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The pro-porn rebuttal to that opinion has already been made very competently by Nina Hartley and others.

To summarize it, pornography is good because it gives outlet
to things — to fantasies it would be inconvenient for us to pursue in our real lives, and also to impulses which might, if indulged, jeopardize our standing in the community. Both factors apply to both genders.

As an ideological supporter of porn, it gave me personal pause to find myself in disagreement with intelligent women on so important a question. It also forced me to visit the commitment I have made to pornography, which would have to be nullified if I became convinced porn was actually bad for women. Suffice it to say, I don’t believe it is harmful.

This is a critical time for pornography. Significant censorship is quite possible. And I’m afraid the business-as-usual defenses of long historical success are going to cave next time they are tested.

I’m convinced that when push comes to shove, to win, to really WIN — not merely to scrape by with a technical legal victory — we have to make a case on merits, not just Free Speech.

So, I get concerned whenever I encounter an anti-porn argument that is both passionate and articulate.

Women who condemn porn do so because they feel it perpetuates violence towards women in the culture. Women who support porn do so because they believe it relieves a pressure that would otherwise escalate into violence — and not just towards women.

Who is right?

They both are.

I should say that, as a man, I don’t feel I have a right to argue my points directly with a woman who has decided to condemn pornography. Our perspectives on the issue are too different, and there are ways in which my lack of perfect empathy would make it ridiculous. Basically, women feel about this issue in ways I can’t — I respect that, though I may disagree.

So, I’m not planning to become a strenuous advocate for these ideas in the company of women who have the opposite views. If there’s any convincing to be done, it’s gotta be woman-to-woman.

The following observations and conclusions are not intended as an “argument”, per se, one way or the other — only to provoke thought.

As I said to my wife just a few minutes ago, "You can’t put a man on the moon without the word for ’screwdriver’."

What I mean by that is we could not have gotten as far as we have — as a Civilization, as a species — but for our capacity to create Complex Systems of Cross-Cooperation, both person-to-person and person-to-community.

  For example, I will come sit here and sort microchips for seven hours every day, if you will pay me $30 per hour. Then, forward from there, on the strength of that agreement, we can each enter into other agreements with other parties, and so on. I will make my car payment. You will deliver 10,000 chips on time to your customer.

Complex Systems of Cross-Cooperation allow us to separate ourselves and the work we do from our direct necessities — food, shelter, etc. You can have a nice dinner in your house, though you never laid a brick or fired a shot.

CSCC’s are also what make wealth possible. When a person doesn’t have to hunt or gather, they are free to invest time more "productively". Sometimes, much more productively

It is a great gift human beings have, and we have taken it far.

  But, to be a participant in today’s hypertrophied society
— to vie for the spoils — has a cost we seldom consider in its proper
light.

The word "cooperation"…

That boils down to — having to shave, having to ride the bus, having to be at a certain place at a certain time, and having to do a thousand other things we do each day, not because we want to, but because we are bound up in a Complex Web of Cross-Cooperation.

Apologies if there are any residual Socialist connotations in the word for you, but we are living in a collective. And I think I can safely say, there has never been a more elaborate civilization on Earth than this. We spend half our lives cooperating and the other half learning to cooperate.

For all we get back, it’s not a bad deal, I agree. But we’re paying for it in three other ways we seldom consider, at least not consciously.

1. For a CSCC to function, the individual is required to perform duties not of his choosing. Most jobs are not gratifying, and most people would rather not go if they don’t have to. This is not because we are naturally lazy, but because the labor is genetically meaningless to us.

What I mean by that is a few decades is hardly long enough for us to have optimized the Organism in any way to the strange and myriad occupational choices we have today. Early humans certainly had far fewer choices, but they all related very directly (very gratifyingly) to survival.

It would go far towards explaining our modern discontent if aspects of both body and mind are very confused from all these dazzling innovations, which appeared essentially overnight. Existentialist Philosophy could simply be the mass depression of a species out of touch with its design.

2. There is also the necessary suppression of impulses. I’m sure you can fully dimensionalize that in your own imagination.

And…

3. We’re losing instinct and forgetting some very useful skills.

Sex runs through the heart of all those things.

1. If we don’t use our bodies as they were designed, don’t exercise them, feed them strange and unfamiliar things, what would our bodies do in reaction, our hormones? Look at the scientifically proven connection between hormone-injected beef consumption and the premature onset of breast development in pre-pubescent girls, to pick just one from a long list.

2. The connection between sex and suppressed impulse should need no explanation.

3. The loss of instinct arguably is the worst of the consequences, since it is probably irreversible. But I understand it would have been impossible to create CSCCs with instinct intact. In CSCC’s the rules are always changing, even reversing. What was bad yesterday may be good today and bad again tomorrow. This means we can’t deeply invest in "truth" anymore. Instinct, which by definition bypasses the cognitive mind would have to go. Now we are ambivalent and uncertain all the time.

Instinct provided many answers, but alas, not consciously, which is where we would need them to build a great civilization. “Pass me the screwdriver, please” or, better yet “ICQ me.” These are marvels of our awesome modernity. They show what’s possible when the “shelves are cleared” and we create a personal inventory from scratch. We traded unconscious certainty for Fellini.

The relationship of cause and effect I am trying to sketch for you, using woefully few examples I’m afraid, is that we had to give up sex in order to advance Civilization – sex, in it’s Wild and Natural state. let’s say, in its full Freudian scope.

As we suppressed sex more and more, we learned to gratify ourselves spiritually — via art, religion and ideology. We learned to attach symbolic meaning to our experiences and emotions, and we discovered that we could (with a little diligence) attach any meaning to anything.

And lacking any common truths based in irrefutable* instinct, human beings saw themselves becoming (well, feeling, really) very different from each other. One man’s gold could be another man’s poison. *(You can’t refute what you’re not aware you know.)

Basically, between the 16th and 18th centuries, all the ideas were thrown into one big bucket — good and bad, rational and absurd, moral and perverse. And they’re all a bit tainted now, from having been in such rough contact. And here we are today trying to fish out the ones we want to clean up and re-invigorate, and leave the nightmares behind.

It’s not hard to imagine that respect for women was one of the first things we had to learn when we started to civilize. But the men didn’t do it altruistically. They just wanted to keep their own women safe from the other men. And since we had rockets to build, it made sense to button things up as best we could as quickly as we could with the law, chivalry and a thin rubric of Romance.

The women, seeing that the men were now struggling with ideas and no longer with each other, produced feminism, both to empower as a community and to raise the value of sexual intercourse. Which is not to say that the arguments of feminism aren’t valid, only that they arose as much from cultural opportunism as moral imperative.

Is all sex really rape? I dunno. Is a penis a weapon? Could be. But those mantras may have already accomplished their intended effect.

The feminist repudiation of sexual violence may have been running on auto-pilot while we transitioned from "happening in the real world" to "happening on the screen". And I think it’s absurd to worry that pornography will inspire violence in anyone.

Porn is never anything other than a perfect reflection of us.

If you see a movie you don’t like, or one that offends you, it means you’re not the intended customer.

Some people are also fond of freaking out when they DO like something they think they should not. That is a matter for the individual to resolve for himself. It’s true that these are the kinds of people who sometimes become so tortured by guilt, shame and self-loathing that they unleash terrible violences. But the cause of that violence is not pornography, but rather the feeling that one’s natural desires are unfit.

Sometimes one’s "natural desires" are not to be indulged, sometimes they are criminal and hideous. Again, it could not be porn’s fault. People seek out the porn that reflects them. I have never heard of such a thing as Propaganda Porn, the aim of which would be to "recruit" initiates who were not interested in the first place.

 We choose what moves us.

Anti-Porn Feminists: "Thank you. Great job! We could not have achieved as much as we have for women without you. Welcome home. You’ve been away a long time. It’s a different ‘war’ now… Oh, by the way, see that guy there waving the ‘NUKE PORN’ banner — he is not on ‘your side’ of the porn issue cuz he likes women."

Pro-Porn Feminists (my wife Lauren among you): "THANK YOU for understanding that taboo and righteous condemnation only keep things current that would otherwise be forgotten. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU for the amazing work you’re doing on the Instinct Recovery front. Oooh, baby"

Violence begets violence.

Suppression is violence.

Expression has the opposite effect.

The chart above is a conception of what today might actually look like if you agree with most of my premises.

We have put our Sexuality into this sorry state to get here.

And here happens to contain technology and a Medium that permits us to recover some of the “sexual dimensions” we gave up along the way. Have we been persecuting “unlawful” sex so long and so blindly that we can’t tell the difference between an Old Enemy and a New Friend?