Pornography is vital to freedom and a free and civilised society should be judged by its willingness to accept it, says India-born writer Salman Rushdie.

His views are to be published alongside images of American porn stars in a book called XXX:30 Porn Star, says The Sunday Times.

Rushdie writes in an essay 'The East is Blue', "Pornography exists everywhere, of course, but when it comes into societies in which it's difficult for young men and women to get together and do what young men and women often like doing, it satisfies a more general need."

He adds: "While doing so, it sometimes becomes a kind of standard-bearer for freedom, even civilisation."

According to Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the book's photographer, Rushdie supports his "argument with statistics about the volume of porn traffic on the Internet in Pakistan".

Rushdie's recent novel Fury had mixed reviews amid suggestions that it drew on his love life with Padma Lakshmi, who is 26 years his junior.

Earlier this year Lakshmi became his fourth wife in a Hindu ceremony in Manhattan, which was photographed by Hello! magazine. They live in New York.

Rushdie, 54, is joined by some of the most prominent figures in American literature, music and cinema in his campaign to welcome pornography into the mainstream.

Gore Vidal, the grand old man of American letters, writes in the foreword to XXX:30 Porn Star that America is a puritanical society which has fettered sexuality with unnecessary constraints. 

"We didn't take sex so seriously thousands of years ago because we had so many other things to worry about, such as surviving," he said.