What message does the comment about blood stained tissues in the washhand basins of the ladies' loo supposed to convey? Someone has a nosebleed, and is slovenly over tissue disposal (perhaps through drunkenness). This can happen at any function. Why include it in an article about the porn industry? Bad journalism. No. Very bad journalism.

Mary Whitehouse. Miss Penny was right, but we all ridiculed her.

JArticle: You may not realise this, but articles are usually commissioned and written some time before being published. Google reveals the SHAFTAs were more than ten days ago. If an article on a porn awards ceremony happens to be published on the same day as UK military intervention in Libya, that's the New Statesman's call, not Laurie's.

This article is poor.

The opening paragraph alone is contemptible, just mocking the individuals involved.

If Anna Span/ Smith is to be believed it is also dishonest as she was not actually there.

There are serious issues regarding porn etc. but this does nothing to advance the agenda and imo sets back any argument. Pathetic.

Lets just re-cap people, lots of you are sneering at Laurie Penny, a feminist writer because her article about a porn industry gong event wasnt balanced enough? are you people crazy?
She can never get those precious hours of her life back as it is.
If a feminist writer that went to Oxford can't look down her nose at "the Shaftas" ,an event where purveyors of porn gather in a strip joint to congratulate each other on who made the best cum shot that year...then we need to ask ourselves what, as a society, do we aspire to sneer at!
I sneer at you the dim witted defenders of the depraved...I sneer at you culturally, socially and intellectually.....
its like , if Laurie was a gourmet food writer and she got asked to review a McDonalds , and she wrote a snotty article, you people would be attacking her for poor journalism. Get a grip. Its not Laurie's responsibility to make sure you feel
that the honest, hard working, much maligned and misunderstood people in the porn industry are being adequately represented.

are you against pornography laurie? what exactly is your position, so to speak? ;)

as is pointed out above in some of these comments, these are real women doing this on camera, for money and possibly enjoyment, so is at fault here, men, women, or just non-middle class, uninhibited people?

"A good virus disabler enables free orgasms. Much like the real thing."

hehe, probably the best thing i've ever seen you type in these blog comments DD :D

Hmmmm...... yes, the fact that one of the few named people in the article is someone who has never met Penny does throw the rest of the article into doubt. Is it all made up? I would have expected New Statesman's fact checking to be better than this.

This was a disappointment to the fresh look at things I usually expect from Penny.

Whatever porn is it ain't erotic. We need to keep male pimps out of the industry. The female performers need to make their own material - to take power over how they are portyayed to contol their use and, very importantly, to avoid abuse

Porn is often tacky? How astonishing! In industries that are not regulated properly exploitation happens? There is nothing wrong with porn per se other than how crudely constructed it tends to be. The supposed link between sexual assault and porn is absurd and an abuse of cause and effect. Which is more intuitive:

1. A person willing and desiring to commit a sexual offence would also be likely to be interested in porn.
2. Porn compels people assault people.

A correlation between pornography and violence is not sufficient. Murderers liking horror films is not a sufficient reason to prohibit horror! I am glad that the exploitation of women argument was not repeated. Such arguments have an inappropriate bias that do not account for the position of men in porn or that women are not always the focus (eg. gay porn). Porn, like sex, is morally neutral. It is the behaviour of the people involved that can make is degrading.

if people are getting so sick of reading penny perhaps they should engage that most fundamental of talents shared by all animals and learn from their experience; in which case you might stop reading her articles and wasting your time commenting.

online comments should be a dimension for constructive debate and not a binary release for physical frustrations (which is, in essence, a similar act to watchin porn pon the net.. just saying...)

anyway, i for one enjoy pennys nuanced pieces and have no qualms expressing respect for her approach and delivery

If we look at human history we find that the most advanced of civilizations were the most sexually liberal.

Eg. Babylon, the temple of Astarte where it was obligatory for everyone to lose their virginity at the temple of Astarte.That was 500 to 700 BC Babylon was the the most advanced civilization besides Egypt.

Eg.2 Greece had very liberal ideas on homosexual and sexual relations and in 300 to 400BC they knew the Earth was round measured the circumfrance, theorised on the atomic structure of the universe Socrates taught the deductive way of thinking!!!!!

None of this happened in theocracies such as Judea, did it?

Do you think the Greeks could just get rid of their sexual hang ups and get on with it?

@Buckskins: I don't really like porn. Honestly. I don't like the look of the people involved.. they remind me of people who work in fair grounds. I'm a romantic who believes in love and loyalty. I went to a couple of strip shows yonks back to see what they were like. I felt embarrassed to be there and just wanted to get out. I can't stand most of the modern music videos. My favourite music is the new romantics of the early 80s like Ultravox, 'Oh Vienna'.

I try to make fun of the people who work in this industry liking their actions to farm animals to exaggerate the ugliness, to ridicule them. I want to make them appear as ugly as possible. Their souls seem empty. I am attracted by eyes and minds.

This article is factually incorrect. Everyone should know that Pascal White won this years male performer of the year and not Danny D. http://www.televisionxnow.co.uk/shafta/ did laurie just make all of this stuff up?

Also, I doubt that there was less violence against women before porn (on the internet).

In this day and age, why is it acceptable to sneer like this at the sexual proclivities of normal people? For it is normal every day people who consume porn. Would the right-on Ms Penny have dared to write such an article about gay porn performers? I doubt it very much.

I can imagine Ms Penny 40 years ago writing a scathing article about the insidious effects of homosexuality on society as a whole when such bigotry was the mainstream view. It is tragic that it's still acceptable to be so bigoted towards anyone's decisions to act in or watch porn.

Ms Penny, you don't need to like porn or the porn industry. Those who do like it and those who work in it could care less. You behave as though the sex act is some sort of holy sacrament that should be confined to the marital bed and performed through a hole in a sheet. I'm pretty sure you're not remotely religious and despise the religiously conservative right, so why do write about porn as though you are one of them?

Hugh: I dunno about "the sexual proclivities of normal people." There are a fair few assertions in this article that are open to dispute, but I can't argue with Laurie's assessment as regards the vast majority of commercial porn. Most of it is, indeed, profoundly un-erotic and gruesomely degrading.

Whether it's fair to assume that kids are growing up with this garbage as their concept of 'normal' sexual behaviour, and/or whether it's a significant contributor to sexual violence and misogyny... well there, I'm not so convinced.

Wow, interesting to see you here, RevStu. Not got an iPhone app to promote today?

Anyway, regardless of the somewhat shoddy copy editing, I have to agree with Penny. Although I personally think that the 50p-a-minute wank line ads in the back of men's magazines are more depressing than anything else I have EVER seen. Why would I want to know about slack granny fanny and piss fetishes?

Sorry but you can't claim the editor made this into a bad article and then carry on writing for the NS.

If they mangled it that badly, you should quit.

If not you have to take responsibility for the end result because, by not quitting, you are endorsing it.

I enjoyed (perhaps the wrong word?) this article, although it makes me feel a bit odd being one of the 8% of teenage girls who haven't. Maybe people should bear in mind that many teenagers who answer those surveys may feel pressure to pretend they have done or looked at things, when they haven't. I know when I was younger I felt very 'immature' not having watched porn, and the repeating of these statistics by journalists and 'teen sex education' programmes only made me feel worse.

Not so bothered now though. There is such a thing as imagination...people should use it more :)

How can it be 'anti-human' if humans make it and watch it? What can 'human' mean there?

I think Penny is confusing her own romanticism with what is authentically 'human'.

""I love the idea of people watching me, of making money from performing," slurs Hannah. "but I've never had an orgasm from sex. Not from sex, no.""

Carefully does it. Lots of women have never had an orgasm from sex. Doesn't mean they didn't enjoy it.

If porn has a downside it's that it tries to fit human sexual experience into a fixed ritual of positions. If it has an upside it's that it enables us to have conversations about how the fixed ritual of positions we had before porn were even more restrictive.

This article proves two things. One, Laurie Penny has a razor-sharp wit and can write a great piece. Two, that Laurie Penny falls into the sad stereotype of sex-negative feminism. The sneering tone in this article was clearly made up long she attended the event, and I don't think anything seen there could possibly have changed her mind. This is hardly objective journalism, she didn't even seem to be trying. The only thing we gleaned is that Penny hates pornography and looks down on those who make and view it.

The sad thing is, porn is in desperate need of input from real women because it's been left to the whims of a largely male audience, and therefore often reflects the worst excesses the male mind can cough up. Instead of trying to make the portrayal of sex more representative of humans instead of just men, Penny perpetuates feminism's long-standing tradition of quitting whenever sex comes up.

I expected more, and I'll continue to expect more.

I'd have expected better writing from Laurie, particularly on a juicy subject like this. We have to guess what the bloody tissue insinuation refers to: cocaine being taken in the loos, I'd guess? but coy hints like that don't do the piece much credit. And the casual use of "slurs Hannah" language gives a tone of downmarket journalism that devalues any actual facts that may be in here.

The sign-off is really weak: I'd hazard that Hannah (however she may or may not have slurred it) was saying that she is one of very many women who do not come through vaginal intercourse alone. In other words, she uses other methods to get there. Why else would she tack on "Not from sex, no" - using the word "sex" in a particular technical sense. There's a really clear reading of her words in which [when she was asked by her interviewer: "Do you have orgasms during sex?"] she said "...I've never had an orgasm from sex" etc. Nothing to write home (or anywhere else) about.

If you're going to make the shock-vaginas-sex-feminism slot your own in the NS Laurie, you need to raise your game.

Better more radical writing would have understood that the people who make and watch porn are indeed humans and asked what consequences its popularity has for the writer's own idea of what is 'human'.