Yale Daily News

I would add the acculturation of erotic anonymity to your concerns about the impact of Internet porn and porn consumption in general. As a male who discovered sexuality through the lens of pornographic media, I can attest to the long-term implications for intimacy. For those of us who grew up internalizing porn as didactic theater, anonymity is synonymous with pleasure.

This is a moderately accurate critique of porn today w/ limited utility for those interested in making it less toxic. Studios are already required to verify models' ages and keep their records on file. As for fair wages, are any of the models making less than minimum wage? Many do quite well. It's up to each individual to negotiate what she'll accept for any given scene. Charging a government agency with monitoring models' health and potential abuse is too broad and unrealistic (we have enough trouble keeping up with clergy, teachers, and coaches), especially now that so much of it is decentralized. An agency couldn't go to a dozen studios anymore to track this--there are thousands of purveyors, many of whom are not in the U.S. and wouldn't be subject to our laws anyway.

Some performers have in fact contracted HIV, but considering the number of annual contacts, infection is remarkably rare, well under what's seen in the general population. Testing is scrupulous, and more big producers are requiring or at least encouraging condom use.

The increasing perversity of porn in general is disturbing, and it's difficult to know how free the participants were to consent to those acts. But that can also be difficult to discern from the images on screen. People like being dominant and submissive during sex, and assuming one role or the other doesn't prove their consent or objection. The commentary above identifies porn as misogynistic, but one can also find gentle couples porn, porn with women in dominant and/or abusive roles, gay and lesbian porn, transgender porn, and everything in between. It isn't one thing, and any critique needs to both acknowledge that and specify which types it's referring to.

We all are indeed influenced by what we see, hear, or read about in porn--and in some negative ways--but it's not a one-way street. This is a continuous feedback loop. Depictions of certain acts inherently sell well. I promise you that men wanted to push women's heads down, come on their faces, and have anal sex with them long before Edison invented the moving picture, and also that there were women who enjoyed multiple penetrations and being restrained. Porn, obvious as it is to say, did not create "perverted" sex. In this sense it reflects and helps satisfy our deepest fantasies, which more than likely would otherwise go unfulfilled, in a safe way, with minimal impact.

Criticizing porn for being unrealistic is entirely beside the point. We don't pay for what we already have. The solution is not to shoot ho-hum missionary sex with average-looking partners, any more than romance novels ought to feature doughy, uncommunicative men who are faithful to their wives and watch a lot of sports. Porn, in its messy, disreputable way, brings our taboo desires out into the open and compels us to react to them--whether that's by discussing, criticizing, masturbating, or laughing at the shocking diversity and intensity of human desire. That, I would equivocally argue, can be a very good thing.