Take a $200 digital camcorder. Hand it to any set of lovers. Bellow this scene with the ether of high-speed Internet and watch the flames fly high. When the smoke clears, cast your eyes into the smoldering pit and behold Rosemary's cyberborg baby: YouPorn.com.

It is YouTube's naked, younger sibling. It has a global Alexa traffic rank of 48, which means only 47 sites out there on the big bad Web are getting more hits (try the likes of Yahoo, Google, MySpace, Flickr, Amazon and eBay). Not surprising, really. Porn has never been so easy.

Never ever.

No trip to the dirty bookstore on Brookpark. No need to enter the "Adults Only" room at the corner video store. And, oh yeah, YouPorn is 100-percent free, so leave your credit card safely tucked in your wallet, miles away from some seedy Web page. All you have to do is creep into the spare bedroom, click your mouse a few times and let the flesh fest begin.

No orifice is off limits in the more than 10,000 (ahem) entries. Many are snippets from professional efforts. Then there are the oddity clips (sorry, but the guy with the "massive freaky" member ought to be showing that thing to a doctor instead of me), the funny clips (go ahead and sigh over the visual love story between a girl and her leek - let's just hope it was organically grown), the vintage clips that prove the smut of 1907 was no different than the smut of 2007, the parade of bitter ex-girlfriend features, although all those submitting must promise they really truly have legal 2257 Code documentation for the footage (jeepers, do you think the anonymous submitter of Revenge Ex Girlfriend Swallow would mind producing those papers?), and the disturbing entries (okay, it started out as play, but did he have to continue smacking her ass until tears streamed from her eyes?).

Then there is the other side of YouPorn.

I could never understand prostitution. Having to pay someone to share a bed always struck me as a profound self-insult. And professional porn is prostitution's homely stepsister. After all, the actors aren't screwing because they necessarily want to. It's their job. They are paid to make it look good even if it doesn't feel good.

Paid sex is a lie. YouPorn is different.

The people in the videos look like the clerk at Giant Eagle, Joan from accounting and the sweaty guy on the treadmill at the gym. They are overweight and skinny, hirsute and hairless, blemished and befreckled. They look like you. They look like me. They are amateurs.

An unremarkable word at first blush, but it means that they are not there for money. Be it banal, crass, gross or ridiculous, YouPorn has what professional porn does not, a respectable dose of honest desire. Participants are doing this because they want to.

And they want me to watch.

I am a partner in the sexual activity on the screen, regardless of my gender, age, race, weight, or even my place in time or space. Without me, YouPorn loses all relevance.

I hated it when YouPorn aroused me.

It was like being attracted to a lover I despised, losing to an opponent I could not see. I wanted to admonish my ridiculous animal self. "Cut it out, already!" Writer Erin would yell at Animal Erin. "Can't you see I'm trying to write something intelligent here?"

Animal Erin would just chuckle and purr, then turn back to the glowing screen.

It was the little things that would draw me into a clip. An older woman's fingers dripping in gold as she reached for her young lover. Cheap bedding, expensive bedding, unremarkable bedding. The facial expressions that said look what I can do as participants leveled their eyes into the camera. Speaking of which, was it stationary or was someone else filming and therefore watching the live action?

In all its baldness, YouPorn is inundated with nuance.

I passed over the previews that promised yet another fellatio performance and looked for an unexpected component. One thumbnail flashed an innocuous control button that led to a hilarious instructional sales vid of an automated Asian sex chair. Another featured a topless woman doing an uneven parallel bar routine. And was that a nude woman walking down a crowded city street? Hm, let me see …

And once I followed the breadcrumb trail that suited me, I was left squinting at the screen, stunned at what was going on in bedrooms just like mine. If it was far from my paradigm, that was shocking. If it was close, that was worse. It was undiluted sex. Sex, sex, sex. Close-up sex, raw sex, predictable sex, athletic sex. Unsexy sex.

Same old sex, brand new road.

Is that a collective sigh of relief I hear as the porn comes home or a disapproving snort? Or perhaps it is womankind recognizing value in the countless gynecological close-ups. Maybe if they look at enough videos of real women showing them off, men will finally be able to locate them on their own.

Quit it with the raised eyebrow already. After all, who made YouPorn number 48?

We did. And that makes YouPorn our porn.

Visit erin-obrien.blogspot.com (Nov. 7, 2007 entry) for more commentary and a listing of pertinent links.