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Porn is educational, egalitarian, pluralistic, affirmative, health-giving, the resource of the shy, sad and disabled, the safest form of safe sex. Sex industry workers enjoy conditions "less dangerous and onerous than those experienced by the women who labor in mills and on assembly lines". Above all, porn - like high art - challenges establishment values. She describes the effects of MacDworkinism in Canada, where gay and lesbian bookshops have suffered more at the hands of busybodying Customs officials than have the hard porn merchants.Defending Pornography is a spirited and well-documented book But it does have weaknesses One is that Strossen romanticises porn All's rosy in her garden of love. She does not buy their distinction between "criminal" and "civil" suits - if anything, fear of a civil action may be more off- putting to a writer and artist who would like to make sexual expression part of his or her work.

She attacks "the notion that all expressions, looks or gestures that recognise a woman's sexuality are somehow antithetical to her personhood". Equality is one thing; treating women like children, or servants, in front of whom certain words may not be spoken, is another. How are women to reach the upper echelons of businesses and institutions if the men currently in positions of power are made paranoid about how to interact with them - if a climate is created where male and female colleagues can't ever relax, joke or talk dirty without the fear of legal comeback?The erotophobes have also misunderstood the meaning of sexual images, Strossen believes. Male violence against women, for example, plays little or no part in most porn videos.

In 1993, for example, the University of Nebraska ordered a graduate teaching assistant to remove from his desk a photograph of his wife in a bathing suit, claiming that it created "hostile-environment sexual harassment of female faculty, students and staff".How can measures like this possibly serve the interests of women, Strossen wonders. Every Jill must have her Jack, and if that's not possible, she has as much right to jill off (a phrase new on me) to her material as he has to jack off to his. It's also an issue about defining women's sexuality - what they willingly choose, rather than are coerced, to do. If you think women perform fellatio, say, only to please their man, you will be in MacDworkin camp; if you think they can derive their own pleasure from it, in Strossen's.To Strossen, the MacDworkinite line on gender difference isn't a defence of women but a betrayal of them - a tale of female weakness and male potency. Take the attempt to protect women from harassment in the workplace, by asking employees to refrain from all comment and imagery of a sexual nature.