Domestic pornography is how she [Margaret Horsfield, author of "Biting the Dust"] describes their idealized and relentlessly cheerful image of the perfect home, which every woman knows does not exist but which millions of us lap up, generation after generation.

My friend Beth is just about the nicest person I know. Yet she does have a secret vice: Martha Stewart. She knows she shouldn't, she laughs nervously when the subject comes up, but she can't help it. It's the one skeleton in her (very tidy) closet. In fact, her husband teases her that Martha Stewart Living is "domestic porn." Looking at the February and March issue (the magazine is published bimonthly), I see what he means. If pornography is the dissociation of action from feeling, then Martha Stewart Living qualifies as a form of pornography.