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Causes... those were the words good ol' Bill quoted, with a grin of incredulity on his face.

Yes, I suppose it would take statistics to prove one way or another whether there is any correlation between porn and sexual molestation, just as it would take careful study to show that computer games do/don't increase teenage violence or that reading novels makes people lose touch with reality.

It's my theory that pop songs cause people to have unsustainable relationships, and hence contribute to the divorce rate by encouraging an overly romanticised view of love (jk!).

Freud he caused a few sexual hang-ups, I'll be bound. I'll stick with Bill Hicks, sexual thoughts are caused by having genitals. And a brain.

But to go back to your original question, how do we define pornography? I've seen pictures that were dead sexy, but not wantonly erotic, which stimulated an emotional response in me, but which did not have any "physical" effects.

To be precise, I think there has to be two halves to the definition. The first is, do the words or images depict the actual act of sex, or show organs and features in a state of arousal? Second, is the context in which they are presented a sexual one?

I've seen pictures of people in primitive tribes who don't wear a lot, but the pictures are not porn. If someone finds it sexual, that's their business. Or, a picture of a lifeguard running down a beach to save someone is not porn. But the same lifeguard, pouting, pupils dilated, one hand creeping toward her crotch, with the caption, "Saving herself for you" is another matter.

Incidentally, my words here are not porn, but taken out of this context and placed in a sexual one, say, an article about what men really want, and suddenly they become pornographic.

Your photoshop'd piece in the original post is not, to me, porn. It has erotic connotations, but does not actually depict anything sexual. Even nudity is not, in itself, porn. Porn depicts a sex act in a context emphasising the pleasure aspect, as opposed to say, the educational aspect.

And I don't think we should stretch the definition. Sex means the arousal of the body's sexual organs, not some obscure fetish a few people associate with their own arousal. At this point we would be moving into a discussion of the aesthetics of porn, the art of porn, if you will, but the substance of porn is that it shows bodies that are in the middle of a sexual process. Otherwise it might be deemed erotic, but is not pornographic.

I'll stop here, and let you draw attention to the flaws in this view, before we carry on. Perhaps it will be possble to arrive at a concrete definition, with enough discussion, or perhaps the line is a fuzzy one and will alwasy be debatable.