ABSTRACT
Because it presents itself as if transparent in intent and lean in its grammar, the author did not find pornography useful for his studies on sexuality: no questions beckoned from within it. It seemed to serve people simply as a masturbatory aid, a sometimes better illusion-device than their own daydreams. Its functions looked too uncomplicated for dissection and microscopic analysis. At any rate, for about twenty years pornography has gradually come to help the author understand erotics. Having done little with it and having used it rarely and with little ingenuity, he thereby teach himself that it is not overwhelmingly valuable. Noting the dynamics—the fantasies—that underlie behavior does not help much in solving moral questions, just pushes around the problem of free will: where and when to affix responsibility. That is not quite correct, however; certainly, when we say morality has its psychodynamics and thereby imply that the issues are complex, we threaten the purity—the absoluteness—of "morality".
