Sorry to lapse so long -- trying to stay on top of those e-mails. Thank you --
The issue of women in the industry is truly a good place to start. So much of what is opined about this business derives from the ways our cilture and other cultures define the role of women. There are many places in the world -- some not so far away as you might guess -- where the role of women may be veneered in a rhetoric of reverence, but is harnessed, in practice, by their treatment as property, as a "reproductive resource", as the objects of men -- rather than something more balanced, more self-determining, more fulflled.
I have my own views on the subject, but rather than risk alienating anyone who may uphold a more traditional / conservative view of the gender roles, I will say simply that to understand our industy's situation in the national and global culture, you should study the ways in which gender biology gave rise to the fundamental behavior schism that exists in some way in all cultures of the world, and the ways in which that Basic Separation, present in each culture, has given rise to modern expectations of sexual propriety -- and therefore, to the various opinions of pornography you will encounter on the streets of the world.
The problem with the basic objection one hears about pornography is that it contains an enormous hypocrisy (or conflict of interest, depends how you look at it). It seems very few men are prepared to INTEGRATE WITH ALLOWANCE the behaviors in women they most appreciate in the pornographic material they consume. And for women, I would say the conundrum is knowing that their men will respond with sexual enthusiasm to one thing a woman may do at one moment, then condemn (to the point of the death penalty in some places) that same behvavior when observed at a less secure moment for him. Women also worry, I suspect, that even the most sincere demonstrations of approval during sex, veil a condemnation and misogyny that lies always ready to strike them at other moments. The combination of these two dynamics is what drives most men and women APART when they are pursuing sexual truth in themselves, even if they are in the same bed. Porn exists in the middle of that tug of war.
2HP