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The Matt Drudge of porn | page 1, 2, 3
Of course, Ford knows that professional convenience isn't the only thing driving him. "I think part of the reason I do this would be some deep, dark psychological Freudian desire to return to the womb," he says half-facetiously. "There's something tremendously compelling to me about pussy. I'm fascinated by women's sexuality. Porn is a male fantasy of female sexuality, but I'm still spending a lot of my time interacting with fairly attractive women -- albeit IQ-challenged -- so there is a deep, dark psychological attraction there." Not that Ford's that popular with porn starlets -- indeed, he says he's only had sex with two X-rated actresses. Anyway, what Ford really wants is to get married -- like countless men before him, he believes that once he ties the knot, he'll leave his promiscuous ways behind. "I'm tired of the life of tawdry blow jobs from porn stars! I want to settle down. One of these days the Lord will give me the strength to turn my back on such sin." He says this jocularly, self-mockingly, but he seems to mean it. On one level Ford wants to hang out with porn stars. On another, he wants to bring down the porn industry. "The boy has a messiah complex," says Roger Jacobs, a former porn screenwriter and director who's now left the business to become a freelance journalist. In an interview with Ford published in Panik magazine, Jacobs describes Ford as being on "a suicide mission against the adult entertainment industry ... the most visible sniper in a lone shooting spree against easy targets." "He's the son of an evangelical minister and he's converted to Orthodox Judaism -- each are the most fundamentalist of religions, and both are very anti-sex," says Mark Kernes, features editor at Adult Video News. "He is fascinated by sex, fascinated by people who are willing to perform sex on camera, and he wants to write about it, but he also hates it. He thinks he is fulfilling the requirements of his religion by attempting to destroy the porn industry." "I don't regard the industry with respect, I don't regard it as something worthy of nurturing," Ford says. "If my writing helps anti-porn hysteria and activism, fine. It would not bother me if porn were banned. Censorship is one legitimate response to the rise of pornography. I would not shed many tears if the porn industry was carted off to jail tomorrow, and I don't think we'd be a worse society for it." Ford claims to loathe Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, but he loathes the propaganda of the porn business more -- and he's disgusted that so many people have fallen for it. After all, in recent years pornographers, in concert with transgression-loving academics, have fashioned a New Age version of the sex industry as some kind of orgasmic human potential movement dedicated to freeing the world from the blight of sexual repression. Talking about the self-described "feminist porn" of Candida Royalle and the theories of pro-sex professors like Linda Williams and Laura Kipnis, Ford's usually mellow, self-deprecating tone turns angry. "I loathe political correctness, I loathe pieties, particularly coming from the porn industry," he growls. "It's a filthy industry. I'm not going to take First Amendment lessons from whores. I'm not going to take sociological lessons and psychological insights about the human condition from pretentious pornographers. This PC academicized femme-porn boosting approach nauseates me. It's a laugh. Women do not buy this stuff. Men buy this stuff, generally single men. The whole purpose of porn is for men to jack off. It does not have entertainment, political or artistic value. It's lowbrow hard-on fuel, period." Surprisingly, Ford professes respect for feminist porn stars and directors, but he thinks they distort the true face of the business. "Candida Royalle, Annie Sprinkle, Jane Hamilton and Gloria Leonard are all intelligent, thoughtful, kind and considerate. They're among the better persons in the industry. But as pornographers they count for zero. Their product does not sell. They do not add a distinctive wrinkle to porn that opens up a new market. The femme porn market is a myth, a nice-guy front that the industry presents to the public." Porn's boosters assume that the libido needs to be liberated, and that human nature -- when not perverted by repression -- is inherently good. Ford, on the other hand, is steeped in the Judeo-Christian idea that people are wicked and need to keep their sinful impulses in check. "The study of porn shows that men are just bad news, and that the primary task facing society is what do you do with the men," Ford says. "Whenever men have been able to, they've raped en masse. What you see in mainstream hardcore pornography is simply an acting out of what your father, boyfriend, husband, brother or son thinks about much of the time. The more time I've spent in the porn industry, the more reverence I have for Judaism and for the Judeo-Christian tradition of forcing the male sexual genie into the marital bottle." To the outside world, Ford is both a porn insider and someone who shares the values of Middle America, and he's routinely trotted out to bash the industry. He acted as a tour guide for a Weekly Standard writer doing a satirical piece about the World Pornography Conference, a congress of pro-porn academics and pornographers held last year in L.A. He's appeared on "The Fox Files," "Entertainment Tonight" and "The Jerry Springer Show," cheerfully adding his voice to the mainstream chorus of salacious fascination and outraged condemnation. "I'm happy to be used by people who want to bash the porn industry. I don't think it's something that I need in any way to protect. By its very nature, almost everyone who dislikes the porn industry can't spend that much time around it. Only a twisted multiple-personality person like myself can do that, so I'm happy to play along." At the same time, there is probably some validity to Ford's views on the porn industry -- he's so transparent in his self-criticism, so brutally honest about himself, that it gives him a certain credibility. Whatever his agenda is, at least he's up front about it. Even Jacobs agrees with some of Ford's conclusions. "I never met a more collectively dysfunctional lot of people in my life than during my seven years in the business," says Jacobs. "The mainstream entertainment industry is neurotic. People in porn are partially psychotic." Says Mike South, "I think Luke's been very good for this business. He has thrown open a lot of doors and shined light on questionable people and questionable business practices. Not much of anything in this business escapes Luke. I trust the majority of what he writes." Indeed, says South, the fact that Ford is so critical of the industry sometimes means that those inside it take him more seriously. "It makes him, believe it or not, more credible. There are a lot of people in the business who are far from evil, a lot of good people. But there are evil people in this business, no question. If Luke says everyone in the business is wonderful, he's just another fucking industry apologist. Instead, he calls it like he sees it." In fact, South thinks that Ford is getting over on all the porn outsiders who take him seriously because his religious views mirror their own. "I wouldn't say it's 100 percent schtick," says South, "but at least 50 percent of it is. What he is trying to do there is to echo the feelings of people reading his site. He's doing what he does best, trying to disarm them and fit in. Don't you think he is smart enough to be playing these people?" Ford is comforting to outsiders because he's willing to give up the dirt on the porn business while professing to hate himself for being so close to it -- he makes readers feel like he wishes he could live in the dull, mainstream world with the rest of us. But South believes that Ford's self-loathing is just part of his game. "I don't think he hates himself at all," says South. "Quite the contrary. I think sometimes he goes home and thinks about the things that have happened and he laughs at the people in this business, because they're so easily duped."
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