Three cheers for the sleaze machine: Easterblogg is handing out kudos to porn studio Vivid Video for not portraying violence and sex together, like a crack dealer who won't buy a teenager a twelve pack of Bud. He contrasts this with mainstream studios who turn out "irresponsible" movies like "Scream" and "Natural Born Killers," movies whose violence has a detrimental effect on the culture and may even lead to Columbine-like tragedies.

I'm glad Vivid limits itself to porn movies that portray happy couples, threesomes, etc. getting it on in every conceivable way, ending every scene with smiles on their faces, but I'm not going to stand up and cheer because they've adopted the slogan, "Vivid Video: We Don't Make Snuff Films." Gregg argues that porn movies are actually empowering to women because they're better paid than the irrelevant men in the movies and they have more artisitic control than women in traditional studios. I'm no prude, and I have no desire to see John Ashcroft go on an anti-porn crusade (at least not while the life and death matter of athletes on steroids is unresolved), but it's certainly wrong to pretend that an industry that exists solely to objectify women has no destructive impact on those women or society at large. Movie violence is what they call in the industry "pretend" and the women being slashed are actresses who go home at night having not been filled out like an application by a dozen guys that day. I doubt very seriously that she'd trade places with some chick bending it over for Vivid.