DEAR ANDREA, My wife and I enjoy porn when we can find something with interesting plotlines, acting, direction, and photography – that is, almost never. I remember porn in the 1970s, shot on celluloid and shown in art houses. Back then, even the cheapest porn often had some clever dialogue, a semblance of a story, and acting by individuals who could actually act (the reason contemporary male porn stars always pull it out when they cum is that they don't have the minimal acting skills required to fake an orgasm).

The genre seems totally ruined by mass production. If some creative porn maker were to produce something halfway decent, no one would even hear about it because it would get lost in the ocean of drek that is modern porn.

Love,
Disappointed

Dear Point: For a supposed porn fan, you are mighty judgmental, and I think you could hurt yourself jumping to that many conclusions in succession. I submit that it's these qualities of yours, rather than the lack of quality in contemporary porn, that are making your attempts to watch dirty movies so joyless.

I'm not convinced porn has yet had its golden age. If you go rent The Devil in Miss Jones, Behind the Green Door, or the other vaunted classics, you'll discover Georgina Spelvin and Harry Reems were never exactly Meryl Streep and Ian McKellen; they were just a little quirkier (and perhaps less conventionally attractive) than the interchangeably shaven and augmented Porn-Barbies™ of today, and they certainly had more (but not necessarily better) dialogue. I watched most of them in a classroom setting some years ago, with no distractions of the sort you might encounter while watching them alone with your wife, and ... they weren't that great. Yes, they were more interesting than most of today's mainstream product, but I suspect time and nostalgia have done more to gloss over their rough spots than any script-doctoring or director's cut ever could.

The question, though, isn't whether Marilyn Chambers was a finer thespian than Jenna Jamison, but whether there's anything worth watching now. Of course there is. You need to break out of your smug certainty that there was once a golden age and go do some research. Actually, you needn't bother – there are hardworking smut peddlers who've done it for you. Go to one of the classier sex-toy sites like Good Vibrations (www.goodvibes.com) or Blowfish (www.blowfish.com), and you'll find the offerings broken down into neat categories, including (at Blowfish) "An Actual Plot."

In closing, I must point out that the statement "The reason contemporary male porn stars always pull it out when they cum is that they don't even have the minimal acting skills required to fake an orgasm" makes no sense whatsoever and is also wrong. Even Behind the Green Door, the opus that started it all, had cum shots. I looked it up.

Love,
Andrea

Dear Andrea: I've felt shame but also tremendous excitement when I masturbate to my fantasies, which are all about father-daughter incest. My therapist has tried to reassure me that they are not repugnant or weird, yet when I walked into Berkeley's Good Vibrations and asked for incest stories, I got a nasty attitude and the response, "We try not to have that kind of thing in here." It seems the only politically correct way to relate to incest is the perpetrator-victim dynamic – and to be turned on by these fantasies makes me an outlaw. I took a class in erotic writing, and the teacher said there are two topics you can't get published: pedophilia and incest. I've looked on the Internet and am worried about getting arrested if I explore too much. Where can I find hot father-daughter incest writing without getting arrested?

Love,
Bad Thoughts

Dear Bad: You walked into the Holy of P.C. Holies – a feminist toy store in Berkeley – and asked for incest porn? What were you thinking? You're lucky you weren't pepper-sprayed and flayed alive, your head mounted on a pike (or something) as an example to others. Don't do that. Better to stay on the Internet where the real pervs hang out.

If you were to download pictures of daddies and little girls, you would indeed find yourself in deepest shit. There are, however, online repositories of text-only filth too sick even for you that are allowed to exist quite unmolested (Emily's Sexy Family, formerly Emily's Sick Family, comes to mind). The legalities of this stuff may be murky, but you can peruse it in perfect safety. I wouldn't want to download family porn and then run for president, but barring that sort of scrutiny, nobody will ever know.

Love,
Andrea