On knowing your enemy

Dear readers,

You may have heard about the plight of pornography mogul Max Hardcore. Mr. Hardcore has been indicted on obscenity charges for shipping videos of people urinating on each other. Christopher Hitchens and I are off to Tampa to dig deeper into this story, and I'll let you know what we come up with.

In the meantime, here's a letter from the Shandy archives to Mr. John L. Harmer, chairman of the Lighted Candle Society, one of the most vocal and buzzkilling of America's ubiquitous anti-pornography organizations.


From: Laurence Shandy
To: John L. Harmer, president, Lighted Candle Society
Re: Pornography

Dear Mr. Harmer,

It has come to my attention that you are on the front lines of a forty-year battle against the ravages of pornography in American culture. As an enthusiastic practitioner of A2M lovemaking (go ahead and Google it if you're curious -- or just stop by my Manhattan penthouse any Tuesday, Thursday, or Sunday evening), I am no prude. But I must admit that when I'm online at three in the morning trying to order discount OxyContin from Mexico and I keep getting pop-up ads for "sweaty, diarrheal midgets" or "lasso-long labia majoras", my stomach starts to turn a bit. It's one thing to get hopped up on vintage Quaaludes and pay an illegal Vietnamese immigrant a couple cans of Vienna sausages to make your darkest sexual fantasies a gooey, delicious reality. But finding my e-mail box filled to overflowing with unsolicited images of emaciated German women engaged in coitus with any number of wild animals? Well, that's an entirely different animal.

Still, many of the movers and shakers in the world of pornography are just as much my friends as they are your sworn enemies. I know you think that they make you and your children do horrible, sinful things with your wing-wangs and hoo-hahs, but I prefer to think of their relation to your genitals as more in line with that of Michelangelo to his slabs of marble. My pornographer friends are only releasing those horrible, sinful urges from your mind and hands -- not creating them. And if you can accept this fact, then you may be open to befriending some of these wonderful Americans yourself. Let me tell you a little bit about them.

Jackie McMillan is a beautiful mother of four. She enjoys cheering on her children at their many soccer games and attending First United Methodist Church, where she sings in the choir. Jackie is also the editor of Wet Set, a men's magazine specializing in pictures of women urinating on themselves and in each other's mouths.

Houston native Jack McNenny was a struggling mill worker and family man before hard times forced him into the publishing business. After she finally succumbed to a brave struggle with breast cancer, Jack was able to pay all his wife's medical bills with the profits from Jack's Number Two, a magazine devoted to helping single men find partners who enjoy anal sex and eating feces.

Young paralegal Candy Apples tried to break the world gangbang record in 1999, but her efforts were brutally quashed by the interference of the notoriously racist and bigoted Los Angeles police department. She had only sexually serviced 743 partners. But even though she didn't break the record, she still put her Gangbangus Interruptus video on the Internet, where it continues to inspire men and women of all ages to reach for the stars -- no matter how painful and disease-ridden those stars might be.

And then there's Lisa Sparxxx, who celebrated Black History Month ("February" to you and me) by deep-throating any underprivileged African-American youth who passed a VD test. Never has an act of charity been so arousingly inspirational.

So, Mr. Harmer, I hope you now have a better understanding of just who these people are that you've chosen to chastise. Their faces are woven into the very fabric of America. You can see them at the grocery store. You can see them at the mall. You can see them at PTA meetings.

And, for just $29.95 a month, you can see them fellate a horse while sitting on a broomstick.

Best wishes,
Laurence Shandy, gentleman