A defense of porn as a genre (which, I repeat, is not at all the same thing as defending most of what porn currently consists of) would be based on the idea that an art rooted in bodily effect can give us a knowledge of the body that other art cannot. Even now porn does give us knowledge of the body—only it is mainly bad knowledge, reinforcing the worst aspects of the social construction of masculinity that men learn to experience in our bodies. All the same, porn can be a site for "re-educating desire", and in a way that constructs desire in the body, not merely theoretically in relation to, and often against, it.
—Richard Dyer^*