For the second "actress," "Houston," an unremarkable voice would be an improvement. It was embarrassing. Her demo was a cover of Christina Aguilera’s "What A Girl Wants." But "Houston" appears to be in her early-to-mid thirties, that is, twice the age Aguilera was when she recorded the song, and with her obvious plastic surgery and dyed hair, comes off as funhouse mirror version of Aguilera. The entire package is rather pathetic. But pathetic or not, "Porn to Rock" points to something I bet many of you were unaware of: the mainstreaming of the pornography industry.

Even a cursory glance at contemporary popular culture reveals evidence of a shift in attitudes towards the porn industry. Reed Schuchardt, a doctoral candidate in media ecology at NYU, and a speaker at the Houston Wilberforce Conference, has pointed out the advertising industry’s adoption of what might be called a "porno aesthetic." Whether it’s the "Got milk?" campaign or perfume and even tire companies, the ads borrow images and associations that got their start in the porn industry. Consider the dialog on sitcoms: young males, wrestling with what to do, will frequently cite renting an x-rated film as one possibility.

Then there’s the strange career of Traci Lords. Ms. Lords spent many of her "formative years" as an underage porn starlet. Recently, she has made a somewhat successful transition to mainstream movies and television. Lords’ success in getting people to disregard her checkered past makes the crossover dreams of women like "India" and "Houston" possible. But it’s not enough. The mainstreaming of pornography requires more; it requires changes in underlying cultural attitudes. The first change is an embrace of a kind of neo-gnosticism that effectively severs any link between sex and transgression. Unlike St. Paul, who saw sexual sins as sins against the image of God within us, we believe that what we do with our bodies is irrelevant to our spiritual and moral well-being. We’ve divorced our souls from our bodies. This attitude is why, if I may say so, Bill Clinton was able to finish his term as president. It’s also what enables us to see the people involved in the porn industry independently of what they do on screen.

The second change was pioneered and perfected by the industry most closely associated with the sex industry: gambling. The past 30 years have seen an almost complete shift in our attitudes towards gambling. Gambling has been transformed, mutatis mutandi, into "gaming" and, in the process, gone from something disreputable into a legitimate form of entertainment. Don’t think that the lords of the Valley haven’t learned these lessons: For instance, they know that labels matter. It may seem stupid, but experience — the abortion debate, for example — teaches us that the best way to shift peoples’attention away from what is really going on is to call it something else. While gambling conjures images of irresponsibility and self-indulgence, "gaming" brings to mind "entertainment." Likewise, there’s no way to make pornography sound acceptable. But "adult entertainment" is another matter. The "adult" part emphasizes the voluntary nature of the activity.

Then there’s the "entertainment" part. Gambling’s other coup was to position itself somewhere on the entertainment spectrum. As in "he goes to the movies, she goes to the symphony, and I go to Vegas 22 times a year." If I’m correct, the pornography industry is on the verge of doing the same thing. Porn is becoming something that people do in their free time. And, as such, it’s none of my business. If this is the case, the "performers" shouldn’t be ostracized. It doesn’t matter that treating pornography and serious cinema or even television as rough equivalents is absurd. It doesn’t matter that this "reasoning" turns India’s oeuvre into the equivalent of Meryl Streep’s. What matters is that Americans are loathe to judge the entertainment choices of others. Where does that leave us? Well, as Schuchardt points out, the aesthetics — not to mention the attitudes — of the porn industry influence others more than they are influenced. So, I guess the expression "the naked public square" is about to take on a whole new meaning.