While Deen does do a lot of work for bondage and discipline sites like Kink.com, his talent for performing vanilla sex scenes -- for example: XXX parodies of TV shows like Seinfeld, 30 Rock, and Scrubs -- is what makes him a novelty in the porn world. Well-groomed and of average build, with a mop of curly brown hair and smiling blue eyes, Deen seems a shoe-in more for Dawson's Creek than for Deep Throat. And thanks to his boyish good looks and seeming ability to connect emotionally on-screen with his female co-stars, he has amassed a devoted fan-base of young woman in an industry that, again according to Lowder, "in most cases ignores them entirely."

I won't argue with Lowder on this point: Much of the porn being made today appeals to a conventionally male kind of erotic fantasy. But whether porn producers have women's interests in mind when they shoot a scene is beside the point if we stop pretending that "women's interests" is a category unto itself. Studies by Meredith Chivers (PDF), a university professor of psychology and a highly regarded researcher of sexual behavior, have determined that women and men respond to pornography with equal arousal. In fact, whereas men demonstrate a physiological response primarily when watching porn of their respective sexual orientation only, women are far less discriminating: they respond to just about all of it.

Of course, there's something nice about believing that vanilla porn is what women like, and Lowder is not alone in thinking so. Women themselves have been so conditioned to believe that porn is misogynistic, objectifying, degrading, disgusting, rude, and lewd. This anti-porn position first emerged in the 1970s, a product of second-wave feminist thinking championed by the likes of Gloria Steinem, Catherine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin, whose radical belief was that pornography is harmful to women and girls and a violation of civil rights. Forty years later, this illogic is alive and well thanks in part to people like Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women's studies and a self-described anti-pornography activist, whose platform is essentially: All porn is terrible for everyone, men and women alike. In an op-ed published last year in the Australian newspaper The Age, Dines wrote that pornography is at its core "a market transaction in which women's bodies and sexuality are offered to male consumers ... to deliver the maximum amount of degradation ... and to illustrate how much power [a man] has over [a women]." Following Dines's ideology, good girls don't watch porn -- and if they do, they certainly don't admit to liking it.

Why at this late date are we still reinforcing the idea that women are modest and fragile and in need of gender-specific accommodations? Lowder seems to suggest that the arrival of James Deen's mild-enough flavor of porn is some sort of victory for women. As I see it, the only thing necessarily lady-friendly about soft-core scenes is that they come with less stigma than the real stuff. Watching this vanilla variety of porn might feel, for some, like less of a betrayal of one's feminist values -- because the sex depicted is a little gentler, not quite as rapey as what you might expect of, say, a typical S&M scene -- but there is nothing at all feminist, or psychologically healthy, about limiting the expression of a woman's sexuality.