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or flannel) by and for lesbians to be written? How does this new genre of porn function?
    Most people (even the nicest sort of liberal who opposes censorship) assume that porn isn’t worth defending because it’s thrown-together, hurriedly produced garbage intended to make a quick buck. And people do spend a lot of money on mass-market pornography, despite the fact that most of it is flat and stale. The average porn novel is typed, not written. You have to work at breakneck speed to make a living when you get paid maybe $200 a book. It’s no wonder that the work attracts hacks. Even the porn writers who aren’t hacks feel contempt for their audience as well as themselves, and it permeates their material. Illegal businesses are even more tightly controlled than “legitimate” enterprises, and this overpriced, offensive swill is the only graphic sex that’s readily available. This won’t change unless obscenity is decriminalized, and competition makes it necessary for porn producers to cut into their profits with a little quality control. (In other words, don’t hold your breath.) The sad fact that the porn industry makes an obscene profit with its degraded product is just an index of how badly people want to learn about sex and get turned on. It doesn’t tell you anything about what people would like to buy if there was really any choice.
    But these marketplace conditions do not apply to by-and-for-lesbians porn. Because lesbians hardly constitute a mass market on the scale the Mafia (or the vice squad) is accustomed to, the term “lesbian pornography” used to refer to material that didn’t feature lesbians and wasn’t intended for a lesbian audience. Now, a few entrepreneurs, artists, filmmakers, writers, and poets are pouring their creative energy into making homegrown lesbian porn. These businesses are under-capitalized and labor-intensive. Most of them don’t show a profit. Their product is a welcome relief from the straight-produced stuff which usually misses the point entirely. It is immensely popular among lesbians.
    This new kind of pornography has been confiscated by agents of the state (especially in Canada) and banned from significant numbers of feminist bookstores. Many women’s publications routinely give sexually explicit work—even non-fiction lesbian sex manuals—savage reviews. Is the crime of obscenity synonymous with bad writing? Or with being a man out to make a quick buck? Apparently not.
    As the judge who banned Coming to Power in New Zealand said, “Some of the stories are well written but … The book is in the finding of the Tribunal clearly indecent.” The same tribunal had classified The Joy of Lesbian Sex to be “indecent in the hands of persons under the age of eighteen” despite the fact that “the book is well written, informative, and well presented. The subject is sensitively handled … and by comparison with other manuals on lesbianism is of a superior standard.” And despite the fact that “lesbianism is not outside the law” in New Zealand!
    Well-written, sexually explicit material is sometimes even more threatening to the status quo than pulp. In The End of Obscenity (Simon and Schuster, 1968, page 435), Charles Rembar, the attorney who successfully defended Lady Chatterley’s Lover , The Tropic of Cancer , and Fanny Hill against obscenity charges, comments on problems he faced writing legal briefs that argued that these works should not be banned:
    One was “well-written obscenity.” The cry had plagued us all through these cases. Good writing, every one of my opponents had declared, is no excuse. If not all of them said—as many of them did—the better the writing the more dangerous the book, they all agreed that literary quality could not make an obscene book non-obscene.
    People who wring their hands because obscenity laws have been used to hassle the