AdultDVDEmpire.com claims to be "the largest online retailer of adult DVDs in the world," but you'd never know it from their headquarters in the Thorn Hill Industrial Park in Cranberry, a low, dun-colored warehouse-style building with "DVD Empire" -- their other, non-pornography business -- stenciled on the front door.

Their website is notable for exactly two things: the March special ("Celebrate Women's History Month by saving $5.00 on selected All-Girl titles") and the fact that the site employs professional adult film reviewers.

It sounded like the ideal way to build up that college fund for my kids, so I decided to apply.

A quick glance at the top-reviewed titles on the site told me right away that this would be a challenge. There are only so many ways to say, "Naked women! Doin' stuff! Sometimes even to each other!" But despite porn's famously inane plots and dialogue, its cheesy music and settings, and the utter irrelevance of all those things to the average customer -- or so I've heard -- there seemed to be some Cahiers du Cinema subscribers among the reviewers. Did I spy a few shades of François Truffaut's celebratory critique of Jean Renoir's ouevre in one reviewer's incisive query: "So, the question is: What makes a good oral sex DVD?"

Perhaps non.

AdultDVDEmpire requested a sample review with my application. So I rented "Gen Sex" starring Stephanie Swift, Sydnee Steele, Inari Vachs, Tina Cheri, Michael J. Cox, Dale Dabone and Mark Davis -- the only one with a tough enough agent, apparently, to avoid the silly porn-star name.

Swift and Vachs are television talk-show host and videographer scouring the countryside to interview women about orgasms. Don't ask why. They certainly don't.

My wife, a bona fide cinephile, insisted on helping with my review. I'm glad she did.

It takes a woman to notice the little things, from the error one couple made in getting a leather couch wet (very difficult to clean, I learned) to one woman's chafing marks from shaving (points off from the judges there) all the way to the makeup credit: "By Mystery," it said. "Well, yeah," my wife responded.

Deborah Chinn, spouse (I presume) of the film's director Bob Chinn, also stars as the talk-show producer. Although attractive, she is also a woman "of a certain age" in a business suit and sensible hair. She doesn't even get naked in the film, let alone participate.

"Come on, old broad," my wife shouted at the screen at one point, "do it for AARP."

It also takes a woman to come up with such critical insights.

Chinn's cinematic choices were, in fact, a bit odd. One of the orgasmic women found by our TV hostess gets excited by artichokes. Another couple, showing their moves in the back of an auto repair shop, are accompanied on their radio by a public service announcement about herpes.

Last year Salon.com reported that the U.S. government had paid television shows to include anti-drug plots. Could the feds be investing in adult films now?

As for the performances: Ethyl, standing behind the couple in the auto repair shop, was a better actress.

Ethyl was a tank of gas.

And the sex? I can't top the critical assessment offered by my very own Gene-Siskel-in-frilly-panties: "If you don't know what you're doing, don't do it harder."

I felt ready now to critique in the big leagues: porn DVDs. By myself.

The clerk at Starflicks in the North Hills recommended "My Plaything," starring Stacey Valentine -- and the viewer. It was supposed to be a sex simulator, with Valentine staring directly into the camera and only a few male body parts intruding, as required. One could click on everything from "Tease" to "Cowboy" which, I was disappointed to see, I'd actually done -- meaning the whole thing was a lot less dirty than it sounded.

Unfortunately, it also sometimes resembled Night of the Living Penis. Watching a hand wander in from the bottom of a screen to touch a woman is just creepy, not sexy. The best part of this DVD was failing to choose and watching Valentine squirm (literally) and ask, "What's wrong, can't decide?" and, eventually, freeze up.

I sent AdultDVDEmpire.com my review via email -- and one hour later was rejected. Shannon Nutt, overseeing reviewers for the company, wouldn't tell me what was wrong with it. He would only say that they're rather overburdened with reviewers at the moment.

I've been a writer long enough to know a kind kiss-off when I read it. But I admit I'm relieved. If I ever see another porn movie, I don't want to have to do it with my pencil in my hand.

Last week I received two letters on the same day, one from a reader and one from the Republican National Committee, both presuming I was as white as white could be. But now I'm not so sure about my whiteness.

"Dear Mr. Levine," the RNC wrote, "I don't want to believe you've abandoned the Republican Party. Have you given up?" They seemed confident I belonged in their ranks as a member of the whitest club in America. "In 2000," they boasted, "we withstood the heaviest onslaught of liberal special interests� ever." Won't I help them keep up the good work, they asked.

Feeling my melanin rising, I opened the next piece of mail, handwritten on a lovely little notepad depicting a covered bridge and signed only with an initial. It came in response to a recent story about school violence, penned in part by Tim Wise, an anti-racism activist. Wise pointed out, factually, that all the school shooters in recent years have been white kids. Just a day after this article appeared, 18-year-old white student Jason Hoffman wounded three kids in San Diego's Granite Hills High School.

"The recent article by Tim Wise," my correspondent wrote, "stating that the school shooters are all white is in error. The most recent shooter, Jason Hoffman, despite his name appears to be some kind of spic" -- sic.

Normally, I ignore such mail, but this one got me thinking. This reader, like the GOP, had also assumed I was white and therefore sympathetic to his point.

This put me in a dark mood. How white was I anyway? I was white for last year's census, even though nearly seven million Americans for the first time were able to check more than one racial box. But then last week some BBC documentary makers reconstructed the face of a 2000-year-old Israeli in order to show that Jesus, a first-century Middle Eastern Jew, looked like a first-century Middle Eastern Jew: a "dark-skinned, curly-haired man with a round, robust face and a stout nose," as the filmmakers put it.

Not exactly the usual portrayal of Jesus as The Ultimate Caucasian (blond locks, blue eyes, pale skin, patrician nose). He was now, the article implied, a lot less white than we thought. And, except for the desert tan, he now looked a lot more like me than he used to.

I was beginning to feel like an off-white person -- certainly a semi-gloss. Then David Horowitz mixed my paint can completely.

For the last month or two Horowitz has been trying to interest university newspapers in publishing his full-page ad, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks -- and Racist Too." His message to white people about the legacy of slavery: It ain't your fault; blacks already got reparations (i.e., welfare); blacks are better off here than in other countries anyway; and God forbid America should insult black people by fulfilling 136-year-old promises. Many college papers ran the ads, and the inevitable protests ensued.

Horowitz forgot to mention one simple fact in his anti-reparations screed. I offer it to him not because I think he deserves it but because he was an idiot not to think of it himself. If reparations are ever awarded to African-Americans, the cash will come from our tax dollars. Either tax-paying black citizens will, in part, be paying for their own reparations or there will be some mechanism for black Americans to opt out of paying themselves.

Instead of hiding his wallet behind a lot of patriotic rhetoric, all David Horowitz needs to do to get out of paying reparations is to prove that he's just a little bit black.

The "white pride" crowd will be happy to prove Horowitz isn't completely white if, as I presume, he's not a Christian. And being incompletely white has been one definition of "black" in America since way before even the beloved Civil War. So Horowitz may be saved.

But what will the real racial separatists do? It's too late for them to check more than one box on the census. But Horowitz can come to the rescue of white supremacists here. He is a regular contributor to popular magazines, so he might consider devising one of those little tests -- "How White Are You? Take this easy quiz!" -- perfect for USA Today, fashion magazines and the "kids' pages" on the Klan website. Just fail one simple question and, bingo, even a White Aryan Resistance member has proof he's as good as black now.

Of course, that may make these guys eligible for reparations themselves. But paying people to consider themselves black may be the most realistic solution to bigotry anyone has ever devised. In such a race- and money-obsessed country as ours, it's the only thing likely to work 100 percent of the time.