Porn was born from the same human desire that compels young people with Sharpies to doodle humongous boobies in bathroom stalls--which is the need to capture and document something more tangible than pure fantasy. Yet pornography no longer serves the public in private matters. Very little of the tired smut referred to as "porn" raises the heart rate, much less the sheathed sword.

Pornography has become the sticky spooge that pomo academics glue Madonna music videos to. After grinding the worst and weakest cultural references into a ground beef of intellectual thought, and then pressing these scraps into an ovenproof casserole dish, they whip out the requisite can of condensed cream of mushroom soup. As American housewives in the 1950s hoped cream o' mushroom would bind leftovers into something delicious, America's academics pour pornographia soup over the void that is the absence of cerebral activity and conviction, crisscrossing genres with giant Xs, like trails of slug slime sparkling in the sun that sets on all that is sexy, erotic.

This baked monstrosity offers no nourishment. All nutrients were leached from it long ago, rendering the current slice of sexuality each citizen receives on his or her plate more than depressing. Just as medical doctors--decidedly male at the time--were required to invent the vibrator in order to save society from itself in the Victorian "Pedestalization of the Women" movement (which rendered men and women incapable of dirtying their knees in the interest of better sleep, digestion, and mental clarity), so must each and every citizen rise up today and revolt against the monotony that our forebears fearfully dubbed "porn."

RISE UP AND DEFY BOREDOM!

Porn is a man in a scary chicken costume. This is one sick chicken. He runs around L.A. flapping his useless wings. He must hump three things on a busy thoroughfare. So he mounts a parking meter and rocks his cock, crowing to the shocked traffic jam that piles up. Next, he thrusts his pelvis against a giggling stranger; then, like a flash, he is out in the middle of the street, fucking the concrete! Cock-a-doodle-do! There is nothing more depressing than a lewd chicken.

New mothers of the nation, suckling an infant in one arm, fast-forwarding through another unending, painfully lit and zoomed penetration scene with their collective big toes, a little wobbly on their hemorrhoid cushion perches, take up your pens! We are the new pornographers.

DIRT UNDER THEIR FINGERNAILS

We do not cry out in this dull, gray hour for smarter or funnier scenarios, nor do we require footnotes to get sexed up. While a soundtrack by, say, DJ Spooky, might provide a useful and appropriate aural backdrop for heavy breathing, unzippering, and the range of moist noises that will hopefully result from the pornographic uprising, joyful and unfettered by guilt, shame, hyper-analysis, perma-irony, and other plagues of the 21st century, we require very few special effects. People have sex. Sex is sexy. People are sexy.

DOWN WITH EROTICA!

Erotica is wrongheaded because of the word itself--erotica--is small and tinkly-sounding, diminutive, like a tiny toy car puttering on the front lawn, as opposed to the splendid V-8 engine purr of erotic rolling its Rs down a coastal highway. Stop peddling those pocket-sized paperbacks cutely entitled "erotica," and wrap your fist around the thick mahogany stick shift of the hard-backed machine, thrumming with speed and power--the Book that is Erotic!

UP WITH GENRE PORN!

Give us ancient faeries buzzing into the flowers of futuristic space aliens! Let loose and fire the cannons of historical romance, formal poetry, and the violence of thinking, feeling, and writing well about fisting. Write it and write it well! Write sestinas that make the nipples stand to attention! As Marilyn Hacker--one of America's greatest living poets--scraping skin and words into that flush of erotic feeling ("Your cock whispers inside my thigh that there is language without memory. Your fingers plan wet symphonies in my garrulous secret"), so should we look to the future of pornography embracing the formal constraints of antiquity.