Porn is not a drug - it is not a substance

But it is a mind-altering phenomenon

It affects the nervous system quickly and powerfully

It is sex crack. It is dangerous and habit-forming

While it is dangerous and many dangerous

things are against the law,

it's not a good idea to outlaw it

Nobody is touching you

Nobody is forcing you to watch it

But it's an uninvited seduction

It's an unwanted fall; it's your body betraying you

If your body betrays you with a real person

it takes some time and there's some negotiation

With porn you don't negotiate

It goes straight to the groin

The point of porn is a physical jolt, a thrill, a taboo which until this gross-out moment was intact.

At the moment, nothing says "gross-out" like bukkake, the porno genre in which a group of men masturbate on a woman's upturned face.

Like all S/M, bukkake is ritualized domination and desecration of feminine purity, in this case the purer the better:

"They plan to use her for their own sexual satisfaction, then completely HUMILIATE her!," pants a come-on for FacialHumiliation.com.

Nothing new here, to anyone familiar with De Sade's gleeful descriptions of virgins flogged, sodomized and worse.

Porn Goes Straight to the Groin

I have been thinking about porn and looking at porn and observing my own reactions and have hesitated to talk about it because I felt that I had no ability to look at it dispassionately.

But lately, I have made some progress in this regard, and am able to step back and look at it. And what I see is something that is enormously powerful but cloaked in taboo.

It is important to be specific and factual. Porn is not a drug -- it is not a substance. But it is a mind-altering phenomenon. It affects the nervous system quickly and powerfully.

It is sex crack. It is dangerous and habit-forming. While it is dangerous and many dangerous things are against the law, it is not a good idea to outlaw it.

For those of us who can't handle it, we have to face what it is, why it is so powerful.

In the lizard mind where all things are writ backward on the mirror in God's pink lipstick, I am you and you are me. We become what we behold, as Blake said.

What we see is what we are. If you are naked I am naked. We are porous in the sensorium of sex. We are not impervious; we cannot look at it without tingling.

It hijacks our sex. So if we do not like porn it may be because porn is too powerful.

We don't care to lose our freedom to this thing, to have our sex run off one way while we who were children once gape in astonishment and wonder and frightful surprise at the size, the perfection, the wetness, the hairlessness, the lips, the machines.

It reaches right into your pants is what it does. That's kind of weird, isn't it, to have something come out of the computer and reach into your pants?

Maybe you want it reaching into your pants and you're fine with that, you asked it to reach in your pants.

But maybe it's just entering your eyeballs and then reaching into your pants and then it feels good but not entirely because something about it isn't right, because it's a little like being molested, isn't it?

You're not quite sure being aroused is the right thing, because it's not in a relationship, you're not with a person, you're not expressing yourself, you're just having your sex made to tingle by an unseen hand.

You see the bodies represented, but you don't see the hand, any more than you see how the drug works. It's a song in your brain, it's a hand in your pants.

Nobody is touching you. Nobody is forcing you to watch it. But it's an uninvited seduction; it's an unwanted fall; it's your body betraying you.

So your body betrays you. If your body betrays you with a real person it takes some time and there's some negotiation.

With porn you don't negotiate. It goes straight to the groin.