It’s important to distinguish, by the way, the difference between genuinely bad porn and porn that just doesn’t do anything for us. It might also help to work on a “grammar” of porn — some parts, like the hands-on-breasts cliche, represent acts the viewer would like to perform while others, like ejaculation outside the body, probably have more to do with employee psychology and industrial efficiency and nothing at all to do with viewers preferences. The tendency towards pudgy or otherwise unattractive men may have as much to do with non-threatening surrogacy as viewer identification.

Most of the other sex-bloggers talking about porn this week seem to be women. Nearly all porn, even that made by women, is made for men, and as such it often fails to appeal to intelligent women. Seems to me there are two ways to deal with that: give up, or develop a clear way to describe what should be done instead. As a former HP technical manager used to say “Investment follows the clearest specification of success.” Which is an extremely oblique way of saying tell someone what you want and a better way to do it and they’ll be way more willing to produce it for you.