A friend I hadn't seen in years visited last week and asked me to meet up with him and a girlfriend. He'd always been supportive of my feminist leanings and literary aspirations, and like a good pal asked me how my writing was going. "Purely academic," I groaned. He pleaded I elaborate.

So I launched into the sordid details of my last paper. Not, mind you, the thesis-that art informed femininity as dangerous and antithetical to masculinity, that feminism's gains have led to a new, anxious masculinity, and how our most popular low art (porn) reflects this. I went instead into an extended whine about the stress headaches, back problems, and carpal tunnel I acquired in my research and writing, hurting for some old-fashioned sympathy. Of course I didn't get it. The topic was mentioned, the male ego alerted, and the inevitable materialized: so am I for or against porn?

I hate this question.

I don't give a shit about porn. I've sought out porn, watched porn, jilled off to porn. I know and know of a hundred billion men who watch porn and aren't rapists or shitheads, and I'm really proud of them.

I was pretty clear and extensive about my position on porn, and that it's not the genre that irks me, but the culture. After a pretty well-read and -reasoned monologue about the history and implications of desire, where I expected a thoughtful discussion if not the total agreement I absolutely always deserve, girlfriend folds her hands, nods gravely, and assures me "[she] used to think like me" and someday I would grow up. Worse, old buddy agrees.

Ugh! It was so infuriatingly dismissive and pathologizing. No matter what I said, all he (and his annoying girlfriend WHO QUOTES THE RULES) could hear was "porn is bad. People who watch porn are bad. I loathe and avoid such people."

That's not what I think, okay? Yeah, I think it's an issue. If porn existed in a vacuum, I wouldn't. I would be fine with it. But it doesn't, and I'm not.

Porn exists within a culture that doesn't respect women, and reiterates and reinforces the contempt all. The damn. Time. When popular social commentators go unchecked after shrieking "every time Hilary opens her mouth I want to cross my legs," the subtext being that she is a scary castrating woman with power, we see a culture where intelligent, politically potent women are not respected. When, meanwhile, Jenna Jameson's autobiography sells more than biographies on women in politics, and more and more young women have eating disorders, we see the importance of desirability and powerlessness (indeed, the desirability of powerlessness). These are alarming. When we look at how these intersect, they really trouble.

While plenty of men indulge in porn purely as a means to be aroused and do their business and be done, with no disrespect toward women, there are plenty of men--especially younger men--who know few other representations of women. Watching women gagging on dicks and being called bitch and slut and whore, with little other reference, creates a model of femininity that is grossly unrealistic and unfair. From experience and study I can confidently posit that porn and porn stars become the standard toward which men base all women, and all women inevitably fail.

But it doesn't end there--it doesn't end at the leers and comments from dudes in striped shirts and cargo shorts. Young men are the demographic all social institutions court. The standard that young men seek becomes the standard that corporate America seeks. The cycle of culture and popular opinion intersect deeply and significantly, and it's difficult to pinpoint which came first. Regardless, over the course of western history a standard of women develops in opposition to women's power. In America, where powerlessness yields the most profit, the idealized depictions of women become more polarized, more unattainable, and more coveted. Depictions that do women little service seep throughout our culture and subconsciously plant themselves as desire-that's how advertising works-and is reiterated and refined and made further extreme in places like porn. And the cycle repeats.

If there were a well rounded representations of women, then these desired images could simply be fetishes or kinks. But they become a standard. Young men in study after study describe how porn influences their desire, from who they seek out for sex to how they have sex to how they fell about women who do and do not participate in their porny ideals. What they say and how they feel is grim. Really grim.

And, so to speak, it sucks.