"Um, these next two performers want to say something, especially to all you researchers out there." Annie Sprinkle, self-proclaimed post-porn modernist, was announcing the final performances at the kickoff party for the World Pornography Conference. "Pornography can lead to hard drugs like marriage and children! And between the two of them, they have a lot of years of marriage and a lot of children!"

Held over four days at the Universal Sheraton in Universal City, and co-sponsored by the Center for Sex Research at Cal State Northridge and the Free Speech Coalition (the trade association of the Adult Video Coalition, and a special-interest lobby that advocates against stricter government regulations on the adult entertainment industry), the WPC billed itself as the first-ever academic conference on pornography. It was not, however, the first academic conference of its kind. The center had already sponsored conferences on transgenderism and prostitution, and other conferences at New York University, the State University of New York and the University of California at Santa Cruz have covered similar ground.

In fact, for many of the performers on stage, putting an academic spin on pornography and "sex work" is relatively old hat. As "people with brains who happen to like sex" ("liking sex" being the preferred euphemism here for making porn), these industry veterans -- articulate, subdued and clad in neat little suits -- have been a hot ticket on the lucrative campus lecture circuit for years. Acting as ambassadors of "sex-positive" feminist theory, they were careful to stress the kinder, gentler, downright uplifting side of the porn industry.

On the opening night of the conference, Candida Royalle, Femme Productions president, "couples market" pioneer and former actress, showed home movies of her Catholic childhood (Brownies, Girl Scouts, First Communion) and largely estranged family. Botero-esque stripper-cum-vocalist Candye Kane made affirming statements like, "Growing up, I never saw pictures of women who looked like me on the cover of Vogue, Elle or Cosmo. But I did see them on the cover of Juggs" (the porn industry apparently being a paragon of size acceptance). Sprinkle presented her "training video," a softly lit, mermaid-themed, Smashing Pumpkins-video of a porn movie (which starred a University of California student who had written asking for the opportunity to work with her) and freely dispensed tips for the novice director: "Now I want the cum shot. You can use condensed milk. It tastes really sweet when you lick it off." Later, in one of the panels, a "sex educator" who "works in the industry" enthused over Sprinkle's spermatic stage magic: "Now that's innovative!" and Sprinkle's already tremulous voice broke as she announced that her mother was in the house. "Do you want to come up here, mom?"

"Oh, no," came a thin voice from the audience. A fragile, gray-haired lady held up a piece of fabric like a white flag. "I've got my needlework."

By the end of the night I was so floored by the cheerful "sex-positivity," the galloping family values and the panoply of accomplishments on display (these were not just porn stars and strippers, don't you know, they were "nurse-educators," authors, directors, labor organizers, AIDS activists and youth counselors) that, having never considered a career in "the industry" or really ever bought pornography myself, I began to wonder if I was some kind of a pervert.

Toward the end of the evening, Carol Queen (author, peep show dancer and the Cesar Chavez of sex workers) burst my bubble with an anecdote about a young couple who came into her booth one night. When the boy rudely attempted to persuade Queen to introduce her largest dildo into her rectal cavity, she replied that insufficient lubrication (only a smidgen left) would make this endeavor time-consuming and therefore prohibitively expensive. While the boy persisted, his horrified girlfriend averted her eyes. Frustrated, Queen deftly switched into "sex-educator" mode and proceeded, in a frighteningly schoolmarmish tone, to lecture the girl on the boy's anal fixation and on her responsibility, as his girlfriend, in the matter. Then she called security. (I felt sorry for the girl in the story. It was her 18th birthday, after all. She had probably just wanted to see a band.)

The anecdote encapsulated the recurrent themes of the conference as they would unfurl over the next four days. First, that it was the girlfriend who had the problem (her fear of witnessing Queen in the act of love with a latex billy club being decidedly unhealthy). Second, that her problem could have been easily remedied by accepting porn into her life (its rejection having caused the problem in the first place). And third, that the porn industry is really only here to help.

Film and gender theory has taken some tortuous turns in the past decade, but judging from the WPC academic contingent's hearty endorsement of Queen et. al.'s porn puritanism, it may have finally hit a wall. Since feminist film theorists such as Linda Williams and Laura Mulvey (whose seminal 1973 "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" launched a thousand dissertations on "fetishistic scopophilia") first postulated the idea of the personal as political, films of every stripe have been dismantled and scrutinized until every last trace of "woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men" (as Williams wrote in "Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions") was revealed and duly denounced on campuses nationwide.

In many ways, the ideas presented at the WPC were the ironic but logical extension of an academic trend that has increasingly taken the once-subversive notion of the personal as political as dogma. The study of sexual identity as politics has influenced other disciplines, and has profoundly altered the way in which the humanities are taught. As anyone who has received a liberal arts education in the past 15 years can attest, academics have become increasingly influenced by the edges of pop culture, while pop culture has continued to plumb the fringes of counterculture. This has resulted in an obsession with keeping up with the underground within a certain sector of academia, which no longer seems to distinguish between scholarly inquiry and enthusiastic endorsement.

Williams, perhaps the only noted theorist at the WPC, has long since changed her stance on the matter. In the introduction of her 1989 book, "Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible," she writes, "I assumed that film pornography would (illustrate) a total objectification of the female 'film body' as object of male desire. I was wrong."

As sex-positive feminist Susie Bright and proto-feminist bête noire Camille Paglia (who was quite popular among the porn stars and grad-student-cum-porn-starlets I met at the WPC) grew in notoriety, outraged lectures on the fetishized portrayal of Marlene Dietrich in the films of Joseph Von Sternberg (discussions of Dietrich's on-screen "oppression") gradually gave way to discussions of Sprinkle et. al.'s on-screen "empowerment." The old guard all but went underground as its hip and trendy status was revoked by the cultural intelligentsia-in-training. But just as Mulvey and pre-conversion Williams eschewed a dialectical approach in favor of an unyielding, generalized political stance, so have many current theorists thrown the baby out with the bath water. As Jean Baudrillard writes in "Fatal Strategies": "The widely accepted obviousness of a generalization of this order -- political, cultural, social, sexual, psychological -- marks its death sentence."

By noon of the first day of the conference, it had become clear that the academics at the WPC were in the throes of a widely accepted obviousness of another, opposite generalization -- one just as narrow and hostile to dissent.

"I don't even know what a victim is!" snorted Betty Dodson, Ph.D., and author of the 1974 self-published classic "Liberating Masturbation."

The panel I was attending, "Women and Pornography: Victims or Visionaries?" was hosted by an impressive bevy of sex-positive feminist porn producers, each with a line of New Age, "visionary porn" products to promote. Sprinkle and Royalle were joined by fellow visionaries Veronica Hart, Nina Hartley and Juli Ashton, all at the forefront of the "watch my video, it's good for you" school of porn. Speaking of pornography's role in spicing up the sex life of middle-aged couples, Hartley has said, "It's no different than [sic] Hamburger Helper."

Very little credence was given to sex unaided by technology (the hamburger without the helper) in the alternative universe of the WPC -- where enlightened porn star and devoted wanker were unanimously voted cutest couple. In this world, it's sex without the mediating factor of porn (with bodyguards, condensed milk and monthly HIV tests) that's dangerous.

"The answer to bad pornography is not no pornography, it's better pornography!" chirped Sprinkle. "If you don't like the stuff that's out there, make your own!" urged Royalle. "Porn been beddy, beddy good to me!" quipped Hart. All but one of them venerated '70s icons, they claim that the industry has provided them a "safe place" in which to "explore and own" their sexuality. But if at first this looks like a new brand of feel-good female solidarity, it's not. Some panelists imply that it is women outside the industry, not within it, who not only suffer but perpetuate hostility between the sexes.

"You've got them so scared sexually that they're mad!" says Nina Hartley, apparently directing herself at the non-pro females in the audience. "They can't get laid! They can't get blow jobs! They can't cum! That's why you're seeing more of these videos of women getting dragged on their faces, and spit on, and having their heads dunked in the toilet. Men are mad!" A male fan in the audience nodded his head in vigorous agreement (the middle-aged fans had come out in droves). "Men love and care about their favorite porn stars, because the women they know hate sex!"

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"