Necessary Danger

It's perhaps sad but it's true: we cannot be trained not to do things because they are unsafe. 

We smoke, we drink, we eat wrong, we drive faster than we should, we leap from airplanes, we bungee-jump, we skateboard, we have sex. 

It isn't that we must do these things, it's just that they must be done.

In our world, safety cannot be mandated, particularly where the passions at the heart of our identities are concerned. 

We believe in miracles. We are optimistic and irrational. We believe that we can be saved if we will just be ourselves. We smoke, drink, fuck and play because this is what we are and this is what we do. 

It is this depth, this complexity and this eloquent and tragic irrationality that porn has the responsibility to represent and represent accurately and honestly. That is its job. 

An avoidance of unsafeness doesn't work as an anti-AlDS strategy, and it has been bastardized by the slicker elements of porn in ways that have only exacerbated the problem, promoting not a culture of sex and sexuality, but a perfectly tantalizing world of vapid heat and "sexiness".

Paul Morris

1998