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• Feminist porn doesn't sound like much fun to most heterosexual women and with very few exceptions, it isn't. It sounds like something you eat because it's healthy rather than because you have an appetite for it. This is the factor that limits its reach more than any other.

  It may come as a shock to some self-described feminist pornographers out there, but men and women who like porn tend to like more or less the same things. You know, all that heteronormative stuff that feminist pornographers love to trash. Evidently female porn consumers don't share the same political agenda as the visible figures in the fem-porn genre.

• I suspect romance novels are what women who aren't into "male" porn consume for their erotic needs.

  • Even in that instance, think about what's on the cover: the strapping, powerful "heteronormative" male with the female in his arms.

    • However much it may infuriate a certain kind of anti-porn feminist, most women are straight and not so different in their sexual fantasies from men. Those differences appear to be stylistic rather than content-based. Dr. Robert Stoller, the UCLA sexologist who pretty much began the study of porn from an academic perspective, used to call romance novels "women's pornography." But the point was that, while there may be gender differences in the preferred method of delivery, the content is pretty much the same for straight women.

      I think much so-called feminist porn is really mislabeled. It's not meant as a knock on the products made by self-described feminist pornographers, some of which are quite entertaining even if you don't share their take on sex, is really queer porn (not used in a derogatory way, as queer porn is a legitimate genre of its own that mainly eschews what it considers gender stereotypes).

      That kind of porn has an appeal all its own and can and does sell on its own merits. It's actually been around for a long time and built a market for itself. Attaching a political label to it does a disservice to both the products themselves and to the larger questions involving gender relations.

      I think those making these products would do themselves a solid by simply accepting their work as niche entertainment and quit trying to use it to make a statement about the kind of porn they don't make and don't like. Porn is about the worst medium I can think of for trying to express complex political ideas. It's just not what it's made to do.

      As Louis B. Mayer said all those years ago about movies in general, if you've got a message send a telegram.