Susannah Breslin writes on www.forbes.com – According to Amanda Marcotte, writing on Slate’s Double X blog, porn is a business devoted to the expression of male hatred of women.

Using the recent release of a book about the history of 20th century adult magazines, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers — an American Tale of Sex and Wonder by Mike Edison, as her launching pad, Marcotte unleashes an indictment of male pornographers and the porn they make, deeming pornographic representations of male sexuality an abomination and the business that manufactures them a factory of male-on-female loathing.

In a word, Marcotte claims, porn is misogynist. But is it?

I’ve been writing about the adult movie industry for over a decade — here’s a story I wrote about porn and the recession — and unlike Marcotte, I’ve investigated the business. I’ve talked to pornographers and performers and spent time in so-called Porn Valley.

Here’s the truth about porn: It’s an expression of male desire. Watch a porn movie, and you’re seeing male fantasies projected onto a screen, a facsimile or simulacrum of real fantasies that exist in real minds in real men.

Unfortunately for Marcotte, she cannot control those desires and they are not always politically correct. What men want — in their dreams, in their masturbatory reveries, in their sex lives — doesn’t adhere to what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s sexist and what isn’t, what’s OK with Marcotte and her feminist sisterhood and what the truth is that a man thinks about when it comes to sex.

Porn is a business like any other in that it obeys simple rules of supply and demand. As a pornographer once told me, “If people didn’t want it, it wouldn’t be made.”

Men are the primary consumers of pornography — not feminist bloggers — and, as such, the porn industry has no interest in sating the desires of anyone other than the men who consume its product.

Marcotte deems pornographers misogynist, as well, announcing — based on what, I’m not sure, maybe some googling? — that men who make porn — her dreaded enemy: the pornographer — hate women, too. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess I know more pornographers than Marcotte, more men who work in porn, and more men who are paid to get it up on camera.

If Marcotte is interested, or, unlikely as it may be, open-minded enough to learn something, she may be surprised to know that men who work in porn do not hate women. They have complicated relationships with women. Their relationships to women are as complex as that of their consumers: Women are something that is desired but in some way never had. So, they make movies in which, for once, the guy always gets the girl. That’s their happy ending.

The porn industry isn’t misogynist. It’s human. Misogyny is Marcotte’s problem, not porn’s.