“All you kids make me sick! You act like little Miss Muffet and down inside you’re dirty! Do you hear me? Dirty!“

Such is the hilarious moral condemnation spewed at teen trash selling their bodies to illicit porno-peddlers in schlockmeister Herschell Gordon Lewis’s gutterfest Scum of The Earth.

In a bygone genre devoted to the exploits of Teenage Gang Debs, Cocaine Fiends, and Untamed Youth, no greater shame was borne by the sinner than the curse of being a callow, surly youth wallowing in smut for thrill and profit at the behest of the flesh trade. Only bad kids use their bodies as toys or chattel! “Well you listen and you listen well: you’re damaged merchandise — and this is a fire sale!”

“Eat me, Pops! I’m the sale of the century!”

The accidentally-determined outcome of a Canadian sex research project conducted in Montreal and devoted to the male sex drive — the 97th such probe this year alone — suggests no youthquaker is squeaky clean enough for Riverdale or New Eden.

The mission statement: ascertain effects of porn viewing on college-aged heterosexual males. The intended control group: young men with pristine, virginal eyes who’ve never watched a fuck flick, never gotten a paper cut from dry humping a skin rag, and never had to wipe down their keyboards after losing control of a rogue pop shot.

The hitch: none could be found, prompting the researchers to reach the conclusion that “guys who do not watch pornography do not exist.” If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking “Also, water is wet,” while still entertaining at least a half-hearted cynicism about such a sweeping claim.

The project involved a mere twenty-odd twenty-something male volunteers — not exactly a broad cross-section of the human condition by any means, and the fact that none were gay is conspicuous given the import gay porn plays in our own sexual identities. The conclusion may be more anecdotal than anything else, but it still begs the fascinating question:

Is there really any guy out there who is a porn virgin anymore? Is that even possible today in the era of Web Porn?

My first brush with gay porn came my freshman year of college in New York when I witnessed Joey Stefano getting double-teamed from both ends — and matter-of-factly commenting “You sure know how to fuck ass, man!” — in The River as it played on a TV in a friend’s dorm room. Admittedly, nineteen is pretty late-in the-game by most standards, and this was a couple years before the Internet porn boom really hit.

Still, I was fucking transfixed in a Bugs Bunny-style leer, and if a guy I felt smitten with was in the near vicinity, I might very well have flung myself at him in a flurry of frantic dust and cartoonish limbs flailing every which way and loose. That was the power of the first porn experience for me, made all the more delirious by the fact that the medium — once this urban thing spoken of in hushed tones — was readily available mere blocks away on 42nd Street, and now with a virtual wrong side town at our fingertips, you don’t even need a Red Light District to make you feel all trampy and wayward anymore. We’re all damaged goods now!

If a male porn virgin — what Divine in Hairspray might have really meant by “a clean teen”? — exists in the waning days of 2009, then I can only imagine that, given the shame-free ease with which the nasty stuff can be found in complete privacy, he must be actively avoiding it, and why so?

Either he’s a complete ascetic, or he’s lying his ass off, and either end he’s been encouraged to do by the Piety Police, with masturbation aversion — the Ex-Masturbator niche market is, if anything, less plausible than even the Ex-Gay Movement — and Christian Porn Addiction rehab makes cranking shaft sound like working the streets to feed a smack habit.

The Montreal study’s corresponding conclusion that porn is not a “neurotoxin” that infects a healthy mind is equally rational; dirty pictures don’t create a sex addict so much as they can enable him, and a sexual predator needs a hell of a lot more than an early life exposure to porn to put him on his merry way. A dash of filth doesn’t just help us figure out what we want; it can also aid us in self-determining what we don’t.

The reality is that most of us will admit to actually seeking out some form of sexually-stimulating material as youngsters, not having it forced upon us. What exactly qualifies as smut anyway? A Victoria’s Secret or International Male catalog, or even the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition or Muscle & Fitness have non-prescribed uses in the right hands. Custom-made, self-lensed porn doesn’t even need to be produced by an underground syndicate of sex fiends. It’s hard to believe, but the iPhone’s chief application was not aiding young men in learning how to properly frame their dicks like the Washington Monument. Even the jerk-off zone has shifted away from the living room couch in front of the TV and into the office chair in front of the computer screen.

The kids aren’t falling prey to white slavery rings, phoney modeling agencies, and pervy shutterbugs. They are the sleaze merchants now.

And taking advantage of yourself is the hottest trip of all.