LONDON: Raising yet another controversy, Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie claims that porn is vital to freedom and supports his argument with statistics about the volume of porn traffic on the internet in Pakistan.

Rushdie argues that a free and civilized society should be judged by its willingness to accept pornography. His views are to be published alongside images of American porn stars in a book called XXX:30 Porn star , The Sunday Times reported on Sunday.

Rushdie, who faces an edict issued by Iran sentencing him to death for allegedly insulting Islam in his controversial book Satanic Verses , writes in an essay The East is Blue , “Pornography exists everywhere, of course, but when it comes into societies in which it’s difficult for young men and women to get together and do what young men and women often like doing, it satisfies a more general need.”

He adds, “While doing so, it sometimes becomes a kind of standard-bearer for freedom, even civilization.” According to Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the book’s photographer, Rushdie supports his “argument with statistics about the volume of porn traffic on the internet in Pakistan.”

Rushdie’s recent novel Fury had mixed reviews amid suggestions that it drew on his love life with Padma Lakshmi, who is 26 years his junior. It was nominated for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award but failed to win.

Earlier this year Lakshmi became his fourth wife in a Hindu ceremony in Manhattan, which was photographed by Hello! magazine. They live in New York. Rushdie, 54, is joined by some of the most prominent figures in American literature, music and cinema in his campaign to welcome pornography into the mainstream, said the daily.

Gore Vidal, the grand old man of American letters, writes in the foreword to XXX:30 Porn Star that America is a puritanical society which has fettered sexuality with unnecessary constraints. “We didn’t take sex so seriously thousands of years ago because we had so many other things to worry about, such as surviving,” he said