This is interesting and apropos the subject. It is from the introduction to Ed Cray's "The Erotic Muse: American Bawdy Songs." This man is clearly no prude; he gives fully unexpurgated versions of some very "dirty" songs. Here is his take on pornography: (warning! dirty words!) (2nd edition, hardcover, pp xxviii - xxix)

Sexual intercourse, often in heroic bouts; penises of equally heroic proportions; cunts worthy of such cocks; seduction of the innocent but agreeable maiden -- this is the stuff of bawdry.

It is also the stock material of that which, for lack of a better definition, is labeled "hard-core" pornography. There is one major difference: pornography is rarely humorous. Indeed, if it has any distinguishing characteristic, it is this lack of humor. Pornography is grim in its detgermination, its single-minded insistence upon clinical detail.

Not so the bawdy song, which rushes to climax the scene in laughter; the pornography meanwhile grinds relentlessly for tumescence....

The pornographic world is preeminently a sexual Schlauraffenland, the erotic pervading the fantasy, fantasy pervading the erotic. The people of Pornographia are capable of unending sexual bouts, only now and again fortified by aphrodisiacs.... The men ejaculate in super-human streams, again and again, past all limits of known capability. The women are pliant, cardboard receptacles whose response -- how different from the real world -- is invariable, predictable, oriented to the gratification of their partners, male or female. Sexual intercourse results in no untoward effects. The female is rarely impregnated, despite the interminable coitus. Veneral disease goes unmentioned. Nothing, not even an incidental menstrual period, is permitted to intrude upon paradise.

Above all, pornography is a male-oriented art form. It is loveless, mechanistic, centered upon the act itself, not upon the emotive aspects that women in Western European cultures demand of sex. Its concern apparently is to provoke the reader to potency....

That folk balladry and pornography have some similar traits is accidental.

------------

Alex