PLYMOUTH, Mass. – It’s the fourth Thursday in November, and you know what that means: The Detroit Lions, Dallas Cowboys and at least two other NFL teams are stuck playing football, while the rest of us are stuck at the airport.

I’ve noticed this is a time of year during which a lot of people eat an inordinate amount of turkey, get liquored up at lunch and start prattling on about all the things for which they are “thankful.” Normally, I don’t go for that sort of shit, but I figure if you can’t beat them with a dismembered turkey leg, join them in the drunken babbling.

Accordingly, here are some of the porn-related things for which I’m thankful.

Traditional, two-dimensional, non-interactive porn videos. All the 3D, immersive and/or virtually-real shit I’ve ever tried to watch, play or fuck has made me want to puke, convert to Catholicism, or beat big blue aliens to death with a rock, so I’m very thankful for the continued existence of old-fashioned, 2D, flat, non-immersive porn videos. Plus, given the number of careers and livelihoods being ruined by accusations of sexual impropriety, I’m just glad my masturbation habits involve women who can’t see me and will never know I was pulling on my dick while staring at them in a very disconcerting and possibly predatory way, and therefor can’t get me shit-canned for jerking off to/at them.

Lame, tired, bullshit porn-publicity stunts. As a seriously lazy person, I can really appreciate the total lack of effort, thought and originality that goes into a stunt like offering a job to any random fucker who winds up in national news headlines. After all, if it weren’t for porn studios, tube sites and cam companies offering people jobs all the time, I’d have to spend at least an additional hour per month on average tracking down porn-related shit about which to write snarky, cheap, unfair insults.

The occasional self-righteous pornographer who thinks her/his shit doesn’t stink. Sure, they can be irritating with their pedantic, lecturing tone and self-aggrandizing blog posts, press releases and guest articles in mainstream publications, but where would the adult industry be without porn producers who consider virtually every other pornographer’s work an example of “toxic masculinity” or a feeble attempt at imitating their own legitimately artistic, sex-positive, responsibly-sourced, organic, gluten-free, fair-trade erotica? (For starters, the porn industry wouldn’t be semi-regularly featured on Refinery29.com, that’s for sure.)

Porn lawyers. Granted, I’m probably only thankful for porn lawyers because other types of lawyer rarely return my calls, emails and miserable, drunken 3 a.m. texts, but I think this should still count as sincere gratitude.

Hackable “smart” sex toys. Thanks to the cyber-capabilities (and security vulnerabilities) of various smart vibrators and web-enabled butt plugs, you wouldn’t believe my ever-expanding archive of surreptitiously recorded sexual-encounter sound files. Among other things, by the time I’m done collecting these suckers, it will make faithfully covering Frank Zappa’s “The Torture Never Stops” a snap.

Net neutrality. To be honest, I’m not sure what “net neutrality” means, but as I understand it, net neutrality is why online porn is free to watch in every public library from which I haven’t already been banned, as well as the reason I can watch Netflix’s original programming without excessive buffering.

Gullible mainstream journalists. True story: Right now, I have some guy from The New York Times absolutely convinced I have in my possession a Donald Trump sex tape recorded in a ritzy Russian hotel, in which a half-dozen Ukrainian strippers piss all over him while he reclines in a bathtub. Hah! What a moron, right? Boy, this left-wing hack is sure going to be furious when he finds out there are only two strippers and they’re both from Moldova.

Image © Rob Gonyea