Fight for your right to be kinky

A column's introduction is designed to hook the reader, so we want to know what it would take to get you to turn away. Maybe big-breasted women licking whipped cream off each others chests? Or an interracial couple seducing their 18-year-old babysitter? What about the lead cheerleader "entertaining" the entire basketball team? Or a Cleveland Steamer? A Dirty Sanchez? A Rusty Trombone? An Eponymous Squeegee? (OK, we made that last one up.)\nClearly, the average person can tolerate much more than the government and a vocal "anti-smut" minority believe he or she can -- because you're still reading. These people say porn marginalizes women's sexuality and leads to dangerous and anti-social behavior. What they neglect to explain is that pornography is used as an outlet for expression. There is a significant portion of the population that gets off to bondage, discipline, sado-masochism and mock violence, along with fetishes as common as feet, armpits and lingerie. Without a safe, private place to entertain one's own fantasies, these people might satiate their sexual appetites in improper, socially destructive ways.\nPornography's opponents also neglect the First Amendment. As offensive as interracial she-men or shaved Brazilians doing as nature may or may not have intended can be, the government has no right, nor should it have the authority, to remove the choice to view such material. \nObviously, 6-year-olds should not be learning about four-inch diameter, double-sided dildos. Nor should anyone be forced to do anything against their will. However, pornography is, when legally regulated, a constitutionally protected form of speech. And if there is any appropriate place to experience alternate forms of expression, it should be a university setting, the quintessential open marketplace of ideas.\nAs an 18-year-old, if you're mature enough to stare down an Iraqi insurgent as you put an M-16 round between his eyes, we're pretty sure you're psychologically prepared for any way in which Jenna Jameson might employ a banana.