Since Andrea Dworkin wrote about pornography as being anti-women in the early 1980s, we have become acclimatised to the idea that porn is bad for us, and must only be tolerated due to reasons of democracy and liberalism. In the past 30 years this idea has largely gone unchallenged outside academia and, in the process, feminism has been conflated with the anti-porn position. We have effectively been neuro-linguistically programmed to equate porn with harm.

Not only is there no good evidence to support this view, but there is a fair amount of evidence to support the opposite. This is the problem with the opt-in proposal: only the reportedly negative results from porn have been considered. But porn is good for society.

Women's rights are far stronger in societies with liberal attitudes to sex – think of conservative countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen or China, and the place of women there. And yet, anti-porn campaigners neglect such issues entirely. A recent study by the US department of justice compared the four states that had highest broadband access and found there was a 27% decrease in rape and attempted rape, and the four with the lowest had a 53% increase over the same period. With broadband being key to watching porn online, these figures are food for thought for those who believe access to porn is bad news.

Likewise, porn keeps many marriages going. How many couples do you know whose partners have identically matched libidos? Not many. Porn is an outlet for the sexual pressure built up in such relationships and also for (mostly) men who feel that communicating or finding a woman to have sex with is very difficult to achieve. Many feel the need to keep their porn use a secret from their partners for fear of upsetting them, which would not be possible if adult material has to be opted into in a local PC World in broad daylight, sitting next to the wife or family member. No opted-in status can be put down to error, as it is clear the government wants it to be reasonably onerous to achieve with the presumed age checks etc it must entail.

One man wrote to me recently saying that he had suffered cancer of the face, which left him heavily scarred and almost completely without confidence after a subsequent divorce. He said that chatting to webcam porn stars kept him from suicide. This is an extreme case, which I bring up simply to illustrate there is a lot more to pornography than the issue of harm to women and children. I have a lot of experience in the industry and for the past 13 years have heard members of the public relaying stories about porn helping them to learn about sex, which their family or culture discouraged, to overcome sexual abuse and even one couple approaching me to tell me that one of my scenes resulted in the lady's pregnancy.

There is a lot of sexual desire out there that needs an outlet. One needs to ask: what social science will be undertaken to ascertain the effect of this bill on relationships between men and women? The picture is largely unknown and far from straightforward. If the government wants to stop children from accessing porn, all it needs to do is to listen to the world's adult industries (who are united with everyone else in wanting to prevent underage access). We say they need to take down the (handful of) porn torrent sites, which give teenagers free, easy access to hardcore scenes – scenes whose copyright has been stolen from the producers. Such producers spend vast amounts of money with government censors who then do nothing to prevent children and anyone else from bypassing the censors online for free. Ed Vaizey needs to stop playing to the crowd and do something that will genuinely secure our children's and our creative industries' futures.