in a saddle. Sometimes, the show ventures into "Red Shoe Diaries"-land, but, for the most part, it focuses on what it's like to be a modern woman for whom the line between being a whore in bed and a dominatrix at work is becoming ever blurrier. I'm curious to hear what College Callgirl, America's Belle, thinks of it.

The Book of Porn

Want to read a book about porn? These are your choices. There's the celebrity twist: How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale and Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz. There's the right-wing polemics: Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families and Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism is Corrupting our Future. There's the academics: XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography and Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. There's the anti-porn feminists: Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture and Pornography: Men Possessing Women. There's the photographs: The Valley and XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits. There's oral history: The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. There's an autobiography: Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine. Where's the book that's about the porn industry, that reveals why Americans watch pornography, that tells the true story of porn at the dawn of the 21st century? I don't know. It's a mystery.

Perhaps it's that buried under all the nervous stereotypes of pimply teenagers, furtive perverts in raincoats, and anti-social compulsively masturbating misfits, is a sneaking recognition that pornography isn't just an individual predilection: pornography is central to our culture. It's not just its immense popularity -- although estimates put its sales at over eleven billion dollars a year. It's that pornography is revealing. It exposes the culture to itself. Pornography, it might be argued, is the royal road to the cultural psyche (as for Freud, dreams were the route to the unconscious).

So the question is, if you put it on the couch and let it free-associate, what is it really saying? What are the inner tensions and unconscious conflicts that propel its narratives?

When writing about the pornography of the past, whether visual or literary, scholars and art historians routinely discover allegorical meanings within it, even political significance. Historians have made the case that modern pornography (up until around the 19th century) operated as a form of social criticism, a vehicle for attacking officialdom, which responded, predictably, by attempting to suppress it. Pornography was defined less by its content, than by the efforts of those in power to eliminate it and the social agendas it transported.

Despite knowing this, it's difficult to envision contemporary pornography as a form of culture or as a mode of politics. There's virtually no discussion of pornography as an expressive medium in the positive sense -- the only expressing it's presumed to do is of misogyny or social decay. That it might have more complicated social agendas, or that future historians of the genre might produce interesting insights about pornography's relation to this particular historical and social moment -- these are radically unthought thoughts.

I've proposed that pornography is best understood as a form of cultural expression. It is a fictional, fantastical, even allegorical realm; it neither reflects the real world, nor is it some hypnotizing call to action. The world of pornography is mythological and hyperbolic, peopled by fictional characters. It doesn't and never will exist. But what it does do is to insist on a sanctioned space for fantasy. And this is the basis of so much of the controversy it engenders, because pornography has a talent for making its particular fantasies look like dangerous, socially destabilizing things.

Like any other popular culture genre (like sci-fi, romance, mystery, true crime), pornography obeys certain rules, and its primary rule is transgression. Like your boorish cousin, its greatest pleasure is to locate each and every one of a society's taboos, prohibitions, and proprieties, and systematically transgress them, one by one.

Pornography manages to penetrate to the marrow of who we are as a culture and as psyches. As avant-garde artists knew, transgression is no simple thing: it's a precisely calculated intellectual endeavor. It means knowing the culture inside out, discerning its secret shames and grubby secrets, how to best humiliate it, knock it off its prim perch. A culture's pornography becomes, in effect, a precise map of that culture's borders: pornography begins at the edge of the culture's decorum. Carefully tracing that edge, like an anthropologist mapping a culture's system of taboos and myths, provides a detailed blueprint of the culture's anxieties, investments, contradictions. And a culture's borders, whether geographical or psychological, are inevitably political questions.

Pornography is thus a form of political theater. It's a medium for confronting audiences with exactly those contents that are exiled from sanctioned speech, mainstream culture and political discourse. And that encompasses more than sex. --Laura Kipnis