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Opponents

"The public jacks off to us with the left hand, and pushes us away with the right," says pornographer Bill Margold, summing up a frequent complain by pornographers about their customers.

Not only do millions of Americans use porn and not admit to it, millions of users and non-users feel great contempt for pornographers. Is such contempt deserved? No. Porn may do more harm than good, but compared to the harm done to society by, for instance, lawyers who get violent criminals off just punishment, pornographers are angels.

In a world where persons prostitute their talents for fame, fortune, success, popularity, etc., the sexual prostitute is the most reviled and the least harmful, says Xaviera Hollander.

In a world filled with genocide, mass murder and torture, no one has ever died from an overdose of pornography. (Bill Margold)

Should a person who uses porn have to admit to it publicly? AVN sometimes talks about "outing" (making public the names of) prominent porn users who publicly oppose porn. But what happened to the right to privacy which much support for decriminalized porn production and distribution depends on?

Pornographers universally support a woman's right to an abortion which is legally based on the right to privacy. Does this privacy not extend to other persons than pregnant women? What about persons who use porn and oppose porn? Perhaps they are less hypocritical than weak. Americans say in surveys that the media concentrates too much on revealing the personal lives of famous people, yet Americans consume People magazine and gossipy TV talk shows. Most of us are weak and give in at times to temptation. If porn were more easily available, more men would consume it, and many men don't want that temptation.

Also, if we only allow persons of perfect holiness to articulate standards, there'll be no standards and we'll be finished. The definition of civilize is "to cause to improve from a primitive state to a more developed one." (Oxford American Dictionary)

Civilization is based on objective standards of excellence - in ethics, government, art, etc.. No standards, no civilization. Yet no one always lives up to the highest standards. Therefore, to make a good society, we should tolerate some 'hypocrisy'.

I use porn and I say that porn is unholy and violates the sexual ideals of every religion (including my own) and virtually every historical sexual code of which I'm aware. Am I a hypocrite?

Certainly persons who devote great passion to fighting porn and other forms of sexual expression outside of marriage, and then frequently do in private the same acts that they condemn from the pulpit (such as tele-evangelist Jimmy Swaggart), deserve the epithet hypocrite in at least this one part of their lives.

Pornographers cannot expect acceptance and approval from any society whose citizens are either largely religious or religiously influenced. Since the time of Marquis de Sade, clear-thinking pornographers have understood themselves as the enemy of society - perhaps a benign enemy, but an enemy nonetheless. No society can last if its citizens lead the life glorified in porn.

Most people have a difficult time understanding that those with whom they disagree may still have good motivations. Eric Dew writes on RAME about opponents of porn. "The hypocrisy is that it would seem difficult for the general sex industry (and here, porn stars are just one subgroup of the greater industry) to be the multibillion dollar industry that it claims to be and only have the ten of us raincoaters be the market. Somehow, the market has to encompass those who claim to abhor the product."

Dan Bongard replies on RAME: "That's not even remotely true. The last time I checked considerably more than %0.000004 of the population were willing to admit to liking porn -- and that's not counting the people who don't publicly acknowledge their habit but don't publicly condemn it either.

"$1.25 billion = 1 percent of the US population spending $500 a year. Not bad when you consider the typical price of rentals and tape purchases. And the sex industry, like most "vice" industries, probably makes most of its money off of a small portion of the population, just as lotteries and gambling casinos do.

"I've been to a casino twice in my life, and I know plenty of people who haven't gone at all -- but I'm not ready to make the assumption that my non-gambling friends must be secretly sneaking off to the casinos. There are better explanations for the success of that particular multibillion-dollar industry.

"As an additional point, the tobacco industry is also a multibillion-dollar industry -- yet supposedly the majority of the population doesn't smoke, and anti-smoking activists routinely try to ban smoking and sue the companies who make cigarettes. Now, do we automatically assume that the anti-smoking activists are all secret smokers? Is there no other explanation?

"The simple fact of the matter is that the adult video business is supported primarily by a minority of the population spending a decent-sized chunk of cash. Sure, some of these people probably publicly decry the evils of porn and then sneak off to watch "Pussyman 16". But the sad reality is that most of the anti-porn crowd really does think this is a hobby for sinners and perverts."