LOS ANGELES – If there’s one thing I’ve found consistently entertaining and amusing over my years working in and around the adult entertainment industry, it’s the lengths to which many pornographers will go in drawing significant qualitative distinctions between their own work and the clearly inferior work of their industry peers.

From creators of (relatively) big-budget features to those who shoot quick-and-dirty gonzo vids, many producers, directors and performers regard their own work as brimming with merit, or even sheer brilliance, while regarding the efforts of their competitors as fundamentally flawed, possibly evenfraudulent, efforts to horn in on their territory.

To be fair, clearly there are substantial differences in technical ability from director to director, and many other points of differentiation to be had as we compare the work of different producers and studios. When the crucial difference is theme- or genre-based, however, I can’t help but chuckle at the moralistic stylings of some intra-industry criticism.

This brings me to a recent piece by former porn performer Aurora Snow covering the “disturbing rise” of incest-themed porn, a trend with which “not all stars are happy.”

As a quick aside, I feel compelled to ask which niche or genre in porn are all stars happy with? Is there universal agreement in the porn world that solo masturbation scenes are a good thing, for example, or do some performers find having a dildo for a partner somewhat unfulfilling?

Setting aside the question of whether making all performers happy is a bar any given porn theme must clear, the gist of Snow’s piece seems to be fauxcest is different from other fantasies depicted in porn, simply because the reality of incest’s existence is more objectionable than sexual realities connected to less problematic sexual fantasies, like gangbangs, marital infidelity, sleeping with one’s babysitter or getting down with a creepy clown.

Granted, if I had the same experience described by Gia Paige in Snow’s article, I’d be hesitant to continue filming fauxcest titles, too.

“One fan told me that he and his wife conditioned their son his whole life until he was old enough to join them in bed,” Paige said. “That really got to me. I almost felt like I was helping this kid get sexually abused.”

As horrible as this anecdote is, Paige ought not feel guilty about it. Regardless whether a single additional frame of fauxcest video is produced ever again from this day forward, familial sexual abuse will exist. Like many other profound negatives afflicting humanity over the centuries, sexual abuse of family members has been part of the human experience since the days before written or spoken language, and well before the existence of fauxcest porn.

Personally, I don’t get the appeal of fauxcest, but appealing to me isn’t a bar a porn fantasies must clear, either. If it were, porn would be a far narrower place, thematically speaking, and probably a very dull one from the perspective of many other porn viewers.

Whether it’s fauxcest, foot fetish, BDSM, sexual cosplay or any number of other erotic genres that don’t interest me, my attitude is the same: This is not my thing, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it being anyone else’s thing.

Everyone has a right to his or her opinion, of course, and I’m not about to tell someone in Paige’s position she’s wrong to be uncomfortable with performing in fauxcest. I will, however, argue in favor of the right of other performers, producers and directors to continue making the stuff. I’ll do so simply because in my view, the age, interpersonal disposition and explicit consent of the performers, not the characters they play, are the bright-red lines within which porn must stay.

Just as there’s a fundamental difference between playing Dr. Hannibal Lecter in a movie and being Jeffrey Dahmer in real life, there’s an enormous gulf between sexually abusing one’s family members and fantasizing about having sex with one’s stepmother with the aid of a video in which paid performers pretend to be doing the same.

As for Paige, she said she just wants to get back to shooting “good, clean porn again.”

This sounds good on paper, but I submit to you that in our current socio-political climate, in which porn is increasingly being termed a “public health crisis” by state legislatures around the country, Paige might find outside her industry peers and the consumers we serve, the sincere belief is there’s no such thing as “good, clean porn.”