Larry Flynt's venerable publishing enterprise has, throughout its history, championed freedom of expression in its own unique way. In 1984, Flynt famously went all the way to the Supreme Court over the right to run a parody ad of inexhaustible loon Jerry Falwell reminiscing about losing his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. Tasteless? Yes. An obvious lampooning of a public figure? Also yes. But when Hustler recently ran a photo of conservative writer S.E. Cupp Photoshopped to look like she was performing oral sex, that was something altogether different.

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?"

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I grabbed my friend's arm and whispered, "My favorite male porn star just walked in the door." She looked at me dumbfounded: "You have a favorite male porn star?" OK, so the competition isn't steep and, yes, I'm one of those mythic women who actually like porn (but for the record, we make up an estimated one-third of visits to adult sites). When I first clicked across this man -- with his smoldering eyes, strong nose and athletic body -- it allowed me to forget for a moment that porn is largely made by and for men. He's a rare male performer who is charismatic, young and handsome -- everything the infamous Ron Jeremy is not.

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.

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You want to know what's profound? How scientifically inaccurate that statement is.

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.

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On CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday, he said, "Under the Bush administration, pornographers were prosecuted much more rigorously than they are ... under the Obama administration." He added, "My conclusion is they have not put a priority on prosecuting these cases, and in doing so, they are exposing children to a tremendous amount of harm. And that to me says they're putting the unenforcement of this law and putting children at risk as a result of that."

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Interestingly, he says the prosecution was worried that the defense was stacking the jury with men -- but it was two women who voted in his favor. Isaacs says he spoke with one of those women, a 75-year-old who, according to the Los Angeles Times, “wore a Christmas-themed sweater with snowmen” to court, and thanked her “for standing up for freedom of speech.” He says that the juror was particularly sympathetic to his argument about artistic merit and freedom of speech because her late husband made horror movies.

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The Department of Justice has booked my plane tickets and hotel room in downtown Los Angeles. Now I just need to buy an actual pair of non-denim pants and I’ll be ready for my subpoenaed testimony this Thursday in a federal obscenity trial.

Seriously, though, for reasons much greater than my own involvement, this is a trial to pay attention to.  The pornographer on trial, Ira Isaacs, is indicted for making and selling what’s known colloquially as “poo porn,” and redistributing foreign-made bestiality films, like "Japanese Doggie 3 Way." Needless to say, he's not a porn magnate along the lines of Larry Flynt or Steven Hirsch: The guy is small-time. But he's at the center of a now-rare obscenity trial, in which prosecutors will argue that the sexually explicit movies that he sold -- not all of which he made -- are offensive, violate community standards and have no redeeming artistic merit. The charges could put the 61-year-old in jail for the rest of his life.

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While pornographic film has ostensibly been in existence since the birth of the moving image, the porn star name did not take hold until the 1970s, when the rise of adult theaters and the emergence of full-lenth mainstream porn films such as "Deep Throat" (1972), "The Boys in the Sand" (1971) and "The Devil in Miss Jones" (1973) created a new space for pornographic actors and actresses to become popular icons. Some argue "Deep Throat’s" Linda Lovelace was America’s first household “porn name.” Other porn stars like Bambi Woods, Seka and Johnny Wadd followed suit.

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The "money shot" can be traced back to the premiere of "Deep Throat" in 1972, according to Linda Williams, a film studies professor at UC Berkeley. That isn't to say that male performers didn't bust outside the body before then, but the legendary film “introduced narrativity in the genre and coined the cum shot as its defining figure," she writes in “Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible.” Williams explains, "Where the earlier short, silent stag films occasionally included spectacles of external ejaculation (in some cases inadvertently), it was not until the early seventies, with the rise of the hard-core feature, that the money shot assumed the narrative function of signaling the climax of a genital event."

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ABC's Terry Moran introduced the segment by warning, "For any parent concerned about what their teen does online, the huge popularity of the young man you're about to meet may be deeply disturbing." We're then introduced to a handful of young women – all well over 18 – who think 25-year-old Deen is totally hot and, like, "the Ryan Gosling of porn." Then reporter Cecilia Vega announces that the adult business "has now targeted and reached a new demographic: teenage girls."

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According to the ordinance, adult film production companies will pay an additional fee with their permit applications to cover an as-of-yet undetermined method of enforcement. Currently, condoms are used in the mainstream gay adult film industry (which includes only gay male films), while the heterosexual industry (which includes both lesbian and straight films) has used mandatory STI testing as a health and safety precaution since the early 2000s. Until May of 2011, the Adult Industry Medical Center, founded by retired performer Dr. Sharon Mitchell, ran the nationwide STI testing service and database that certified heterosexual performers as STI-free previous to their working on any production.

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In his new book, "Sex, Bombs and Burgers," Nowak argues that porn, fast food and the military have completely reshaped modern technology and our relationship to it. He points to inventions like powderized food, which emerged out of the Second World War effort and made restaurant chains like McDonald's and Dairy Queen possible. He shows how outsourced phone sex lines have helped bring wealth to poor countries, like Guyana. And he explains how pornography helped drive both the home entertainment industry and modern Web technology, like video chat. An entertaining and well-research read, filled with surprising facts, "Sex, Bombs and Burgers" offers a provocative alternate history of 20th-century progress.

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"In the dead of night, alone at home, the loneliness sometimes becomes unbearable," writes one man. "There aren't many places to go in the middle of the night, and most of those choices don't necessarily ensure any kind of reasonable human interaction." Another man explains, "Nobody talks to me, nobody cares what I say. I'm a 24-year-old drone who wastes his days sitting at a computer reviewing spreadsheets that don't really matter," he says. "I just want to talk to someone who cares, and $1 every 3 minutes is a lot less than $250 an hour for a therapist."

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No matter how much you think you know about the varied and nuanced spectrum of human sexuality, you realize you don’t know squat until you work in a porn store with a vibrant and active arcade. People don’t come here to buy porn. Our customers  -- over 90 percent same-sex-attracted men -- come here to meet up for casual, semi-public sex. The arcade is a dark, damp area with about 15 small, squarish booths with video screens, chairs, trash cans and, of course, paper towels. The defining feature, however, is the holes between the booths, called glory holes. They aren’t jury-rigged glory holes common in arcades. They are professional, finished pieces of custom carpentry. The booth has three hard-and-fast rules: No drugs (except the amyl nitrate and nitrous oxide we sell at the counter), no turning tricks, and always feed the meter if you want to stay in the booth.

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I've noticed that modern photographs that re-create vintage erotica do nothing for me. Women in the costumes with the period props are just silly. There's something about knowing that she lived her life long ago and left only these beautiful glimpses of her sexual expression that captures my erotic imagination.

But. She's dead now. And there's no possibility of meeting her. But I think Dan is wrong. What do your experts say?

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A new study attempts to explain exactly how that judgment works and why our perceptions of people rely on the amount of skin they show. It's a question at the heart of contentious debates about everything from objectification in pornography to work-appropriate attire. Typically it’s been assumed that this is something that happens when men perceive women -- the infamous “male gaze” -- and that it involves, as one of the study’s researchers, Kurt Gray of the University of Maryland, put it, “the wholesale stripping away of mind” (in other words, viewing someone as a mindless sex object). “This study challenges all of those ideas,” he told me by phone.

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She's a mom herself, actually – to 8-month-old Emma – as well as a performance artist in the tradition of "post-porn modernist" Annie Sprinkle. That is why we're sitting across from each other on an airbed in the middle of an art gallery in San Francisco's Mission District. This peculiar scene of public domesticity -- with a reporter, no less -- is how she chose to close her recent group exhibit, "Building Our Own White Picket Fences," which explored family dynamics relating to queerness and sex work. Among Young's contributions to the show: An image of the red-haired BDSM star next to a blindfold and cutouts of combat boots – it's titled, "Pin the Combat Boots on the Queer Mommy." Another photo shows the award-winning BDSM star topless with a shot of a television covering one breast and an image of a milk carton covering the other, with a spinning arrow in-between. By the window, a wood swing is strung from the ceiling -- on the seat, upside-down pushpins spell out "family."

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The U.S. has tried to do so, first with the Communications Decency Act and then the Child Online Protect Act, both of which were deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. In 2000, Congress introduced the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which requires libraries and grade schools to use filtering software on computers in order to receive federal funding, and it made the constitutional cut (although debates over the measure, and the questions it leaves unanswered, continue more than a decade later).

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Just the other night, I had the bizarre experience of co-judging a classy, high-brow event called the Air Sex Championships. At one point during the show, a man going by the pseudonym "Sir Fucks A Lot" climbed onstage wearing a baseball cap, a muscle-hugging V-neck, cargo shorts and a cocky Casanova smile. He looked like a straight frat boy stereotype, but to everyone's great surprise he began enthusiastically enacting a gay sex scene -- and, reader, it was hot. For the only time that evening, the all-female judging panel leaned forward -- instead of recoiling in disgust -- to get a better look.

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