When you get down to it, there’s not much difference between those strategies of disdain and Bill O’Reilly’s calling Jameson a “quasi-prostitute.” They’re both ways of saying that what used to be called “that type of woman” has no standing in real society. She’s not a real person. And, by extension, neither are the millions of us who watch Jenna Jameson and who have made her the most successful star in the history of adult movies.

As the representative face of a segment of pop culture that’s both more popular than it’s ever been (porn’s yearly income rivals that of Hollywood and pro sports) and still unacknowledged by most of its consumers, Jenna Jameson has become an unintentional provocateur. She’s managed to become a big star with only minimal appearances in the mainstream media (some hosting for the E! Channel; a recurring role on NBC’s canceled “Mr. Sterling” series; a bit role in “Howard Stern’s Private Parts” and guest shots on his show). I can walk into one of the big media megastores and buy one of her movies or a “Got Jenna?” T-shirt or a Jenna Jameson action figure. But I’m not likely to see her turning up on Letterman or Leno — and if she did, the conversation would likely be about the novelty of her being there at all.

It’s doubtful that Jay or Dave would oblige her with a plug by holding up a copy of “Briana Loves Jenna,” the second-best-selling adult movie of all time, or her latest, “The Masseuse” — a remake of the ’80s porn classic — or let her mention her Web site, Club Jenna.) She towers over Times Square on a billboard. But when she appeared on the cover of New York magazine last fall, it was to illustrate a pair of hand-wringing features by David Amsden and the hapless Naomi Wolf on the alleged insidiousness of Internet porn. Because of how she’s become famous, Jameson has made it harder than ever for people to maintain the hypocrisy that they recognize the names of porn stars but don’t watch porn.

Jenna Jameson has done more than any other performer to increase the acceptability of a part of our culture that, like it or not, isn’t going away. For her, porn has not been and is not a stepping stone to “legitimate” show biz. “The most important thing to me right now is to become the biggest star the industry has ever seen,” she told Wicked Pictures founder Steve Ornstein when she asked him to put her under contract. In no part of her new autobiography, “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,” does she pretend that porn was a detour on a career that was meant to be spent acting or modeling or singing. Jameson is the prototype of a new sort of star, one who doesn’t treat her particular brand of notoriety as notoriousness. Look at her book with that phrase — porn star — right there in the title, no coyness about it.

In this book, Jameson gets you rooting for her. Written with New York Times contributor Neil Strauss, the book is a captivating mess — with autobiography; celebrity dish; tips on making it in porn; transcribed conversations between Jenna, her brother and her father; pages from her teen diary, photo albums with everything from childhood snaps to skin shots to wedding pictures; comics; a “Ten Commandments of dating” (along with a list of the ones her husband has broken), all tossed together. A celebrity bio has to be judged on whether it’s entertaining and whether, despite the ghostwriter, a real person comes through in its pages. Here, one does, and that’s as much a tribute to Strauss’ ability to merge with his subject as it is to the strength of Jameson’s personality. “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” is lively, hellaciously entertaining, sharp, feisty and touching enough to earn Jameson the right to wear that “Heart Breaker” tattoo on her right butt cheek.

Not that she ever asks for anyone’s pity. Not once. The voice of this book belongs to what’s usually called “a troubled kid.” The difference is that in “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” that voice reaches us directly and not in the way in which we usually receive such voices, as part of a sociological study or as supporting evidence in an editorial.

The outline of Jenna Jameson’s life so far (she’s only 30) sounds like the typical run-up to a too-fast, too-soon outcome: Mother dead of cancer when she was 3. Loving but devastated father ill-equipped to raise her and her older brother. A series of negligent and abusive stepmothers. A generally unsupervised upbringing, leaving her and her brother free to get into drugs and other serious mischief. Moving from town to town. Gang-raped during her family’s stay in Montana, in an attack she very plausibly claims she was not meant to survive. Live-in girlfriend of a biker tattoo artist. Raped by his uncle. Work as a stripper, leading to appearances in men’s magazines leading to adult movies. A growing fondness for smoking crystal meth and bad relationships. Thousands of dollars made and blown. Eventual fame in adult movies and accompanying ‘tude. Unhappy first marriage to a controlling fellow porn star. Periodic lapses into drugs and booze.

That Jameson is alive to tell this story would, in best “E! True Hollywood Story” fashion, dictate an end replete with tears, redemption and “If I knew then what I know now” contrition. In fact, there is a happy ending: Reconciliation with her father and brother. A position as CEO of her own company. A happy second marriage to porn director Justin Sterling, now her only male partner, on-screen and off. A contented domestic life in Scottsdale, Ariz. Eager anticipation of motherhood. But the strength of “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” is in the way it shows that sheer, lived experience makes a hash of assumptions and ideologies.

The reason Jenna Jameson has become the friendly face of porn is that she is so reassuringly familiar. She has always looked like the prettiest girl you saw hanging out at the mall (in a recent interview she talked about how excited she was that her image was appearing on a ski board, like a girl whose boyfriend has painted her name across the back of his Trans Am). Hers is an accessible, American middle-class prettiness, blond and sunny, not exotic. She doesn’t possess the forbidding fashion-model beauty of a porn star like Tera Patrick (a former Ford agency model). Nor does she have the up-for-anything trashiness of the countless girls who pass through the industry.

Ten years into her career, Jameson doesn’t look used up or hard-bitten. Possibly that’s because she limits what she does on-screen. The same avenues that made porn more available, home video and the Internet, have also made it more private, able to cater to any fetish from the most benign to the most repulsive. In an industry that increasingly relies on pushing the envelope, she has always refused double penetration and gang-bangs, and has kept anal sex for her private life.

Reading “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” makes her seem even more familiar. Most of us have known someone, a friend or sibling or cousin, who made lousy choices and somehow come through it all OK. Often those people wind up living traditional middle-class lives — they get married, have kids, buy a home. But the route they take to get there is one that — often recklessly — shuns all the traditional middle-class safety nets of college or vocational training or settling down in one place.

What could seem a better way to flout middle-class values than going into stripping or nude modeling or adult movies (even though, for some of the people who go into them, they are the quickest route to middle-class stability)? But though sex workers have often been looked down on in the name of middle-class propriety, it’s interesting to think about what they share with the middle class.

Back when strippers were occasional guests on daytime talk shows (instead of the staple they’ve become), there were always a few well-appointed middle-class women in the studio audience who rose to chide the guest on her lack of self-respect and ask how she would ever manage to justify her job to her children. Whenever I’d hear a question like that, I always thought, fairly or not, that the person asking it must never have worked a day in her life.

The assumption behind that question is that work is ennobling instead of, for most people, a drudgery they endure to feed and clothe and house themselves and their families. The now-standard glib riposte to people who call porn degrading and exploitive is that you can be degraded working at Wal-Mart or Denny’s. There’s an obvious problem with the analogy — people who work retail or wait on tables aren’t required to fuck on camera. But the comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. You can just as easily lose your self-respect doing something that society doesn’t consider scandalous. And while there’s a good chance that getting literally screwed will be pleasurable at least some of the time, getting figuratively screwed is never any fun.

What I’m trying to get at here is the class cluelessness that has always seemed part of the knee-jerk reaction against any type of sex work. Sexism is a part of that, too, a belief that any young woman who ventures into the sex trade will wind up either a victim or a whore.

Jameson doesn’t settle these arguments; she complicates them. She upsets the easy assumptions of both sides in the debate about whether porn is degrading (damn straight it can be, she says) or empowering (ditto). One of the best and toughest chapters in the book is Jameson’s advice to would-be porn stars. She lays out what happens to too many of the girls who arrive at the industry’s regular cattle-call auditions:

“In a worst-case scenario, a gonzo director will take a girl to a hotel room and have their friends shoot a cheap scene in which she is humiliated in every orifice possible. She walks home with three thousand dollars, bowed legs, and a terrible impression of the industry. It’ll be her first and last movie, and she’ll regret it — to her dying day.”

Jameson says porn has more pitfalls “than nearly any other occupation.” Drugs is one. Maintaining a boundary between your job and private life is another. The inability to recognize the distinction is shared by many who love porn and many who loathe it — in other words, they both tend to assume that porn stars are whores who will sleep with anyone.

Even the girls who are lucky enough to land a contract with one of the big adult film companies like Vivid or VCA or Wicked find their battles aren’t over. A contract girl gets between $75,000 to $100,000 to appear in 10 movies a year (at probably two to three scenes a movie). They don’t own any rights to their screen work, so scenes can be reused in compilations. And because the adult industry isn’t unionized and the movies are so cheap to make, the stars make a piddling slice of the overall profits. (The professional in Jameson seems ashamed by the diva behavior she indulged in following her success, though it’s tough to read her account of that time and not feel that, for the money they make off her, the producers deserved a little bitchiness in their lives.)

The same is true with photo shoots, where photographers often retain the right to resell the photos for which they’ve paid models a basic fee. (Jameson calls the most famous adult photographer, Suze Randall, whom she insists she likes, “a shark.”) To make more money, many porn stars tour strip clubs as “featured dancers,” which can present its own problems, like obnoxious fans and chiseling club owners — one told Jameson she couldn’t keep the tips that patrons tossed her onstage because tips weren’t in her contract. (Jameson stays mum on the growing number of adult stars who hire themselves out to escort services.) And none of this touches the difficulty of having sex in front of other people, sometimes with male co-stars too nervous to perform, which isn’t exactly balm for a girl’s ego.

But Jameson doesn’t talk about porn as if it were the white-slave trade, either. She knows how easy it is for the gullible to be taken advantage of but insists that aspiring pornettes have to learn to protect themselves. (That may be a tad easy for her to say. She’s right that porn stars have to be firm about what they will not do, though the ones who refuse to perform a certain act, and who don’t have her charisma or star power, may find themselves with a lot fewer career options.)

For a long time, Jameson would lie when asked if she had been abused because she didn’t want to be seen as a victim. (She also rightly finds the question insulting. When was the last time you heard it asked of a comic or an actor or a musician to explain what they do?) For her, playing the victim is offensively easy. Jameson rejects the idea of using her rapes as an explanation for her career. “Was I in this business because I was victimized or because I wanted to succeed at something?” she asks. “I examined it from every angle I could, and every time came to the same conclusion: that it didn’t make a bit of difference. It occurred too late in my development to be formative. Whether it happened to me or not, I still would have become a porn star.”

Jenna Jameson’s story has a happy ending, but not one that moralists will be able to stomach. She got her happy ending because of porn, not in spite of it. Without it, she might still be Jenna Massoli, a Vegas biker’s girlfriend content to get high on crank, perhaps still stripping at a local dive and not going anywhere. The penultimate page of “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” shows a laughing, resplendent Jenna Jameson on her wedding day surrounded by her father, brother, sister-in-law and young nephew. Everyone is wearing white. Even the bride.

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.