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It's an industry of evil. Just look at the participants:

The girls are mostly damaged, drug addicted and poor. They're failed actresses stuck in LA with no family and no means of survival. Whether or not we have any sympathy for them (and who really has sympathy for failed actresses in LA?), the fact remains, they're weak, alone and broke, and that's why they get into porn.

The men are largely fresh out of prison biker/Aryan Brotherhood types. Career criminals, that's what they use for these videos (next time you're watching a porn video, look for the blue prison ink. It's a dead giveaway). They get cons because they'll bascially work for the sex and the drugs.

The distributors? Mobbed to the gills, always have been.

So we have a multi-billion dollar industry in which mob thugs pay desperate, lost, drug-addled girls to have sexual intercourse with up to 15 different ex-cons a day in front of a camera. And if she gets the jitters or has any doubts about what she's about to do, there's always plenty of coke and meth on-set to get your head fixed up right. Always.

I love sex, but this ain't sex. This is the devil (or whatever you want to call him), playing on our love of sex. With bad, broken people carrying it out on every level.

And in spite of all that, it's still tempting as hell. That's how I know it's evil.

Just one man's opinion... Free of charge.

That is a reasonable argument, and it has almost nothing to do with evaluating the indulgence of porn,* but rather with assessing the real-world production of porn. My response would be that measures should be taken to 'clean up' the porn industry as much as possible. It wouldn't be that difficult to do (of course you could not eliminate all such problems), but isn't done because society wants to keep it in the shadows. In order to directly confront such issues, you must bring them into the light of day, and 'we' don't want to do that. That was clearly the case last year when a handful of adult performers contracted HIV. There was a brief flurry of talk about regulation, then it all vanished into the shadows again with hardly any notice.

There is another argument as well along the lines of: were it not for broken girls and dissolute men porn would not get made. Perhaps that is true to some extent (of the 'hard-core' stuff) but that's neither here nor there. The underlying topics you raise should be confronted for what they are, and porn can then become whatever it will be to whatever extent they are resolved.

A lot of this ties back into what I said earlier about our unhealthy social regard of sexuality, in tandem with some unrelated or indirectly related social ills. The basic point that I am making is that graphic erotic imagery is not the problem; other social ills that intersect with that are the problem. And I don't condemn sex for what it is, nor do I classify it in some vague, shady sphere apart from the rest of human life. I think most of the problems with sex arise from that type of attitude.

* Except in the most tangential sense of: 'if you have sympathy for the participants, you won't patronize the product' or something along those lines. Arguable in itself.

next time you're watching a porn video, look for the blue prison ink. It's a dead giveaway

Whoa, whoa, whoa.....I have a lot of blue ink on my body and I've never even been in jail, let alone in prison. You have no idea what you're talking about here. Most people I know with ink have blue ink. It's a toss up between green and blue as to which is the most common outline color.

PS. And I am not agreeing that your characterization applies universally to the adult industry, but that it does to enough of an extent that it should be considered. In many cases that is more the perception than the reality. By example, the Canadian girl who contracted HIV seemed to be pretty content with her job when leaving that aside (and she evidently made pretty hard-core films), at least in the interview of her I read at that time.

My main thought in that regard is that I think it is unfortunate for the people involved to the extent that it limits their future options in life (career, family, etc). Then again, I think that that's what pays their bills, and it's better than selling themselves on the street or running drugs. We don't live in a perfect world. You know that!