Hypocrisy is one of the indictments Eric Schlosser levels against America in “Reefer Madness,” his smart, levelheaded look at the unpleasant truths that emerge when you turn over the rock of mainstream American business and check out what’s underneath. The other is that our worship of the almighty free market leads us to ignore injustice — because, as he points out in his discussion of illegal laborers, “giving unchecked freedom to one group usually means denying it to another.” It’s hard to argue with these conclusions. But Schlosser’s analysis takes a back seat to the vivid portrait he paints of three funny-money zones where punitive moralism, venality and Puritanism grow as luxuriantly as 10-foot-high Humboldt County sinsemilla. Although Schlosser is a meticulous reporter who rakes the muck with the best of them — his bestselling “Fast Food Nation” emptied out the grease trap of the fast-food industry — “Reefer Madness” is more of a guided cultural tour, by turns infuriating, depressing and weirdly entertaining, than a polemic. “If the market does indeed embody the sum of all human wishes, then the secret ones are just as important as the ones that are openly displayed,” he writes. “Like the yin and yang, the mainstream and the underground are ultimately two sides of the same thing. To know a country you just see it whole.”

It isn’t a pretty picture.

The title of Schlosser’s book is somewhat misleading — but in a way that proves his point about American hypocrisy. The book is ostensibly about black markets, so why is pornography one of his subjects? After all, peddling graphic images of people having sex is a more or less legit business now, an $8 billion to $10 billion industry in which stolid, respectable, often Republican-run companies rake in a lot of swag. The three groups Schlosser looks at — marijuana dealers, growers who hire illegal immigrants to pick their crops, and porno-film magnates — actually have very little in common other than that they all probably avoid bringing up the details of their business practices at their kids’ school events. But porn has only emerged from the underground recently — and Schlosser’s point is that the unreflecting ease with which we have gone from prosecuting it and persecuting those who distribute it to consuming it en masse reveals how changeable our moral standards can be, and how wide the gap between our public pieties and private pleasures. It also shows how the almighty free market, worshipped by conservatives, opens a Pandora’s Box of thoughts and desires that many of those same conservatives claim to abhor. (Although, as the case of Bill “hit me again” Bennett proves, sin is hard to eradicate from even the most spotless souls.)

Schlosser says that “the proper role of the state and the proper limits on the free market are central themes of this book.” A classic liberal, he’s for government control when economic justice is involved, and for individual freedom on most issues involving private moral choices; he thinks our laws should reflect a public morality that’s consistent with our private one. The free market should be reined in when it perpetrates economic injustice, but marijuana and porn should be allowed to march under the banner of Adam Smith: he calls for decriminalizing marijuana for personal use and getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders, and he seems open to legalizing porn altogether, like Denmark. (Schlosser notes that after porn was legalized there it briefly flooded the market, then dwindled to a trickle. But since porn is for all intents and purposes legal, absurdly ubiquitous and largely free here already, it’s unclear what effect formally legalizing it would have.) But on economic crimes, like the use of illegal labor and the slick accounting tricks, overseas incorporations and other underground-economy type scams that, as Schlosser points out, mainstream companies have increasingly adopted, he believes in government intervention — and strict sanctions. “Economic crime should be punished much more severely than behavior that is considered merely unconventional or distasteful,” he writes.

Of the three classic American sins Schlosser explores — sex, drugs and the desire for cheap vegetables (had he done a chapter on file-sharing, he could have completed the unholy trinity carved into a million high school desks) — the best and most hard-hitting is the one on the war on marijuana. The American political establishment seems utterly impervious to reason on this issue: We continue to lock people up, invade their privacy and seize their property for possessing a drug that practically everybody has tried and most Western nations have decriminalized or legalized. Democrats refuse to touch it for fear of being accused of being “soft on drugs”; indeed, some of the bravest statements on marijuana have been made by conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr. But the ascension of Bush and Ashcroft has not helped: The sanctimony, ignorance, bad science, rage at the “cultural left,” and political cowardice that has kept America benighted seems only to be getting worse.

Still, one has to believe that sooner or later the gap between America and the rest of the developed world will become so embarrassing that our policies will change. When they do, clear-thinking, quietly passionate analyses like Schlosser’s will deserve much of the credit.

Schlosser starts by pointing out that the so-called war on drugs — an intentionally misleading and hysteria-inducing phrase — is mostly a war on marijuana. “Marijuana is and has long been the most widely used illegal drug in the United States,” he notes. “It is used more frequently than all other illegal drugs combined. Approximately one-third of the American population over the age of 12 have smoked marijuana at least once. About 20 million Americans smoke it every year. More than two million smoke it every day … The value of America’s annual marijuana crop is staggering: plausible estimates start at $4 billion and range up to $25 billion. In 2001 the value of the nation’s largest legal cash crop, corn, was roughly $19 billion.”

Marijuana, in short, has become almost as American as apple pie. But that doesn’t mean that the powers that be are prepared to wink at smoking a joint — at least not outside of a few areas. The statistics Schlosser amasses are staggering and shameful — even more so considering how many middle-class white people smoke the odd joint at home with impunity, while an army of poor people and minorities are being warehoused behind bars for doing exactly the same thing. “There are more people in prison today for violating marijuana laws than at any other time in American history,” Schlosser writes, including 20,000 inmates in federal prison and perhaps 25,000 to 30,000 more in state prisons and local jails. An incredible 724,000 people were arrested in this country in 2001 for marijuana offenses, of which 90 percent were for simple possession.

Schlosser holds no brief for marijuana or marijuana use, and he wisely argues that it should be kept away from young people. But he refuses to accept the thin, propagandistic arguments, based on dubious science, that hard-liners use to support America’s draconian marijuana laws. The notion that it is a “gateway” drug leading to heroin or cocaine use is bogus, a classic case of confusing correlation with causation. And marijuana is considerably less dangerous to one’s health than alcohol. Schlosser notes that “not a single death has ever been credibly attributed directly to smoking or consuming marijuana in the 5,000 years of the drug’s recorded use.”

Schlosser focuses on the case of an Indiana man named Mark Young, who received a life sentence without possibility of parole for brokering the sale of 700 pounds of marijuana grown on a nearby farm. (One of the more surprising tidbits in “Reefer Madness” is that most domestic marijuana is grown not on the West Coast but in heartland states like Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. It’s not surprising: He notes that a bushel of corn sells for $2, a bushel of marijuana — which admittedly requires several hundred times more labor to produce — for $70,000.) By contrast, the average length of incarceration for an American convicted of murder is 11 years and four months. “How does a society come to punish a man more harshly for selling marijuana than for killing someone with a gun?” Schlosser asks. The answer is not flattering to a society that likes to think of itself as enlightened.

After the harshness of the penalties themselves, perhaps the greatest injustice of the marijuana war is how unevenly they are dispensed. Class and race play a role, as do harsh sentencing laws, as does blind luck. Schlosser relates a few of the many cases in which the children of politicians got a slap on the wrist for offenses that could have earned less connected individuals 20 years. Mark Young got life (his sentence was later reduced on appeal and he is now out of prison) because of a random confluence of events. He had been convicted of two previous felonies, one more than 17 years old. His first felony was for trying to obtain diet pills with a fake prescription; his second was for possession of “a few amphetamines and Quaaludes.” These heinous offenses made him a three-strike offender and a “career drug offender” — liable to be sentenced, at the U.S. attorney’s discretion, to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Schlosser follows in the footsteps of Wendy Kaminer and other writers in savaging harsh mandatory minimum and “three strikes” laws, which he argues have degraded the judicial system by putting unprecedented power in the hands of prosecutors, taking sentencing discretion away from judges and encouraging defendants to turn informer. One of the reasons that Young got life was that he refused to betray a fishing buddy who played a minor role in getting the deal together. “This guy has nothing … This guy couldn’t buy half an ounce of marijuana, okay?” Young said in a jailhouse interview with Schlosser, explaining why he didn’t turn him in. Asked if he would turn him in if he had another chance, Young said, “No, I wouldn’t do it any other way.” In the brave new world of mandatory minimums and hysterical demonization of “drugs,” Young’s moral rectitude, instead of earning him a favorable evaluation and a lenient sentencing, assured that he was sentenced to life.

Young’s story is chilling, but no more so than the following statistic: “The number of drug offenders imprisoned in America today — more than 330,000 — is much larger than the number of people imprisoned for all crimes in 1970.” It is impossible to finish Schlosser’s account of the failed and ruinous war on marijuana without thinking that with regard to its attitude toward drugs, American society desperately needs an intervention.

Schlosser’s exploration of the burgeoning use of illegal immigrants is important in a completely different way — because it is so underreported, and because no one cares anymore. The “Harvest of Shame” that Edward R. Murrow exposed on the day after Thanksgiving so many years ago has never gone away — but our awareness, and our shame, have long disappeared. “The rise in the number of migrant workers in California, along with the growth in the proportion who are illegal immigrants, reflects a national trend that has passed largely unnoticed,” writes Schlosser. In the days of Cesar Chavez, there were perhaps 200,000 migrant farmworkers; today, their numbers swollen by the gross disparity between what a worker can earn in Mexico and what one can earn in California, there may be a million. (Membership in the UFW, meanwhile, has plummeted.) And they are being paid far less than they were before: “The hourly wages of some California farmworkers, adjusted for inflation, have dropped more than 50 percent since 1980. Migrants are among the poorest workers in the U.S. The average migrant is a 29-year-old male, born in Mexico, who earns less than $7,500 a year for 25 weeks of farmwork. According to one estimate, his life expectancy is 49 years.”

The crops most picked by illegal, exploited migrants are high-value specialty crops — strawberries, avocados, lettuces, peaches, plums. Schlosser focuses on the strawberry harvest — a brutal job that must be done by hand. The risks of growing strawberries are great — an entire crop can be wiped out by a few days of rain — which encourages growers to save money on labor costs by hiring illegals, who they underpay and don’t put on the books. The real scam, though, is “sharecropping” — the practice of letting workers become fake “owners,” who are responsible for hiring workers and getting in the crop. What happens, all too often, is that the sharecropper inherits all of the risk and little or none of the reward. Schlosser exposes how this benign-sounding practice actually often condemns the sharecropper to a lifetime of debt peonage.

Schlosser acknowledges the intractability of the problem: As long as a strawberry picker in California can make far more than he could make in Mexico, illegal immigrants will flock to the California fields. (Indeed, he points out that illegal workers are increasingly moving into nonagricultural work in America’s heartland, becoming meat packers and doing other jobs at wages that undercut American workers.) His solution is to raise minimum wages and enforce existing labor laws.

Schlosser makes a harrowing visit to a squalid migrant shantytown in San Diego County, where he meets an 18-year-old Mixtec man named Francisco. Francisco got up every day at 4:30 to pick strawberries for 10 or 12 hours a day. He sleeps on the ground in a 5-by-7-foot shack with two other men. In four months he saved $800, which he sent home to his parents. In the most passionate passage in the book, Schlosser writes, “Driving back to my motel that night, I thought about the people of Orange County, one of the richest counties in the nation — big on family values, yet bankrupt from financial speculation, unwilling to raise taxes to pay for their own children’s education, unwilling to pay off their debts, whining about the injustice of it, and blaming all their problems on illegal immigrants. And I thought about Francisco, their bogeyman, their scapegoat, working ten hours a day at one of the hardest jobs imaginable, and sleeping on the ground, so that he could save money and send it home to his parents.”

Schlosser concludes, “No deity that men have ever worshipped is more ruthless and more hollow than the free market unchecked; there is no reason why shantytowns should not appear on the outskirts of every American city … Left to its own devices, the free market always seeks a work force that is desperate, hungry, and cheap — a work force that is anything but free.”

The wild-card chapter in “Reefer Madness” is the final one on pornography — specifically, on the long, strange, sad saga of a man named Reuben Sturman, a former comic book salesman from Shaker Heights, Ohio, who became the father of the modern porn industry after he discovered that people were buying more sex magazines than anything else. Sturman built his empire, in large part, by pioneering the use of peep booths, which advanced beyond “stag films” by allowing customers to watch skin flicks in private. (Hilariously, Schlosser notes that watching stag films was a completely accepted practice, sponsored by Kiwanis Clubs and other respectable organizations. As long as only men were present, the cops and judges looked the other way.) But Sturman drew the attention of the morality police, who repeatedly tried to bust him on obscenity charges — and lost every time.

What finally did in Sturman was the same thing that did in Al Capone: taxes. Schlosser tells the engrossing tale of how a dogged federal tax investigator named Richard Rosfelder chased the elusive Sturman for almost 15 years, a convoluted cat-and-mouse game spanning several continents in which the porn mogul tried to hide his assets by using fake holding companies, picking names of “directors” out of phone books and a host of other tricks. His foes, besides just-the-facts-ma’am tax investigators like Rosfelder, were such apostles of morality as Charles Keating, a towering anti-porn crusader who was later brought low by the savings and loan scandal.

It’s a pathetic tale: Sturman was sent to a minimum-security prison, escaped, but refused to flee the country because he wanted to see his wife and child. He was recaptured and ended up dying in prison. The moral of the story: sell no porn before its time. Yes, Sturman deserved prosecution for tax evasion, but he was subject to a vendetta that went far beyond his tax crimes. Today Fortune 500 companies make billions of dollars by selling graphic sex, a fact that will probably prevent America’s ubiquitous scolds and bluestockings from driving it underground ever again. But it’s useful to remember that just a few years ago, with great fervor and the full support of the government and the citizenry, the hounds were set loose on those who sold exactly the same thing the men in the penthouse suites are selling now.

“American society has become alienated and at odds with itself, like a personality beginning to decompose,” Schlosser concludes after his tour of the underbelly of American business. It would be naive to expect America, or any society, to cease to be hypocritical overnight. But American morality is more two-faced than most nations’. After reading Schlosser’s book, it’s hard not to think: Wouldn’t it be pleasant if this country acknowledged the facts of life, just a little?

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.