Weary as I am of Jensen's screeds, I don't think they should go unanswered. If they do, it would appear that we either lack answers or are afraid to make them, neither of which is true.

In this particular instance, I would point to Jensen's obsession with the specifics of sex acts in porn, which I consider not prudish, as I've said before (to demolish the favorite straw man of anti-porn feminist that those of us who disagree vehemently with them dismiss them as mere prudes, when in fact their fixation on porn is clearly both perverse and prurient) but rather, as Carol Queen characterizes it "absexual," a grim condition in which hatred and loathing of this or that kind of sex forms the center of the individual's sexual identity.

As to the specifics about DPs and whether women hate them or men should because they're inherently degrading, that's just too silly to rebut. Men and women have been doing DPs since long before porn was invented and will continue to long after it's gone. Jensen's assertion that neither men nor women enjoy such activities in their private lives come from his anecdotal sampling of what even he admits is a skewed focus group - his circle of associates who most likely share his narrow construction of sex. In fact, contrary to his findings from his study group, DPs may not be the most common sex act among porn, but I know I am one of hundreds of thousands of men and women who have occasionally enjoyed them when there wasn't a camera anywhere nearby.

Let's be reminded once more that Jensen, though he conveniently never mentions it to mixed or het audiences, identifies as a gay man and I don't doubt that he and his half-dozen like-minded friends find the idea of putting their dicks in in vagina unappealing to begin with (though I wouldn't be surprised, or critical in anyway, if some of his friends find the notion less repellent because there would still be some dick involved).

Meantime, I continue to question the motives of a man who voluntarily exposes himself to hundreds of hours of a type of porn that has nothing to do with his own sexuality and serves only to keep his miserable, depressive view of what the heterosexual world finds appealing as dark as possible. If I felt I had to watch daytime TV, which offers virtually nothing that speaks to me, for hundreds of hours, I have no doubt I'd find even more things to dislike about it.

But let's get back to his central point, if he has one, which seems to be that men have all been conditioned to respond to forms of sexual behavior that women (for whom he claims not to speak while repeatedly doing so) just because women dislike them. This, in Jensen's opinion, helps perpetuate hostile gender dimorphism which serves the interests of The Patriarchy, though just how DPs help maintain the power and influence of the couple of hundred white guys who really are the patriarchy, or more correctly oligarchy, that runs this society (and from which most men, Jensen and myself included) are barred from membership by accident of class) remains a bit murky to say the least.

Now, when we look at a real, out-of-the-closet patriarchy to which most men in the society in which it exists truly do feel a sense of collective entitlement over the proper and improper uses of women's bodies, we find an interesting phenomenon. The men in those cultures find pornography, or any form of sexual expression involving women, every bit as repellent as Jensen does. Here's an ugly recent example that nicely supports my observation to the effect that societies that suppress sexual expression overall generally blame women for its existence and suppress them as well. This from today's AVN Online:

Iranian Soap Actress Faces Charges over Sex Tape
By: Carlos Martinez

LOS ANGELES -

An Iranian soap actress is being prosecuted on morality charges for appearing in a sex video she made with her boyfriend.

Iranian authorities arrested Zahra Amir Ebrahimi after the tape was posted on the Internet by her boyfriend, then released on a DVD, angering millions of Iranians, London�s Daily Mail reported.

The boyfriend, who was not named in the criminal case, is suspected of distributing the video illegally. He reportedly fled to Dubai.

The 25-year-old Ebrahimi had a leading role on a popular soap opera, but has been dropped from the show after she was arrested. She had played a morally upstanding woman on the program.

Iranian law forbids premarital sex and if Ebrahimi is convicted she faces a public lashing and a jail term.

Recently, television presenter was fired after a video surfaced showing him dancing at a wedding with a bride that he was not related to.

Does Jensen really believe that a porn-free society would be a better, safer place for women? I don't doubt his sincerity (it's too maudlin to be fabricated), but for a college professor supposedly trained in critical thinking, he doesn't show much intellectual integrity when it comes to facts that don't fit his theory.

He continues, like most anti-porn feminists, to insist that violence against women is of epidemic proportions in this country and that that epidemic is fueled by porn. As we've seen from a much wider, better study quoted in this forum, the facts don't support this contention. I doubt that he will, but he might want to check out this genuinely scientific piece of research provided by our logic-minded friend Frank:

http://www.law.stanford.edu/display/...0+%20paper.pdf

Not surprisingly, what he Stanford study concludes is that sexual violence goes down in societies where pornography is widely accepted. I don't think there's a one-to-one causality in this, but rather that it represents the differences between societies that accept sexuality, including female sexuality, as normal are less given to spasms of violent misogyny than those that don't. In that same thread, I provided some examples::

Pornography tolerant (tolerance certainly varying by degrees) societies:

Japan
Holland
France
Germany
England
Spain
Virtually all of Scandanavia
Australia
Canada
Israel
The United States

Now let's look at some countries where porn is rigorously suppressed:

Saudi Arabia
Iran
China
Afghanistan
Pakistan
Jordan
Indonesia
Singapore
India
Sudan
Egypt
South Africa
North Korea
Nigeria

Do Jensen and his crowd really think women are safer in the latter group than in the former? Does he have the intellectual courage to address this question openly, or does he share the anti-porn feminist view that dirty pictures count as violence against women in themselves and that, therefore, women in this society suffer more violence than in those societies in which they are merely raped, tortured, mutilated and killed for failing to conform to rigid social constraints on female sexual choice?

One thing that even Jensen admits, in a rare moment of candor, is that most of this society doesn't agree. In a startling admission to one of the like-minded gatherings of porn-bashers where he collects his honoraria, he pretty much condceded that his cause is lost:

"But we live in a society in which the pornographers have won, in the short term. Their products are more widely accepted and available than ever. Much of the culture has bought the �pornography is liberation� and �pornography is freedom� lines. To the degree that an anti-pornography position can get traction in the dominant culture, it comes from right-wing groups that have co-opted the language of feminism -- the political language of harm -- as a cover for a regressive moralism that rejects the values of feminism. Those same right-wing groups typically resist a critique of the capitalist commofication of everything, an analysis crucial to understanding pornography."

At least he's honest enough to admit that the rhetoric he and his self-appointed cadre employ has been more valuable to the enemies of women's rights than to feminists in general. Maybe when he's not too busy boo-hooing over the horror of DPs, he might want to consider the way in which anti-porn feminist claptrap has come to the aid of enemies of reproductive choice such as the sponsors of South Dakota's thankfully defeated attempt to criminalize abortion, or Dubya's new choice for federal family planning czar, who believes that contraception "is degrading to women." Jensen's crowd bears the responsibility for arming such cranks with talking points, not us.

If any of these fanatics really cared about the treatment of real women, instead of ventilating their own morbid paranoias about abstract forms of "oppression," they would be more concerned with the fate of Zahra Amir Ebrahimi than they would be with DPs in videos.

But then, to do this, they would have to admit that the liberal West has a more enlightened attitude toward women's rights than the kinds of non-Western societies that leftists are reluctant to criticized out of the fear of contradicting their equally corrupt notions of cultural relativism.

Meantime, while feminists argue among themselves about porn, women all over the world suffer real violence of the most ghastly varieties, largely unassisted by the naval-gazing, porn-fixated rad-fem left here where, thanks to that infamous tool of patriarchal oppression, The First Amendment, they would be able to speak out openly against such atrocities, if they actually cared about women as human beings rather than as faceless victims of a mass ideological campaign to keep them down.

The prosecution rests ... for now.