I was introduced to the IDEA of pornography in three different ways. For starters, I knew it was a men's club thing, boys only, no girls allowed unless you show your titties. I imagined it was a bunch of Type A bullies, chauvinist to the bone, who couldn't look at a girl without reducing her to a bra size. "Porn exploits women" -- isn't that the first thing a young lady learns about the cold cruel world? It's a synonym for Men Use Women in the most calculating way. Second, I knew pornography was a business with a capital B. Millions of dollars were said to be made at it; it was an industry with a lingam instead of a smokestack, blowing clouds of jizz and peep-show quarters. Finally, I thought that the porn industry started at cheesy, moved on to gross, and ended at its logical resting place: the snuff film. My real-world introduction to porn started with these thoughts in my head, and the whole mess was so intimidating to me that I would never have taken a peek into it myself -- if my new girlfriend, Honey, hadn't gotten a job working as a cashier at the Market Street Cinema, a big porn theater in downtown San Francisco that featured live strippers and classic X-rated movies. When Honey came home from work, she told me that the whole place smelled really bad, and that she could chain-smoke her entire shift. She said there were some girls who were beautiful working there, some of them with mouths as smart as their stage whips, and some so sad you wanted to cry. The next week she told me she went to change the light bulb in the ladies' john, and when she unscrewed the lamp fixture, somebody's dirty works fell on her head. One afternoon, Honey called me up from the theater and said, "You've really got to come down here, they're showing an incredible film, 'Desire for Men.'" She said that the featured actress was a blonde named Long Jeanne Silver, a woman with a peg leg. I said I'd be right down. My first revelation about porn movies was that they were, in fact, movies. I don't know why -- all the hysteria about how bad they were, how dehumanizing -- but it was genuinely a shock to me to see a full-length feature with real actors and real drama, sexual drama, unfolding before me. They weren't just bodies, they opened their mouths; and you could tell this one came from Queens, and this one was a surfer, and this one was a little brat, and this fellow was so full of himself it was almost endearing. Sometimes the director had the gods with him, and I actually got drawn into the little story or setup he was creating. Sometimes I could tell it was all they could do to get the sex act on film. But then when the sex did happen -- cock entering cunt, tongue licking ass, faces all crazy when they came -- my goodness, docudramas don't get any realer than this! The put-up-or-shut-up authenticity of it all was audacious, it was radical. Another thing I could see about porn -- and this has changed a lot since video took over -- was that it was far less formulaic than Hollywood or television in some ways. Long Jeanne Silver was only the beginning of an endless list of actresses who had every physical attribute under the sun. You can look like whatever you are and be a porn star. Directors also had their little stamp; they were instantly recognizable, every one an auteur. They had this crass list of what kind of sex had to be in the film, but other than the "position" agenda, they were on their own voyage. Some directors had a social message they were determined to get in, along with the fucking and sucking. Some were clearly in love with one of the players, and built the film around their infatuation. Some thought they were producing the cinematic follow-up to "Sympathy for the Devil." Others obviously had a wonderful time doing all that blow and dope, and just wanted to show you what a great party you missed. Many porn directors are cinematographers who simply have an undying love affair with their lens. I'll never forget the time a close friend of mine in the business pointed out a porn film that I'd enjoyed tremendously called "3 AM," and said of the director, "He was Orson Welles' cameraman for 15 years." I was not consciously aroused the first time I went to a porn theater. For one thing, I was shocked by the quality; for another, I was terrified that one of the paying customers at the theater was going to molest me. I was once felt up by some jerk when I was 14, at a screening of "The Lady and the Tramp" that I attended by myself, so I just sort of multiplied the consequences of going from a Disney flick to a smut screen. At the very least, I feared that the seat I chose in the dark would inevitably turn out to be covered with cold, wet come. My girlfriend lent me a flashlight. As it happens, the men in the theater were much more frightened of me than I was of them. They scattered from every row I approached; I began to see that their eyes held the frankly paranoid delusion that I had been sent by someone -- their wife? their boss? -- to spy on them. The most disgusting aspect of a porn theater is what an assembly of closet cases the audience is. Everyone is deadly quiet, except for the popcorn crunching and the breathing of those in the back getting blow jobs from their brethren. When something funny happened in the movie, which was quite common, I would laugh out loud -- and completely alone. In all my time in porn theaters, strip joints, and peep shows -- and believe me, I've logged as many hours as any raincoater you'll ever meet -- I have only been spoken to, in a conversational way, two or three times. I have to hand it to the first guy who approached me -- he got right to the point: "Why are you here?" In the beginning, I wasn't sure why I was there. I was crazy about movies, and I thought porn had really gotten a raw deal, being so unwelcome in normal dinner table conversations. I was really in love with my girlfriend; I thought she was a genius and a great adventurer. And I was a feminist working in a "feminist vibrator store" where we were so politically correct that we didn't carry anything that looked like a penis (at least not in front of the counter), and when our customers asked us about "erotica," we really didn't have a clue how to advise them. I felt it was my professional and political duty to find out what and where all the good dirty movies were. But the other concern, in the back of my mind, was that I wondered if I was capable of being aroused by pictures, still or moving, of people in the act of sexual abandon. I had no experience of it. I certainly had been frightened by those kinky Polaroids I found when I was a child, and I had pawed through Playboys I found at my father's house, but they were more like anatomy lessons to me, of cheesecake that I could admire or wonder about. They never made me reach down and touch myself. Reading, on the other hand, reading sexy stories, was my very, very favorite way of getting off. I had mastered the art of holding a book and turning the pages with one hand while fingering my clit with the other. Those words on the page, the Penthouse letters in all their "needless to say" glory -- just thinking about the font that those letters were set in makes me all creamy with nostalgia. I had my favorite fantasies, and when I saw them in print, it was like a direct line to my orgasm. I had never had that experience with living color photography. Now my girlfriend had several jobs, one of them as the porn cashier and another as a banquet waitress working out of a union hiring hall. She was about the only woman working in a crew of the most unbelievable set of queens you'd ever hope to meet in the Tenderloin. One of her favorite work partners was named Victor -- rest in peace, my friend -- a Texas immigrant and totally devout Catholic who carried two books in his satchel: a leather-bound Bible, and a paperback copy of a little classic called "How to Enlarge Your Penis." Victor thought I was beautiful, he thought I had the figure of Marilyn Monroe. He gave me pearls for my birthday, and one day, after some outrageous fight he'd had with a lover, he decided to move all of his belongings into storage, and asked if I would like to "borrow" his big-screen TV/VCR. He left me a few videos, too, all "straight" -- since, par for the course, Victor had no voyeuristic interest in watching gay male performances, only men with women. The first movie I watched at home was some sort of sailboat orgy fiesta. I was excited before I even pressed the PLAY button, because I'd made sure no one was at home, and I felt altogether uninhibited -- much more free and comfortable than in the Market Street movie palace. I watched the couple on the sailboat giggle and take their clothes off, but I couldn't make out any dialogue -- Victor's audio system seemed to be hopelessly broken. "Mrwarrrr rahhdgh blehhh," went the girl who proffered her ass to the camera. This was getting annoying. I didn't feel the least bit attracted to anything. I poked the STOP button and felt like slapping somebody. Then I made a very important move, so dreamily and intuitively that I couldn't have told you where I thought it would lead. I plugged in my vibrator, put it in my lap, and pushed PLAY again. The same idiots frolicked under the sails; the camera moved close to the fat guy's cock; it was enormous, purple veins, the whole deal. Then we moved to the girl's behind, all plump and spanky, her hands reached behind to pull her cheeks apart, and she had a forest of dark hair running up her cunt to her ass. There were drops of something on her pussy hair, it was matted in places, wet. The camera and the stud moved closer to her, one of them expertly parted her thighs and lifted her a little with one hand, and right then, just with the tip, the purple cock slid in. My clit jumped like an alarm clock. I never would have felt it if the vibrator hadn't been humming against me. You have to remember, above the neck I was watching this silly trash and saying, "What a piece of silly trash!" But when his cock touched her, the opening of her wet lips, the words flashed across my mind's eye -- he's fucking her from behind -- and I came like a bullet. Well, of course, the first time is always a little bit special. I don't remember the name of the movie, which is so much like the anonymous heroism of porn -- you never learn the name of the person who saves you. Many porn flicks later, I would find that I was a sucker for any sort of rear approach -- don't even bother trying to figure it out, it's just another point of light in my thousands of irrational fantasies, but the first time was such an illumination. I had only succeeded in turning off my intellectual doubts and disdain by turning a Hitachi Magic Wand directly onto my clit. God, no wonder so many people are impervious to arguments about the value of pornography -- clearly, it sometimes takes a physical intervention! My confrontation with Victor's gigantic screen was the equivalent of Newton's apple: I began to connect the dots. I saw in my own body how inexplicable sensations could happen from seeing pictures that triggered my fantasies, and that I only relished these things when I felt uninhibited, without anyone watching or judging me. I could see how porn formulas were essentially a shotgun approach to hitting a number of broad sexual scenes, hoping that somewhere along the line the viewers would find where their erotic mind met a single frame -- and voilà! That's the secret of the pause button and the instant replay. What I perceived was the Pink Elephant of the pornography discussion: What turns you on may not match your artistic values, your romantic choices in real life, your political views, but it is just as much a part of you, just as real and substantial, as any other aspect. It's not a defect or a weakness, it's your intuitive ability to take all that's unbearable and crazy and unspeakable about life and turn it into juice -- eroticism. Don't you dare go around with your nose in the air pretending that anybody's fantasies are low-class or despicable, because without that juice you wouldn't be alive, wouldn't be able to discriminate; you'd be a stranger both to your capacities and your limits. Pornography is like four-letter words -- an unaccepted language that exists in every tongue in the world, the first to be expressed and the first to be suppressed. Here's your world without porn -- a world without sex, without creation. Expressing sex is always the first way we try to communicate, and it leaves its marks everywhere. Look at every technological innovation in communications, from cave drawings to the printing press to giant VCRs to the Internet. Porn has been more of an inspiration to me than I could have guessed when I first accepted the dare to walk on its turf. I looked, criticized, gasped, and got my rocks off. But my interest went way beyond my hormones. Before I knew it, reading other people's sexual bodies became as revealing and mind-bending to my world as only the greatest works of art can be. Eventually, I had to roll my own -- make my own erotic creations in print, with my crummy camera and my friends who believed as I did, that a pornographic sisterhood was potent stuff. We didn't know what we were doing, we hadn't one clue, but you know what? In the pornographic imagination, not knowing what you're doing gets awfully close to the truth. March 18, 1997 Excerpted from "Susie Bright's Sexual State of the Union," copyright 1997 by Susie Bright. Published by Simon & Schuster. Printed by permission. Another excerpt from the book appears in the March issue of Playboy magazine. What do you think of Susie Bright's views on porn? Get it off your chest in Table Talk.