“Our company can bypass your brain and heart and go for your erogenous and other viscera on its way to your wallet. Nothing personal, by the way.”

Nothing liberating, either – and my authority is the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who thought porn “a sign of a diseased condition of the body politic.” D.H. Lawrence wasn’t ducking indictment or an inquest when he wrote in 1929, in “Pornography and Obscenity,” that “even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously,” rebuffing “the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit…. There is no reciprocity… only deadening.” Lawrence hated porn because he exalted sexual love. He was happy that “the intelligent young… are rescuing their young nudity from the stuffy, pornographical hole-and-corner underworld of their elders, and they refuse to sneak about the sexual relation.” He came as close as any well-known writer of his time to seconding Oscar Wilde’s defense of homosexuality.

Lengthy article on the pornification of public spaces, from Salmagundi