A quick update

Scribbled on a scrap of notepaper, hidden in the spine of a book and smuggled past my captors by a sympathetic janitor.

If updates have been few and far between around here, it’s partly because I’ve been locked into a cold, damp cell, where I am being fed thin gruel (laughably called “tender care”) for my efforts, and forced to write an essay concerning pornography, which there is at least some risk that I will soon finish.

On that subject, note the piece on the aptly named feminist porn filmmaker Erika Lust in today’s Grope & Flail, which includes this nugget:

Do you think mainstream porn has changed the way some people are having sex?

I see this as a problem with young people turning to pornography to learn about sex. They aren’t critics of what they are seeing. If this same young man would watch one of my movies, he would get another idea of what sex is all about. We’ve said for years with porn that it doesn’t affect us, that it’s something only a small number of men are watching. But pornography has taken a major step into culture as a discourse that explains femininity and masculinity. I think it’s important that women start to participate in this discourse, because men aren’t going to explain our experience.

That is, of course, the crux of the problem. It’s possible to put it more succinctly, of course.