A Pornographer's Manifesto

Author’s note: I talk throughout this essay specifically about pornographic writing. I’m a professional writer, after all. Know, however, my comments apply to all the adult creative arts—erotic charcoals, sexy scenarios you paint on your tablet, explicit filmmaking, and especially that naughty piano sonata for four sexy hands you’re composing as the centerpiece of your Sunday Afternoon Fine Arts Orgy.

I also speak as a cis gay man. Reader, that might not be your perspective nor your audience. I hope you find the philosophies herein malleable enough to adapt into your own. I encourage you to customize them at whim.

If you’re expending your creative efforts in the service of the carnal, or if you’re allowing other adults to enjoy adult content from the fruits of your imagination, you’re my kind of craftsperson.

Sometime during the pandemic, I began listening to podcasts. Yes, I know podcasts have been around forever. Not even when everyone was talking about Serial, though, had I ever been tempted to listen. I never understood the appeal of spending a dozen hours across as many weeks, passively allowing someone to drone out the same information I could cull from a quick one-minute browse on Wikipedia.

Then, in 2020, I found myself trapped in my home for weeks on end with nothing to do but fret. Narrated audio experiences filled a new kind of void. I could kick up my feet in my living room, game controller in hand and something relaxing like Minecraft on the TV screen while a podcast played. The hours wouldn’t exactly fly by, at least they ambled along more amiably than had I tuned into the 24-hour doomcasts on every news channel.

Quickly I accumulated a playlist of favorites. Shows about television and movie history appealed to me, as did programs diving deep into my favorite recording artists. I’ve never been big on true crime—I think it tends toward exploitation and poor handling of victims and bystanders alike—but I did find a couple of investigators who approached their subjects with sensitivity and compassion. Over time, I looked forward to certain shows and began supporting a few on Patreon. When restrictions eased, I continued listening. If I have to make a long car trip these days, I’m more inclined to turn on podcasts than music.

Then came an incident that shook me.

One of my favorite shows that I discovered right at the beginning of my podcast journey shines a light onto a certain type of pop culture specifically through an LGBTQ lens. I clicked with it immediately because of the genial hosts and their clever analysis of a genre many consider to be trivial or disposable. I was so entertained by the enterprise that I started working my way through several years’ worth of their old programs. Every long, isolated afternoon, when I’d unwind with the Playstation, for a couple of hours I wouldn’t miss my pre-pandemic life at all.

In one particular episode, these hosts got onto a tangent involving limericks. They were trying, and failing, to construct a dirty limerick from a specific first line that ended with a tricky-to-rhyme word. After a minute or two, the pair gave up and instead invited listeners to send in their best attempts from that first line. Well. When I was a fifth grader, limericks were my nerdy little thing. I grew up steeped in Edward Lear and fancied myself a real 11-year-old limerick connoisseur. My alarming output of the five-line, anapestic little poems prompted my homeroom teacher to sign me up for a citywide creative writing workshop that set me on a lifelong creative journey.

Plus, I like a challenge.

It was but the work of a few minutes to accomplish what the hosts could not: a perfectly-formed, absolutely filthy little masterpiece of such turpitude that once I’d finished, all I could do was rub my hands together and cackle in glee. After a bit of polishing, I tweeted the thing to one of the hosts and promptly went back to my much grayer, limerick-free life.

I’d actually forgotten about the challenge until a couple of weeks later, when during an ad break to thank their new patrons, the podcasters announced they’d received several limerick submissions. Immediately, I grew excited. My dirty poem was going to make my two favorite podcast hosts laugh! I turned up the volume to hear.

The first few listener limericks they read—well, they sucked. They suuuuuuuucked. The rhymes were terrible, the scansion just plain bad. One wasn’t even a limerick. Inwardly I gloated. I was winning this thing for sure. Okay, it wasn’t and had never been intended as a contest, but I have an unfortunate competitive spirit that manifests itself with obnoxious intensity, if I don’t tamp it down. And on that day, I wasn’t attempting to tamp. I was totally tampless and jittering with anticipation.

Finally it was my turn. The primary host paused slightly before reading off my Twitter handle, then launched into a diatribe that left me hot and flushed with shame. My social media profile, he warned all the listeners, was sexually explicit pornography. It was shocking. He launched into a description of all the things a hapless innocent might find if they were so naive as to dare stumble into my little den of depravity. Nude photos! Graphic depictions of homosexual sex! Licentious behavior! A corruption so absolute that no righteous soul should dare approach! In fact, they didn’t recommend listeners look me up at all, but since I’d sent in a submission, I’d forced their hand.

After what felt like an hour of these preliminary warnings, I think they finally read my limerick. I was in such a state of shock, though, that their reaction swept over me without registering. I felt humiliated at being called out in such a way, by two of my favorite voices, no less—two gay men who’d never spoken ill of anyone save for the LGBTQ population’s conservative foes. It felt like being spit on in passing by Oprah, or having Mother Teresa pick me out in a crowd, point a gnarled finger, and shout, “FAGGOT!”

Still licking my wounds, I visited my Twitter account to survey the broad swath of vice and debauchery I apparently was leaving in my wake. Sure, there were a couple of posts of naked dudes with erections. Many of my Twitter friends—and I choose the word friends here with deliberation—are sex workers. If I’m proud of someone with whom I have a relationship, I’ll spread the word about their accomplishments. Doesn’t matter to me if it’s an academic presenting a talk, a writer with a new article out, or yes, a sex worker promoting erotic videos or a website.

Overall, though? The amount of male nudity on my timeline that day was pretty minimal. Compared to the amount of shitposting I do on Twitter—tweets about campy movies I watch, links to my blog, comments about music I listen to, or reconstructed dialogs I’d had with my dad, or those bizarre conversations I have on the apps in which men approach me with unfathomable rudeness or ignorance—the number of nudes were insignificant. One had to scroll and scroll back weeks’ worth of microblogging to find even one.

At the time, I was confused anyone might feel my cheeky little Twitter profile merited the same neon yellow CAUTION! tape, hazmat suits, and flashing sirens as a nuclear waste spill. And that kind of treatment from gay men? Gay men whose very internet presences were poised on being perceived as thoughtful about LGBTQ culture? It hurt. I didn’t quit listening to their podcast. I was tempted, sure, but I still enjoyed the discussions enough that I thought my life would be the poorer for quitting out of embarrassment and spite.

What happened immediately after, though, is that I caught myself second-guessing everything I posted on Twitter. Was retweeting the glistening torso of my favorite, sweet-hearted, smiling Chaturbate model dragging my timeline into the gutter? Would using the word fuck in a post tip the balance of my tweets from an R rating into NC-17? Should I skip all mention of my own past and present sex work altogether, so I didn’t offend the sensibilities of the more sensitive gays?

For about a month, I began overthinking all my social media interactions. Was I being too filthy? Were people going to perceive me as vulgar? Should I remove any old retweets featuring naked flesh? Should I try in the future to be nice and safe?

The moment I found myself contemplating that word, though—safe—I knew I’d stumbled down the wrong path. Safe is not a word I’ve ever wanted associated with my blog, my craft, or my process. I’m always encouraging my writing students to step outside what’s safe. Their work is stronger when they venture into territory that’s uncertain, even scary. Safe is for the timid. Safe is the unlived life, the long nights spent sitting on the sidelines, the uncorked bottle of wine saved for that never-arriving special occasion, the fruit that withers on the vine. Safe has never been anything that inspired me, nor should it appeal to anyone.

Fuck safe. Remember in the Narnia stories, how everyone always says about Aslan that he’s not a tame lion? I’m not a tame lion, either. I don’t want tame lions for students. I want my aspiring writers to roar.

What I am is a pornographer. I chronicle my sexual history. For thirteen years I’ve kept this blog with zero attempts at monetization. I’ve composed hundreds of essays about my erotic experiences, past and present, for the joy of writing and sharing. That’s how I roar. If pressed, I prefer calling my output sexual memoir: my goal has always been to create prose that’s evocative and textured. Fancy literary terms don’t disguise, though, that I write to heighten the senses, to set the blood racing—I write to arouse.

There’s a conservative world view in which any book containing sexual acts is porn and therefore deserving condemnation, if not outright consignment to a bonfire. Whether written by Nobel Prize Award-Winning author Toni Morrison or by some unknown in the sticky pages of a titty magazine doesn’t matter. Filth is filth. Under that eye, I am that toxic spill of nuclear waste. I’m dangerous to one and all. I’m a moral threat.

Yeah. I write about fucking. I am a pornographer. And you know what? I think you should be a fuckin’ pornographer, like me. Here’s why.

1. Writing Pornography Makes You Better at Sex

Writing about sex requires a specific skill set, whether you’re writing sexual memoir, crafting literary erotica, or tapping out dirty little crossover stories for your favorite fandom about Spock (the hot Strange New Worlds incarnation, not Nimoy) boinking Bucky Barnes.

At the most fundamental, it’s essential to know the mechanics of sex: how the basic acts play out, how foreplay progresses to greater intimacy, the myriad things people find to do with their parts, what happens (or doesn’t) at climax. You might take for granted that in this age of Pornhub and instantly-downloadable depictions of every sexual depravity known to man, animals, and tentacled aliens, that every adult grasps what fits where. I am here to vouch, however, that you are mistaken.

For the better part of a decade, not that long ago, I was a judge of an annual nationwide contest for the hottest sex scenes in unpublished romance manuscripts. The entries were 100% heterosexual and largely (yet not exclusively) written by women. The contest was a big deal for aspiring writers. Winning guaranteed the author an evaluation by the editor of a major publishing house; their manuscript would avoid the slush piles.

Every year, though, I was astonished by the sheer number of entries that showed a shocking and often comical lack of understanding of both male and female anatomy and the sex act itself. It often was as if the authors had not only never engaged in sex, but had never seen or read simulations of it in media, enjoyed a lecture in sex education, or even known anyone who’d gotten past first base. There’s a whole population of adult women out there under the impression that coitus is when a man kisses a woman with an open mouth—and that such s’embrasser can actually lead to pregnancy. It gets worse. In the wee hours of the morning, I am still haunted by the number of scenes I had to endure in which a heroine accidentally had sex to completion with a Toblerone box she mistakes for the rigid member of her slumbering lover.

(How? I hear you ask. A Toblerone box is triangular, with sharp corners, and bears no resemblance to a human penis at all! Why are a man and woman sleeping in a bed with a candy bar? Wouldn’t it get messy, once all that chocolate began to melt? Who explains the stains to the launderer? Reader, your still-traumatized narrator has no easy answers for you.)

But I digress. Writing about sex requires understanding the chemistry of attraction, the ways in which people gaze upon each other, the ways in which their breathing changes as they move close, how they touch and undress and merge. Writing about sex requires knowing its rhythms and having proficiency in its intimacies, being aware of its comical pitfalls and of the potential disappointments a skilled lover strives to avoid.

Knowing what makes a scene erotic, then elevating it above mere mechanics and into something special, heightens the writer’s perceptions and insights. Those color one’s bedroom adventures. Writing about sex makes one aware that every encounter isn’t merely a discrete occurrence or misdeed. Fucking is not something disconnected from the everyday, to be shoved in a hidden cubbyhole. Sex is the merging of two (or more) people’s stories—stories that began long before the rendezvous and continue past it into the future. Time spent with someone else is the ultimate act of authorial collaboration.

Realizing those things, and honoring them in writing, has made me a better lover. It’s given me insight into what motivates many men, and into how, together, we might fulfill our desires and fantasies. It’s made me more forgiving of fault in others—too forgiving, sometimes. Exploring my older stories has helped me to honor parts of my past I used to find overwhelming or shameful, and to recognize what still makes me vulnerable or frightened. And it’s left me with little patience for men who refuse to search themselves or to grow.

Of course, these points are all a subset of an ideal I uphold to all my writing students at the beginning of any given semester: that being aware and observant of the world makes one both a better writer and a better person in general. It’s something I’ve always believed. However, as even the briefest perusal of the literary biographies at your local library will prove, plenty of authors are terrible people who use and spit out the ones closest to them. I’m often not a prize to be around, myself. But I believe writing—and yes, writing pornography—to be a valuable tool for personal growth.

2. Writing Good Pornography Sets the Example for Your Audience

Allow me to discuss, for a moment, the obverse of my previous point.

I’m enough of a dinosaur to remember when pornography was an event. It was planned on the calendar. It took place at a destination to which one traveled. In the olden days, porn wasn’t something pulled up on a smartphone while sitting on the toilet at work. (I’m referring to the early days of porn films, not daguerreotypes with brazen hussies hoisting bustles to reveal their stockings. I’m not that old.)

It was in the early 1970s when my mom applied her lipstick and dabbed herself with Chanel No. 5 while my dad donned his best sports jacket and a clean work shirt for a Friday night out at the movies. The theater was the Biograph, a newly opened art house near the campus where they taught; the movie was the pornographic The Devil in Miss Jones. Yes, once upon a time, pornography was shown in mainstream places to nice middle-class married couples who would dress up to attend. They’d hire babysitters, perhaps have a nice dinner out beforehand, and make a night of it. Once at the sold-out theater, they’d sit quietly with their hands resting on the arms of their seats, observe the widescreen images of people fucking, eat their popcorn, then presumably head home to do something about those uncomfortably tight clothes.

I saw the ticket stubs for The Devil in Miss Jones on my mom’s dresser the next day. Even as a kid, I instantly knew what it was. Pornography was openly discussed in the seventies. New titles were infrequent and well publicized. People swapped opinions on I Am Curious, Yellow and The Opening of Misty Beethoven over meatloaf and spring peas at polite dinner parties. Late-night comedians fashioned monologues around the latest pornographic release, then men and women would repeat their best jokes around the water cooler. Comics like Mad Magazine, though their audience skewed heavily to teens and pre-adolescents, made frequent, uncensored references to Deep Throat.

Not everyone would see these films, of course, in the same way not everyone flocked to see Herbie, the Love Bug. Attending an X-rated movie was perceived as hip and chic, though most still regarded the genre as dirty. For a good decade, if nice couples desired to view pornography, they would do so in front of other nice people, in nice venues, in nice dress-up clothes and with their pants pulled up and the fly zipped shut.

Pornography didn’t become anyone’s filthy secret until the 1980s, when the volume of cheap porn flicks exploded and what had been mainstream entertainment transformed into sticky cassettes that lurked in the home VCR. I was firmly in my twenties before I saw my first porn flick—a William Higgins film with a dubious soundtrack I selected from a dirty printed catalog that appeared in my graduate school apartment mailbox. To purchase the tape, I had to write a check, send it through the U.S. Mail, then wait six weeks a plain brown package to be delivered. And wow. Was I convinced that transaction was a privilege and a convenience!

I cannot exaggerate how much sex changed, once adult movies could be (more or less) easily purchased via mail order, or rented for private viewing from behind a beige curtain at a mom and pop video store. I’m not referring merely to the frequency one might masturbate to the stuff—though taped porn and the technologies that succeeded it have spawned generations of young people who cannot conceive of self-pleasure without a movie playing. No, what changed were the very acts themselves.

For example: despite having a wildly active sex life during my teens and early twenties, and despite having been a sex worker during that time with hundreds of clients, never once did anyone attempt any rimming. I remember shouting, “Whoa! WHOA!” the first time someone flipped me over and started licking my butt in the late eighties. It was so outré and unimagined an act that I panicked.

“Relax,” said the guy performing this debauched new undertaking on my quivering hole. “I saw it in a porno.”

Now, I’m not saying that prior to 1987, nobody had ever attempted anilingus. My experience tells me that it wasn’t common, however, until we started seeing it on our VCRs. Porn educates its audience. Douching before anal sex was neither widely performed nor expected until 80s films showed us acres of sparkling clean California Blond butts, or until bottom porn stars started sharing their preparation tips. Watersports and double penetration? In my experience, rare before home porn, but much more common after. Straight men wanting women to do butt stuff? You can bet it’s because they’ve seen it in a video. The many straight men these days wanting women to do butt stuff to them? You know know their browser search history contains multiple variations on pornhub milf pegging scenes.

For better or worse, a society’s porn consumption educates and broadens its desires—and you have the opportunity, as a responsible and thoughtful pornographer, to contribute to the tone. Do you want to advertise your sexual hypnotism fetish and normalize it as an outlet for play? Here’s your chance to create a series of hypnotism stories so erotic and compelling that they’ll make a lasting impression on readers encountering it for the first time. What’s your kink? Alien cocoons? Nasty Friends roleplay? Fingerpainting a naked body? As long as it’s between consenting adults, enjoy the fuck out of it and share that love with others. They’ll respond. Think of how much better all those erotic chapter contest submissions would have been, had the writers been inspired by your amazing written or filmed pornography, rather than by Toblerone ads.

I’ve always maintained what I hope is a clear ethic in my erotic writing. I believe it’s important for individuals to explore and enjoy their sexuality. I believe in respecting my partners and their fantasies and in creating a safe space in which they might enact them. I believe in the importance of educating oneself about risk and behaving responsibly when mistakes happens. I believe in making the best with what I’ve been given, of saying yes to opportunities, of opening myself to the bounty the universe presents. I don’t wedge all those themes into every individual essay, but regular blog readers recognize my themes.

Often, my beliefs strike a chord with my audience. If I had a dime for every reader who, over the last thirteen years, told me I’ve changed the ways they think of and approach sex, or who’s slid into my DMs to thank me for helping them learn to say yes to opportunity—well. I don’t want to exaggerate. I’d have enough money for a couple of meals at Taco Bell. But it wouldn’t be a cheap burrito from the value menu. Oh, no. It would at least cover that Mexican Pizza combo, god damn it.

3. Writing Pornography Pisses Off All the Best People

Writing truthfully and honestly about sex and sexual culture, and particularly about queer sex, is one of the most dangerous things a person can do these days. By sharing your work—whether online, or through traditional publishing, or through social media—you are inviting anyone, anyone, to fling your way hurtful comments on your sexual tastes and preferences. Are you a young man in his twenties primarily attracted to daddies? Be prepared to have unknown commenters question your perverted desires and to recommend therapy, prison, or worse. Are you writing sensitive essays involving consensual scenarios of dominance, perhaps with physical, financial, or racial components? It’s best to brace yourself for comments about how sick are your partners and how vile you are for indulging them. Are you writing with flowery euphemisms about the sweet, vanilla sessions of kissing and hand jobs in which you engage with your legally wedded husband? More power to you, but it doesn’t matter. Haters are still going to pop out of woodwork to call you a groomer.

We survive in a culture in which the extreme right wing that doesn’t want the word gay spoken aloud at all. The LGBTQ population lives in fear, in many of my country’s fifty states. They have ample reason. Right-wing rhetoric has stirred up countless hate crimes. Twitter itself has become a cesspool of untrammeled conservative hatred, worse every day, laser-focused upon anyone perceived as vulnerable.

And when you, the artist, write pornography, when you create art from your life and your experiences and do so with sincerity and the desire to share, you are making yourself vulnerable. I have always considered that willingness to be vulnerable, that risky leap of faith an artist takes in releasing his work into the world, as the sweetest of gifts. It’s a beautiful thing, trusting strangers to witness art in its fledgling state, and to have that audience respond to your gift of vulnerability in kind, with generosity of spirit.

It’s soul-crushing when bad actors with worse intentions dogpile upon you to assert their own destructive impulses—particularly when they’re online trolls looking to score invisible points with oligarchs who don’t give a shit.

Don’t expect much of a better reception from many on the left. Your pornography will arouse hand-wringing and concern trolling. If you talk about sex, the other side will think that’s all we’re about! Why can’t you keep things family friendly? I know for a fact that you—yes, you—are acquainted with liberal LGBTQ folk who recoil in horror from drag queens or discussions of trans rights, or who think that men in harnesses, jocks, and chaps are too racy, too much for a big-city Pride event. Sure, a lot of those people might have an alt or a Grindr account where they post naughty photos from the neck down, yet won’t show face or admit to slutting around when no one’s looking. Being honest about their sexual life and desire? It’s not safe.

Hell, even some allegedly progressive gay guys like those podcast hosts, intelligent and articulate as they might be, don’t want to admit that gay men engage in, you know…gay sex. They talk about a gay topic to probably a mostly-gay audience, yet react in abject horror to a fairly mild Twitter feed with a bare modicum of full-frontal male nudity.

As an artist confronted with anger and disgust, you might start editing yourself bit by bit. Like I did for a while, after being called out on that podcast, you can second-guess every word that flows from your brain. You can censor your own work, chip away at your authenticity truth after tiny truth in an attempt to make your art as unobjectionable as possible. Know, though, that every compromise you make, every tiny concession to your invisible enemies, will begin to obstruct your creative flow until one day, it may not flow at all. What you create in the meantime won’t resemble your real, fearless self. It will be a cramped and sorry simulacrum, a duplication sent through the copier too many times until it’s unrecognizable. It might be more innocuous. It won’t be you.

Yet the process of playing it safe and murdering your very soul, frankly, will not win you any converts. It won’t lessen the foaming mouths from the right, nor will it remove the doubts of the tut-tutting left. If an outright masterpiece like The Color Purple can be banned as pornographic, editing a couple of cocks from your sketches or your stories has a snowball’s chance in hell to escape censure.

Don’t be a tame lion. Write to piss off anyone frightened of adult sexual content. Write to make your mommy and daddy cry. Be faithful to your experiences. Nothing created from a stance of integrity is shameful. Do not allow yourself to be shamed.

Roar.

4. Pornography Is an Act of Historical Preservation

No work of art—and I’m including artful pornography in my sweeping statement—is utterly divorced from its time. As someone who writes sexual memoir, I can look back on my body of work and see trends across broad eras. Pre-PrEP vs. the wild explosion of sexual energy after gay men widely started taking Truvada. The carefree social days before 2020 vs. the post-pandemic landscape. It’s wild, looking back on my Twitter feed around the time of the monkeypox epidemic—was it really only last year?—and I was tweeting out like crazy resources and databases for men in the New York City area seeking inoculations.

I spent the better part of two years adapting essays from my blog into full-length memoir that focuses on my teen years as a sex worker during the 1970s. I was really struck, both while doing the research and later while trying to find a new literary agent for this beautifully-written and fucked-up work of art (Hi…still looking for someone unafraid of the subject matter! If you know of an LGBTQ-friendly agent or publisher who’d be interested, slip them my digits, would you?) how uniformly shocked my contemporaries were over how casually and successfully I got into hustling in a decade tucked between Stonewall and HIV. But they shouldn’t be. There’s a reason movies got made with Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields as 12-year-old sex workers in 1976’s Taxi Driver, and 1978’s Pretty Baby. Teen sex work was rampant and ignored in that weird era. Everyone’s darling, Eve Plumb, was selling her body in Dawn, Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, which then spawned Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn, a sequel about her bisexual, teen male counterpart. And these last two movies were made for prime-time TV!

Now, no school guidance counselors in the seventies were advising sex work as a worthwhile career. Parents weren’t saying, “Why can’t you hit the streets, like that nice Jan Brady?” Things weren’t that lackadaisical. But it’s wild, the difference between the swinging seventies and this post-Epstein era. Teen sex work would now never be portrayed with such nonchalance. Nor, as in Pretty Baby, would it be so unwisely romanticized. The work I put into my memoir, uncovering a decade both remote and unfathomable, often felt more like archaeology than writing. I wasn’t striving to defend the customs of that lost era, mind you. But I did work to capture its nuances and unspoken rules, so that others might understand how kids like me could’ve slipped through the cracks.

Every time you craft pornography, you too write as a historian, chronicling the world around you. You’re possibly an anthropologist, recording the cruising spots of your locale, their customs, their clientele. You might be a sociological expert on the dwindling bar culture of today, or the ephemeral customs and rituals of apps like Grindr and Scruff. Or you could take the perspective of a reporter, encapsulating the angst and terror of a gay man living in a red state, or who documents the sexual mores of lesser-known underground movements, like that of competitive leather or a polycule making its own rules.

Even wholly-imagined stories that are way out there speak of our contemporary obsessions. Whether you’re creating fiction or memoir, every tale reflects the time in which it was written.

The simple fact is: we don’t know what’s coming down the road. When I turned 17, the AIDS epidemic descended to decimate the entire tapestry of tearooms, park cruising, and street hustling that had been the only gay fellowship I’d known. I’d foolishly thought that world would last forever. It was never to return. Queer bars might vanish in the next ten years, the very same way. That red state could turn blue. Twitter has had the joy squeezed from it for a long time, and now has devolved into X; similar advances in technology and the companies behind it could render the apps a quaint footnote in future LGBTQ e-textbooks.

“Grindr?” some young future scholar will say, thinking the spelling is a misprint. “What the nanofuck was that?” Then he’ll clear his VR desktop with a blink and twitch his nose to fire up Pervertigo 3000, the latest visual cortex overlay that automatically scans nearby male DNA, extrapolates and projects probable penile length, filters anything less than 20.32 centimeters, and places a red highlight on an eligible subject’s crotch, while displaying all the naked simulated holofantasies his subjects have neural uplinked with the tetraweb.

Help that young scholar, pornographers. Write all the nasty stories about your Grindr hookups that you can, so he can finish his dissertation. Now, while you’ve still got time.

5. Pornography Is Great at Getting People Off

You might even say that’s its primary purpose. The best way to celebrate sex is to share it. When you write an especially steamy story, you’re quickening your reader’s heartbeat. Making skin prickle with sweat. You’re increasing the blood flow to private parts. Causing things to twitch and swell. Maximizing moisture.

Your words, artfully arranged, have the power to persuade your reader to reach down, to unzip, to thrust upwards, to grab what needs attention, to squeeze and pulse and rub. The images you paint will elicit gasps and moans. Hips will gyrate; nipples will ache and beg for attention. Your reader will close his eyes—but then force them open once again because he needs to continue reading. You have snared someone with mere words, and he will follow where you lead.

If you’re lucky, if you’re skillful, you’ll coax him toward a precipice from which he will not shy. Nearer, you’ll inch. With greater speed, his mind will race. He’ll time his strokes to your words, stepping closer and closer until over the edge he plummets, body shaking, semen pouring from his red and stubborn cock. This stranger, someone you have never met or seen, will thrash and rasp and pant to your words. Eventually, as his climax recedes, he will laugh at himself and at the shock of the pleasure you have brought him.

Now, pornography does not have to arouse. It can dumbfound, or disturb, or make its audience chuckle or cry. It can convey multitudes. But I ask you: is there anything more gratifying that bringing someone that pleasure?

I say the following to my students, every semester. Every written word—every work of art—is a declaration of war.

An artist does not stoop to half measures. He writes to stake his claim, to make a stance. To conquer. To persuade. To sway both hearts and minds. Some writers are so skillful they evangelize rivals into followers. Others seek only to lay waste to their foes.

There are all manner of wars. Many are loud and bombastic, sounding of drums and cannon. Other hostilities are settled more stealthily, through the sly insinuation, the gentle innuendo, the poison pill. Some commanders wheedle; some flatter and humor their adversaries into submission.

Make no mistake, though: every artist writes to win.

Pornography can be a weapon in your war. If it is composed from a place of truth and experience, if it is deliberate in its aim, pornography illuminates. Its brilliant light throws into sharp relief what the sanctimonious most fear about themselves; it spotlights hypocrisy and blinds those who would not recognize its virtues. In the hands of an artist, pornography is an incendiary, ready to explode targets of religious and political oppression.

No wonder it frightens those accustomed to staying safe.

This is why I write pornography. Not because it’s easy. Not for fame or quick cash. I write pornography because sexuality is our gift from the universe. I write because it’s important to record, to preserve, to teach, to anger, to arouse. I make pornography, because pornography matters.

And that’s why I think you should make pornography, too.