“I’m the kink controller here at Click + Drag, which means I have to keep people in line,” says the 40-year-old Ehmann. “I make sure that nothing gets out of control — just kinky.”

She soon flexes her kink-control muscle. Making her way through the main dance floor upstairs in her thigh-high latex platform boots, she spots a young man jumping about with his penis dangling from an open zipper. She grabs him and says, “For the last time, put it away or I will cut it off.” The man complies.

“I had to tell that guy three times to put it back in his pants,” Ehmann says. “No one wants to get hit with a stranger’s penis while they’re dancing! We have rules here — no bare genitals. You can show your ass and your breasts, so people think they can expose it all. But we don’t intend to get closed down by [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani.”

Ehmann has many titles in addition to kink controller. She is the “editrix” of Extreme Fetish magazine — dubbed “The best alternative sex publication in New York” by TimeOut magazine. She is on the board of directors of Feminists for Free Expression, an organization that fights restrictions on free speech, and she is a writer and a performer. But for all her roles, Ehmann has only one mission: to satisfy the appetites of New Yorkers who are not sated by polite and sterile living.

Her goal is not an easy one. This night has been particularly arduous for Ehmann. Earlier, while watching the door, she wrangled with two drunken tourists with thick Southern accents who insisted on entering the club and hurled obscenities at her when she refused them entry. Towering over them, with her hands on her hips, Ehmann told the boys, “We have a strict dress code here. Absolutely no denim, khakis or mundane clothing. You cannot come in.”

The theme at Click + Drag tonight is “Circus Sideshow.” All are encouraged to come dressed in circus couture and freak fashion. Ehmann, as “mistress of ceremonies,” wears a black top hat, red coattails and a thinly penciled-in mustache that curls at her cheeks.

“We have to turn away people all the time because of the dress code,” says Ehmann. “If they are not dressed to theme then they must follow the fashion guidelines. Otherwise access denied.” She explains that the code adds to the atmosphere of Club Mother and keeps away the “bridge and tunnel crowd.”

The dress code, posted on Club Mother’s Web site and clearly stated on its voice mail is: “Cyberslut, fetish, rubber, latex, Sexy Robot, Vampyre, Anime, Trekkie, Cyberpunk, Genderhacker and at a very minimum, creative black.”

Ehmann has been presiding over Click + Drag since 1996 with Club Mother owner Chi Chi Valenti, media artist Rob Roth and designer Kitty Boots. The idea behind the party was to meld sex, fetish and technology. The monthly themes and performances add spice.

The music fades, which is Ehmann’s cue to get onstage. She moves quickly, heading behind the red velvet curtain. The room is nearly silent. The curtain parts to a techno beat, and Ehmann steps forward. She tips her top hat, and the throng of fetishists, club kids and clowns applauds. Someone screams, “Abby, we love you!” She smiles and opens her arms as if to hug the entire crowd.

Ehmann introduces “the Reverend” Deacon Frost, a performer who eats glass and sticks pins through his body. She glides off the stage, then watches the crowd grimace and moan at the site of a chewed light bulb. Frost sticks a large needle through his cheek, taunts the audience a bit by wiggling it out his mouth, then pushes it through the other cheek. Ehmann smiles. She has offered an alternative to the “sanitized night life” of Giuliani’s New York.

When the crowd finally dissipates around 3:30 a.m., she goes to her East Village apartment, peels off the latex boots, scrubs off the mustache and climbs into a pair of old pajamas.

Her husband of five years, Eric Danville, is waiting with their dog, Zoe. Ehmann crawls into their four-poster bed draped with feather boas and wigs and gets some much-needed rest. She has a lot of work ahead of her. She must finalize the next issue of Extreme Fetish, review porn films, answer letters from readers and requests for her used panties, go to the gym, call her parents, walk the dog and clean the apartment.

“I’m just really normal,” says Ehmann. She enjoys sitting in front of the TV in sweat pants with her husband, a pornographer, and spending time on the phone talking to her sister and her young niece. Ehmann says she has a great relationship with her parents as well, who are “cool” about her lifestyle.

In her cluttered one-bedroom apartment off Avenue A, one wall of the living room is filled with family photos. She was born in New Jersey and raised in upstate New York. She lived in California for a while, then moved back to New York, where she has been living for the past 16 years. On the opposite wall, photos of friends, including well-known porn stars, line the shelves of the bookcase, along with Halloween knickknacks that remain year-round. It is her favorite holiday, as well as the date of her wedding anniversary.

Piles of porn videos clutter the floor of the apartment. She and her husband receive packages every day with videos to review — he for Penthouse and she for Extreme Fetish. Ehmann says this is one of the toughest parts of the job because the videos seem to all blend together. Nevertheless, she has to say something different about each one for her magazine. “The worst are those videos that are part of a series like ‘Anal Gangbang No. 12,’ or videos that are just shots of blow jobs and that’s it,” says Ehmann. “As much of a fan of blow jobs as I am, it couldn’t be more boring.” Danville also writes video reviews for Extreme Fetish, and fetish-related articles, but he does not get paid for his contributions. “I just have to give him blow jobs,” Ehmann laughs.

The couple first met in 1993 when she answered a New York Times ad listing a job opening at Screw magazine, where Danville worked. “I thought he was an obnoxious rock hipster,” says Ehmann. “A couple of months later we met at a party and had a fabulous one-night stand that has lasted six years. We are two pornographers in love,” Ehmann adds.

It was around 1996 that Ehmann began her crusade to make New York more “sex friendly.” Giuliani was in City Hall, and the showdown began between the strip club and sex shop owners and the Times Square Business Improvement District. She started a fanzine called Porn Free with the idea of giving away pornography. “I thought, hey, there’s a niche that no one is filling. Of course, it wasn’t very profitable.” Ehmann gave up Porn Free after being approached in 1997 by D&L Enterprises, a publishing company, to be the editor of a fetish magazine.

It was Ehmann’s goal to create a sex publication that would provide fetishists with content suited to their needs. Each monthly issue of Extreme Fetish has a particular theme, such as latex, shoe fetishes or musclebound divas. The magazine is distributed to more than 30,000 readers nationally and is also available online.

Ehmann’s entire editorial budget totals $5,000. “I do it all, so it keeps the costs low,” she says. The magazine’s headquarters is a section of her apartment that includes a Macintosh computer and piles of letters and photos she receives from readers. The letters take up three pages of the magazine and include stories of people’s fetish fantasies and requests for what they would like to see in the magazine.

One reader, Dave, writes to tell of his dream of having “unisex bathrooms where toilets surround a table … it would be neat to sit down next to a strange woman.” Ehmann published Dave’s letter and her reply, which states, “I am perpetually engaged in assisting people with the realization of their fantasies … I have tossed around the idea and may put together a photo shoot. So be patient, Dave. Dreams do come true.”

Another reader offers insight on “how culture compartmentalizes us — so that even our sexuality is divided into procreative and sinful. Viewing fetish may lead to new understandings and tolerance in the human condition.” He ends his letter by stating, “If you ever need pictures of a male using suction cups on his nipples … or pretending to be an amputee, let me know.”

Ehmann did not respond to this letter. She says she gets plenty of photos from her readers displaying their fetishes. She has just published one reader’s photos showing his sweater fetish. In one of the pictures, a man is wrapped in Angora sweaters from head to toe and bound with rope. In another, the man is swaddled under 20 thick sweaters. The accompanying letter thanks Ehmann for giving readers an outlet to share their desires and not feel like “freaks.”

Ehmann pulls all the letters that she will publish in the next issue and jumps to her Macintosh computer. She is frantic, with less than an hour to get the photos and artwork to the color separators. Extreme Fetish is already a month behind on this issue, devoted to medical fetishes, because of setbacks with the previous “Tits & Abs” issue featuring bodybuilders and physical domination.

“We’re running behind because for the last issue we had to individually glue in 30,000 scratch-and-sniff stickers of stinky feet,” says Ehmann. “When boxes of these stickers showed up at my door, my whole apartment smelled like stinky feet — not that it didn’t already.” Pungency aside, the issue also had to be retouched a great deal to remove the athletic logos from the model’s gym clothes to avoid potential lawsuits from companies that don’t wish to be featured in porn magazines.

Gathering everything she needs for the separator and printer, she checks herself in the mirror before heading out. Her red hair is piled on top of her head in a knot. She is not wearing any makeup, exposing her freckles. Wearing a pair of old blue sweats, she rushes out the door, looking like the alter ego of the fetish diva pictured on her editorial page.

Ehmann herself has a tattoo fetish. “I have star tattoos running from my ankle to my thigh. By the end of the year, I will have 2,000 stars, for the year 2000.” She also has a tattoo of a crown below her bellybutton, which she calls her “royal muff” tattoo. She admits her fetish is not as extreme as those of her readers.

“I am not a lifestyle dominatrix, contrary to what many people think,” says Ehmann, although she has played the role at La Nouvelle Justine, a sadomasochism-themed restaurant. She left the S/M supper club scene disagreeing with its premise. “Who wants to eat with a bare, hairy ass next to them?” she explains. She also feels that such places could perpetuate the myth that being a dominatrix is simply about “paddling someone’s ass.”

“It is a responsibility,” Ehmann says. “Being a dominatrix means meeting the slave’s needs psychologically as well as through physical punishment. It is just like being married.”

Ehmann says that one of the goals of Extreme Fetish is to dispel the myths people may have about S&M and other fetish lifestyles. It is the misconceptions, she says, that lead to fear and censorship.

As a fervent First Amendment defender, Ehmann has waged war against restrictions on free speech on her own and with Feminists for Free Expression. In 1998, when Giuliani used a zoning law to close down more than 90 percent of New York’s sex shops and strip clubs, Ehmann, along with others in the close-knit sex industry, protested in Times Square. She has also fought City Hall over its attacks on the Brooklyn Museum’s “Sensation” exhibit.

On a national level, Ehmann and the Feminists for Free Expression also fought the Communications and Decency Act and its restrictions on “indecent” and “offensive” speech on the Internet. The Supreme Court ultimately declared the act unconstitutional.

Ehmann says that censorship is often coupled with the excuse that it is for the protection of women. She believes that suppression of pornography doesn’t reduce harm to women and has often been used to stifle expression of women’s sexuality.

“Sexism, not sex, degrades women,” says Ehmann. And the answer to bad pornography, she believes, is good pornography, not no pornography.

I did not understand why my body wasn’t enough to satisfy him. I was willing to give him sex whenever he wanted, yet he chose to relieve himself to other girls. He explained to me that he had “this urge to see other women naked.” He promised to stop, but once again, a few months later, I found some porn on his phone’s browser history. He confessed that he had been watching it during his lunch breaks at work. I was very upset and went to stay with my mother for a few weeks.

He was very apologetic but told me he would never get over his craving for porn. He also promised that he would go to therapy for his porn addiction and would try to stop because it hurt me. He went to therapy, but it seems like they just talked about why porn was so alluring to him rather than how to stop it.

After a few months of therapy, he quit going. I decided to take action, and I monitored his computer daily and kept tabs on him to check if he was watching porn. I also decided that keeping him away from triggers would help him not crave it as much (he agreed). Whenever we would rent movies for example, we would choose ones without nudity in them. I also went as far as refusing to go to the beach with him (because I knew that if we went he would be checking out young girls and may even have to masturbate to them later on).

By placing these limits on his behavior however, I am worried because I adversely made him hypersensitive to seemingly nonsexual things such as a girl wearing short shorts. Now that he is deprived of nudity he has admitted to becoming very aroused by things that were formerly not very arousing, since that is all he has access to.

Now simply going into a supermarket full of teenagers dressed in provocative clothing worries me. He admitted he would never get over this teen fetish/desire for teen porn he has. Currently he swears he hasn’t watched porn for over six months. I have no idea if he is lying or not because I have stopped checking his computer for evidence because it started too many fights about how I was “too controlling.”

I am not sure what to do. I love him, but at the same time I hate that aspect of his personality. I am staying with him hoping that he really has stopped, but deep down I do not think he has. If I were to catch him again, I would leave him for good.

But I am a bit worried that if I leave him, this problem will exist in my future relationships, since most men watch porn these days.

Should I stick around and hope that he is telling me the truth? Should I tolerate my significant other watching porn despite it hurting me? Or should I just seek a guy that does not watch porn or is willing to give it up for me?

Porn Widow

Dear Porn Widow,

You could just leave, you know. You’re 20 years old. You have options.

Think about it. If you deeply, deeply love him and want to devote yourself to being with him, of course you can do that. But you don’t have to.

You don’t have to stick around and help fix him or wait for him to fix himself or sit up worrying about what he is doing. You can just leave.

He’ll be OK if you leave. It will hurt, but he’ll get over it. If he wants to devote himself to recovering from porn addiction, it might even be best for him. He could be celibate for a while. It might help.

You are not married. You haven’t made a solemn promise in front of friends and family to stay together. You don’t have children. You don’t own a house together. You have not blended your families. Few practical obstacles prevent your separating.

You can stay with your mom while you find a new place of your own.

Of course you have deep feelings. I’m just looking at it from a detached viewpoint. From here it looks like leaving him makes sense.

The overwhelming question is this: Do you really want to spend your crucial, wonderful 20s struggling in a relationship with a porn addict?

Here is a scenario: You tell him that you respect his efforts to change, but you don’t want to risk it. You know he’s tried, but you’re just going to cut your losses and move on. And then do it.

In your new life, you can tell every man you date, right off, that you are absolutely anti-porn and that you are looking for a relationship that is completely porn-free.

You may spend months or years looking for the right man. But why not try to get what you want? You have time.

Once you find a new relationship, here is a very wise suggestion about how to say what you want.

And now, because I did a good bit of reading in the course of coming to a decision, here are a number of interesting resources and links:

• Partners of Sex Addicts Resource Center
• MarriedToASexAddict.com
• Therapists who specialize in sex and porn issues (If he went to therapy and all they did was talk about why he finds porn so alluring, maybe he should find some new therapists to talk to.)
• “Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow”
• Prolonged exposure to dopamine may play a role in depression
• Naomi Wolf: Is Pornography Driving Men Crazy?
• your brain on porn (role of dopamine)
• Demise of Guys?

The Cupp photo exists as a “celebrity fantasy” – i.e., an imaginary hate bang. And though Hustler takes pains to cover its butt, noting that “No such picture of S.E. Cupp actually exists. This composite fantasy is altered from the original for our imagination, does not depict reality, and is not to be taken seriously for any purpose,” it ponders, grossly, “What would S.E. Cupp look like with a dick in her mouth?”

Of course, the usual conservative suspects have come out of the woodwork for this one, pointing an accusatory finger at what the Blaze helpfully refers to as “the liberal media” for this. Yes, the American Prospect, Mother Jones, Hustler – it’s all the same to us! On Wednesday, Glenn Beck begged, “Is this wrong, Democrats? Is this wrong?” — as if Democrats were responsible for what Hustler publishes. Who put that penis in that lady’s mouth? Probably Obama. And Cupp herself, on Beck’s show, seized the opportunity to condemn the National Organization for Women, and to add, “I wish that these media entities that perform this kind of misogyny would just come out and do what Hustler did, instead of beating around the bush and pretending to be fair, pretending to be above that. They’re not above that. This is exactly what they do every single time.”

Way to seize the moment, Cupp — except that liberals don’t like fake blow-job putdowns either. Nor do you see a lot of them out there in, say, the Nation. Want proof from the despised “liberal media”? How about how Audrey Ference explained in the L Magazine, “It’s Not Cool to Photoshop a Dick into a Woman’s Mouth, Even if You Disagree With Her Ideas. In These Times’ Lindsay Beyerstein, meanwhile, condemned the photo as “beneath contempt.” And on Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan noted that “More than 50 years after the women’s movement began, we’re still trying to silence women with dicks.” Even the always combative hosts of “The View” unanimously welcomed Cupp Thursday, with Whoopi Goldberg saying,  “This is offensive. This is not the dialogue that we have when we disagree.” So Cupp and company, please extend your detractors the courtesy of believing that we think this is gross too? True liberals don’t pretend that degradation is social commentary.

Flynt, for his part, defends the photo, saying “That’s satire” in an email to the Daily Caller. That “satire,” by the way, consists of the aforementioned blow-job pic, accompanied by the sad commentary that Cupp’s “hotness is diminished when she espouses dumb ideas like defunding Planned Parenthood. Perhaps the method pictured here is Ms. Cupp’s suggestion for avoiding an unwanted pregnancy.”

It’s pretty obvious that a company whose porn movies are cleverly titled “This Ain’t” – as in “This Ain’t Celebrity Apprentice” and “This Ain’t Dancing With the Stars” — is not trying terribly hard to distinguish itself from the people it’s lampooning. Also: apparently “Dancing With the Stars” porn is a thing. So Hustler may hide behind the false equivalency that sticking a penis in Cupp’s mouth because she hates Planned Parenthood is the same as its movie parodies or its glorious, long ago triumph of putting Jerry Falwell in an outhouse. But it’s not. It’s a photo of a real person, for starters, which means it can and likely will be distributed across the Internet pell mell and willy nilly without its disclaimer. Second, it’s exactly the kind of crap women have to contend with on a near constant basis — that we exist to be objectified, screwed and shut up.

Sticking a penis in the mouth of a woman whose opinions you don’t like isn’t satire, especially when you’re in the business of putting penises in women’s mouths all the time. It’s aggressive. Worse, it’s stupid. But at least both the image and the lame excuse for it achieve something Hustler and editors know a lot about. They suck mightily.

Seeing him in person, there was one thought on my mind: I need to sleep with him.

I’d been practicing for this moment since puberty. At age 12, I started investigating the world of sex online like a naughty Nancy Drew, desperately trying to solve the mystery of the male sexual psyche — and, given that I now write about sex for a living, I guess I’ve never stopped. From early-’90s chat rooms to hardcore gonzo porn, I’ve plumbed the depths of men’s desires, desperately trying to figure out exactly what men want in bed so that I could be exactly what men want in bed. Somewhere along the way, I started to explore what I desired — beyond just being desired — thanks in no small part to the men of porn.

It took ordering a shot of whiskey and a PBR — twice — before I could even begin to imagine talking to this man, let alone sleeping with him. Even still, my strategy was that of a grade-schooler — a tipsy one: I asked my friend to tell him that I liked him and then ran and hid at the bar. Mid-sip, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “I hear you’re a fan of my work,” he said — and suddenly I was starring in my own personal porno, bad script and all.

Unlike the cocky man he plays on-screen, he seemed stunned by my interest. “I don’t run into female fans all that often — or ever.” His voice was much higher than expected. I realized I’ve only watched him with the sound off for fear of a roommate overhearing.

We grabbed a pair of bar stools and he started getting into character. “What is it that you like about my work?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. My face aflame, I stumbled: “Well, um, you know, like, everything?” He seemed confused, like maybe this was a big practical joke, so I offered, “I like it when a girl,” I started to whisper, “goes down on you?”

Dirty talk doesn’t come naturally to me in the bedroom, let alone in a bar. No matter, he placed his hand on my thigh and then I realized: This is actually happening. I was about to sleep with a man that I’d watched on-screen countless times. Soon, his tongue was in my mouth, spinning wildly like he was trying to burrow inside me. His gyrations stretched my jaw to maximum capacity; it was like getting a routine teeth cleaning — only at an X-rated dentist.

Eventually, he pulled away and said, “Isn’t your boyfriend going to be mad when he sees us together?” I looked at him, puzzled, and then realized that he was trying to improvise a scene. I hardly needed role-playing to spice things up, but I tried to play along. The naughty improv ended with him grabbing my hand and purring, “We better get out of here” — and we did.

As we walked to my apartment, there was a voice in my head playing on repeat, begging: What the hell are you doing? It isn’t that I didn’t want to sleep with him, it’s just the sex-shame came rushing in: Once I do this, won’t I forever be a girl who’s slept with a porn star — ruined, tainted, stained?

What would my mom think?

Back at my place, we sat on my living room couch and I engaged in the nervous banter that usually arises from having a relative stranger in your house. Only I was keenly aware that while I felt clueless about how to smoothly transition from small talk to sexy times, he was a professional. “Can I get you anything?” I asked, nervously. He smiled — everything was a double-entendre — and then his mouth was on mine, his tongue down my throat again. “Mmm,” I lied. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was all happening too fast to be felt; he was moving at the speed of smut.

Eventually, we transitioned to my bedroom. Before I could reach for the switch on the wall, we were both naked and he was pulling out a condom; he’s used to performing with the lights on. It felt like this was my shot at the X-rated equivalent of the Olympics: How would I stack up against all the professional sex symbols that he’s been with? Would my years of training and YouPorn mastery count for anything?

There’s no need to go into great detail — do a Google search for “porn” and you’ll find an approximate representation of what followed between us. It’s exactly what I had breathlessly watched him do many times before, but this time it seemed mechanical and theatrical. Instead of being entertained, I was doing the entertaining, and I suspect he was too — but for whom, exactly? We were the only audience.

All of which is to say: It was like nearly every casual hookup I’ve ever had. Here were two strangers connected only by their fantasies of who the other was.

Afterward, he stood up, stark naked, and strutted around my room with his hands on his hips. He nodded as he circled, taking in the belongings of the woman he’d just fucked, pro bono. Then he clapped, “Well! I better be getting home now.” No snuggling with the porn star. “Of course,” I said. We did the perfunctory exchange of numbers and I showed him out.

Despite the emptiness of it, I felt a sense of accomplishment over my conquest. I mean, I slept with my favorite male porn star! But when I texted my roommate with the breaking news, she wrote back, “Is this supposed to be a good thing?” Where was my high-five? A man in a similar situation would be heralded a hero by his friends. What had originally felt empowering — the unabashed pursuit of something I strongly desired — began to feel shameful. I started wondering, “What kind of man will want to be with a woman who’s slept with a male porn star?”

As it happens, not too long thereafter I got into a relationship with just such a guy — although I didn’t know it until recently, well into our relationship. I sat him down, poured two glasses of red wine, and said: “Babe, I have something to tell you.” He looked terrified as I paused and then forced myself to continue, “Before we got together, I slept with my favorite male porn star.” His response was immediate: “On camera?!” When I explained that, no, I just slept with a man who happens to make his living having sex on camera, he seemed confused: “That’s it?”

Exactly, that’s it. He has no reason to feel threatened by the encounter: It’s in the context of our relationship that I’ve felt comfortable enough to stop striving to meet a sexual standard set by porn — no performance, no faking. This isn’t a story about forsaking smut, though. Sleeping with my favorite male porn star was thrilling and fun. It’s a memory that I occasionally turn to for private titillation — when YouPorn doesn’t do the trick. But I do have a whole new appreciation for the difference between fantasy and reality, and how much sexier the latter can be when you aren’t striving for pornographic perfection.

Pornography surely changes the brain in some ways — but so does everything. “Watching the NCAA playoffs is going to change your brain, eating chocolate — any time you have any kind of experience, it’s going to change your brain,” says Rory C. Reid, a research psychologist at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA. “The real question is, ‘Are those changes substantial enough that there’s going to be some observable effect?’”

As to Santorum’s claim that such damning research exists, Reid says: “Well, if there is, I’d sure like to see it!” He continues, “There’s not a single study to my knowledge that has even demonstrated half of that [claim].” Allow me to put into perspective Reid’s expertise: He not only specializes in neuropsychology but he’s also one of the world’s top experts on hypersexual behavior. If any such evidence existed, let alone “a wealth of research,” he would have seen it.

Still, he humored me by logging onto PubMed, a database maintained by the National Institutes of Health, and doing a search for any studies involving neuroimaging and pornography. Plenty of related research showed up, but none reliably demonstrate “profound” brain changes. The problem with much of the research in this arena is that it’s limited to (in nerd-speak) cross-sectional and quantitative data — it doesn’t establish a cause and effect.

In order to reliably demonstrate such a brain-damaging impact, researchers would have to engage in the sort of study that no review board would approve — especially when it comes to the impact on children. “You would have to get a group of children that had never looked at porn and then divide them into two groups,” Reid explains. They would all undergo brain scans and then half would have to be repetitively exposed to pornography before another round of brain scans. In addition to then showing “that there had been changes in the brain that would be detrimental, you’d also have to correlate that with behavioral outcomes,” he says. (That’s not even mentioning the issue of how to define pornographic material. As David Ley, a psychologist and author of “The Myth of Sex Addiction,” says, “The Supreme Court couldn’t answer that, but Santorum can?”)

Lest you think Reid is a pro-porn activist, he’s not. He’s written a book titled “Confronting Your Spouse’s Pornography Problem.” He works with patients with sexual compulsivity problems and believes that porn “can be a gateway to developing problems.” He tells me, “Philosophically, I’ve got all sorts of problems with porn. It’s not that I have this liberal perspective that there shouldn’t be any constraints on our sexual behavior … but this idea that consumption of pornography causes cortical atrophy that leads to negative consequences? We haven’t seen that.”

In an email, Bruce Carpenter, a researcher at Brigham Young University — of all places! — made a point of expressing his moral opposition to pornography, and his suspicion “that pornography has larger deleterious effects upon individuals, family, and society,” before writing, “Now to the evidence. THERE IS NONE.” He adds, “There is not a single study of pornography use showing brain damage or even brain changes.”

Similarly, Barry Komisaruk, a Rutgers University psychologist who has done groundbreaking research on the brain during climax, says, “As an experienced reviewer of neuroscientific research literature, I would welcome the challenge of reviewing and commenting upon, the ‘wealth of research’ that the statement claims exists,” he says. “I invite the claimant to make it available to me.” In other words: Bring it on.

Not even a smidgen of such evidence exists, let alone a “wealth” of it. As psychologist Michael Bailey, a professor at Northwestern University, told me, “Santorum is simply trying to wrap his religious ideology in scientific garments. But the emperor has no clothes.” If he’s so interested in the science of porn’s impact, maybe Santorum should add federal funding of sexuality research to his platform — and discourage his GOP brethren from attempting to defund such studies in the future.

I liked doing porn. Though I never wanted to be in a situation where I was doing it to pay my rent, I wanted to do it to enrich my life, so I could do things I wanted to do or so I could go on a vacation I wanted to go on. I was making good money, and all that kind of stuff. I filmed my first films in the beginning of 2009, and things started to come out in August 2009. I got tons of press and everything, but I didn’t tell my mom — not because I was skittish about it. My mother was a free love hippie-type person, and she’s always been very sex positive. But it was not something I needed to tell her. My parents divorced when I was really young, but I don’t talk to my dad. I came out to him when I was 17 or 18, but he is very anti-gay, so I haven’t spoken with him in 17 years.

Then in February of 2010 I got a phone call from my mom. My mom never calls me. Never. It’s like pulling teeth to get her to talk on the phone, but she called me and she was like, “Are you on the cover of a magazine?”  I had been voted Man of the Year in Unzipped Magazine that month, so I said, “Yeah … how do you know that?” And so she told me this story: It was a Saturday night, and she had had a date with a guy and he had stood her up. She wanted to entertain herself so she went to the adult bookstore to buy a dildo, and she decided to browse the gay magazines because she said that’s where the hottest guys always were. And there I was on the cover of the magazine.

Later on she called me again. She had read the article that went with my photos in the magazine, and she said it was really beautiful. She cried a little bit and I was like, “Oh, that’s really nice.” I think at one point she wishes she could have done porn, which is a strange thing to hear from your mom. Now we talk a lot more and there’s always the feeling that I don’t need to be hiding anything from her. If you’re open to your mom with the fact that you do porn there’s not really any other secret you can have.

Porn is much more out there these days. So many celebrities have sex videos, and everybody has naked pictures on their phones, and there are so many amateur porn tube sites. But I know a lot of people who come from conservative religious backgrounds whose parents have completely disowned them or distanced themselves from them, and it’s unfortunate. It’s hard to come out as a gay person, but it’s even more difficult to also come out as a person who has sex for a living. It can be hard for some family members to take. But that’s their loss, unfortunately.

My partner also does porn and his porn coming-out started when his aunt, who had a lot of gay friends, found his blog online. Then she told his mother. And she was shocked at first. But now she’s completely accepted it and makes jokes about it, like, “If I do porn, my porn name is going to be Luscious Lynn.” My mother is actually coming to visit in a week for a few days, and she’ll be meeting my partner for the first time, which is great.

I’ve never seen doing porn as a negative thing — ever. Just because it’s sex doesn’t mean it’s not moral. I’m not swindling people. There are plenty of white-collar jobs with bigger ethics and morality issues. I know the rest of society doesn’t see it that way, and it’s always a little frustrating to be an intelligent, educated, articulate person doing porn and have people thinking that you’re a high school dropout.

My mom’s just happy that I’m successful and not on drugs and happy. Anything else is a bonus.

As told to Thomas Rogers. 

Samuel Colt is a gay porn performer living in San Francisco.