Susanna Breslin, the writer of porn industry blog Reverse Cowgirl, has published an essay, “They Shoot Porn Stars Don’t They,” about the porn industry, its realities, and its fantasies. Its ultimate focus is how the recession and new media are affecting porn, perhaps inordinately, but along the way it takes several fascinating, and disturbing, detours to explore some of the unseen corners of the porn world.

In my last post about porn, I wrote mostly about the new wave of pornographers, specifically the new female porn stars who are more involved in the business side of the business. Women like Joanna Angel and Jilly Kelly run their own porn studios, and I’m sure they, along with like-minded male porn producers, treat their stars with respect, don’t bully them into doing things they’re not ready for, don’t traumatize them into a fugue prior to shooting scenes; that said, some of the stories told in Breslin’s essay are hard to swallow. It’s hard to imagine defending an industry that supports such outright emotional abuse and exploitation, even if only in the edge cases, even if only when things go too far. I recommend you read the whole thing. It’s not a hit job on the porn industry, but it shines a light on it, letting you see some parts you might want to forget about.

I recently listened to a Lenny Bruce album and realized something: Lenny Bruce wasn’t a comedian. I mean, maybe what I listened to was an off night or something, but the guy wasn’t that funny. If anything, he was a political theory lecturer with a good sense of humour.

This doesn’t belittle what he accomplished. He was willing to fight obscenity laws when no one else would. He attacked establishments like the government and the catholic church and wasn’t afraid to call them on their corruption and greed. But at the same time, he said some pretty stupid shit.

While discussing pornography and obscenity laws, he claims that pornography and obscenity laws are there to stop entrapment of wholesome people by prurient interests. His defense of what he does and other so-called obscene and pornographic works of the time is that they are not as a whole prurient in nature and so should not be judged by those laws. I’m OK with that part, but along the way he accepts and endorses the initial claim that pornography is essentially entrapment, that people are unable to resist material which arouses them. Seriously?

Are we expected to believe that someone can come across a magazine rack with a Playboy on it and be unable to maintain his composure and act like a rational human being? This seems like an absurdly backward view for Lenny Bruce, someone I’ve always understood to be a very forward thinking man, to have.

At least with pornography he defends most cases of it by virtue of its artistic merit, or the difficulty of objective analysis of artistic merit. But when it comes to drugs he’s just plain fucking nuts. He made the claim that there really are no drug addicts aside from the dozen or so the various law enforcement agencies have on the take. He describes heroin, in spirit if not in exactly these words, as a drug that no one uses. Maybe its merely that Lenny Bruce has the disadvantage of being dead and therefore unable to update his facts to modern day, but heroin and cocaine and other such hard drugs are a huge problem and their users are many.

Lenny Bruce was vastly influential — and without him we might never have had George Carlin or any of the other idols of modern comedy — but from my limited exposure to his work he doesn’t seem like a particularly great comedian, and his political stances, which are the core of his comedy, fluctuate wildly; maybe his own addictions tainted his responses on drugs, maybe the fact that he liked to swear and the fact that his job required not swearing guided his opinion on censorship. Either way, Lenny Bruce was a deeply flawed man, who managed to incite a revolution. Because of his work, obscenity became less obscene. Because of him, and others of that time, I can say “fuck” or “shit” or even “cunt” whenever I want. And that’s a freedom, like any other for which we’ve fought in the history of civilization, we should never take for granted.