By Pornography
Special to YNOT

LOS ANGELES – Contrary to what you might have heard, it’s not easy being Pornography.

Despite the thousands, even millions, of words written about my scandalous ways each year, most people still don’t know much about me. Somehow, this is true even of those who spend hours watching me literally every day — many of whom stubbornly insist I’m not causing any problems even as they find themselves shopping for new underwear with frightening regularity.

For decades, most people didn’t want to talk about me at all. I was a taboo topic, something you not only didn’t bring up in “polite company,” but which you dared not bring up at all with anyone who wasn’t your psychiatrist, parole officer or college roommate.

That’s all changed now, though. These days, people just can’t shut up about me — which would be great, except almost everything they say is dumb, inaccurate and useless.

Take this article from WIRED, for example. To hear these nerds tell it, I’m not even half a threat to human society when compared to things like opioid addiction, guns or antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Shit, they even list mosquitos as more of a threat to public health, because those little winged pricks transmit Zika, malaria and other un-fun diseases.

Look, I’m no expert on public health, but if I’m not massively dangerous as a vector of horrible disease, will someone please explain what’s going on with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and its director, Michael Weinstein? They wouldn’t be wasting time, money and resources trying to force everyone who works with me to wear condoms and other barrier protection unless they have a damn good reason to think I’m a risky coworker to be around, right?

According to WIRED, somewhere around 2 million Americans are addicted to opiates, which sounds pretty bad until you realize there are roughly 350 million Americans, around 348 million of whom are addicted to me.

From my perspective, the biggest problem with opiates is ingesting too many of them makes staying awake difficult. Forget maintaining an erection long enough to make it through the first three pages of anal sex videos on the average tube site. Naturally, ingesting way too many opiates can cause death — a condition in which it’s even harder to watch or otherwise consume me, obviously.

At the same time, opiates also make it possible for irritating human wussies to whine about their pain a lot less, mostly by rendering them incapable of coherent speech. Considering Americans don’t need much incentive to complain and are, by and large, an extremely loud form of person, maybe a few million of them being too groggy to bitch about their lives isn’t such a bad thing.

As for America’s gun violence “epidemic,” it’s just plain silly to put guns in the category of a public health crisis. First of all, so far as I’m aware, nobody is working on a firearms vaccine, and I have yet to see a single report, chart or graph suggesting gun ownership is why all your kids are so goddamn fat. Are hollow-point bullets particularly high in calories? I think not.

If there’s one public health threat highlighted by WIRED that could challenge me at the top of the health-crisis heap, it’s antibiotic resistant-bacteria. A lot of my fans may not realize this, but antibiotics are as fundamental to producing more of me as is a continuous supply of people willing to have sex with a camera pointed at them.

Still, while the specter of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea is undeniably horrible, there’s no shortage of you humans out there willing to take insane risks for almost no reason. More to the point, an alarming number of you appear to be OK with other humans watching you suck, fuck, squirt and swallow, so I should be able to carry on no matter how many of my on-screen assistants drop out due to health concerns.

The bottom line here is while other threats to public health come and go, I’m going to be around forever. I was there when the only place humans depicted anything was on the walls of the caves in which they lived, and I’ll be here long after the virtual-reality porn trend has been supplanted by the next big thing, whatever it might be.

You hear that, heart disease? Suck it, you half-assed threat to public health!

(I would have told heart disease “put that in your pipe and smoke it” — but that would only benefit cancer, another perennial pretender to my public-health-crisis throne.)

Pornography is a form of sexually explicit expression that has been part of human society since before the word “human” existed. Pornography enjoys arousing people, then making them feel guilty about their desires and fantasies in the moments immediately following each self-stimulated, porn-fueled orgasm.