scraps

[Professional pornography critic Bryn Pryor:] "The top of the heap in porn is the bottom in mainstream.... Porn is not a creative medium.... If we were really good, we'd be doing something else."

Pryor envisions a day when adult and Hollywood will converge, but in a sense that's already the case. If much of porn ranges from silly to degrading, what's the alternative on the other side of the hills? The viewer who isn't watching a mediocre porn product is watching—what? "Temptation Island"? W.W.F.?

Moralists like to see in pornography a decline in our standards, but in truth it's an all-too-ringing affirmation of them. Porn is no more or less imaginative than much of the junk in the entertainment mainstream—though unlike much of that junk, it does have an undeniable practical use. In that regard, anyway, ther may be no other product in the entire cultural marketplace that is more explicitly American.

Frank Rich, "Naked Capitalists," New York Times Magazine, 20 May 2001

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