The two most powerful men in the US today are called Bush and Dick. That might sound like good news for the pornography industry. It's not. Pornography is no laughing matter for Prez and Veep. The adult entertainment moguls have been here before - and this time they're ready for the axe's descent.

For US pornographers, the Clinton era represented eight years of expansion. The Justice Department adopted a hands-off role, and having a horny president didn't hurt. Day after day, revelation by revelation, it seemed the US steadily became a dirtier nation.

Porn statistics confirm this. There are now 25,000 adult bookstores in the US; 10,000 new hardcore video titles are released every year, up from 300 in 1980. Last year saw 711m porno rentals and the industry's annual turnover is now close to $10bn a year.

At the same time, we've seen a broadening of the taboos that porn is prepared to break, a massive increase in the explicit depiction of practices guaranteed to offend the likes of the new attorney general, John Ashcroft.

Practices long avoided by pornographers because of their perceived propensity for drawing litigious fire have sneaked into the fringes of porn's mainstream. Go to any conventional bookshop in America and pick up Penthouse. Inside you'll find at least one hardcore photo layout that includes unsimulated fellatio, penetration and that hardcore staple, the "pop-shot".

The Republicans see the White House Clinton vacated as an Augean stable of licentiousness and depravity requiring a Herculean hosing- down (the first thing George Jr did was to remove the Oval Office's carpet). We can now expect Bush to hit history's rewind button, flashing back to Ed Meese's lengthy, expensive Pornography Commission (conducted by men who signed their memos "Yours in Christ"). Meese oversaw widespread busts in the porn community, and Bush Sr's administration managed 30 court actions. Dubya told campaign audiences last year that "porn has no place in a decent society".

No one yet knows what form his hard line will take, but already America's smut pedlars are preparing for a new onslaught. Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler and Barely Legal, has issued his video production arm with a 24-point memo on what shouldn't be shown in his video releases. Now off limits are the following: blindfolds, wax-dripping, urinating, sex between black men and white women (though not white men and black women because racism is alive and well in porn), bisexuals, transsexuals, menstruation and, uh-oh, "sex in coffins".

This is not the hillbilly deluxe, first amendment literalist Larry Flynt I remember: the man who jump-started the move toward greater explicitness in 1990s pornography. I was present the day porn's new dawn broke, in 1994. The wheelchair-bound Flynt, who was shot and crippled by a rightwing maniac in 1978, had just recovered from spinal surgery, having spent years waiting for laser procedures.

Now he was well again, ready once more to take up the reins of power at Larry Flynt Publications, which I had just joined as a copy editor (later I wrote the Hustler letters page - my mother was so proud). Staff were called to the conference room, where Larry sat under a gigantic reproduction of his late wife Althea's first and grotesquely explicit Hustler centrefold.

He outlined his grandiose plans for a revitalised Hustler. "I want vaginal penetration!" he croaked weirdly. "I want cum-shots! I want it all! No limits!"

We all thought he was demented, but within months Hustler was featuring everything he'd proposed. Within a year, Penthouse had copied him and soon film-makers followed suit. To everyone's astonishment, not a peep was heard from prosecutors - until now. Flynt, always first into the fray, has become the first, so to speak, to withdraw.

In the 1970s, pornographers considered themselves an extension of counterculture, and porn was often produced under threat of legal action. Sets were busted, performers jailed, production companies harassed. Porn outfits were fly-by-night, one-man operations on the fringes of the law. But now, after the eight-year legal ceasefire, the major companies are million-dollar corporations run by the sons of the original pioneers.

Now that the onslaught is due to recommence, there's no one left with the history, cash and experience to finance expensive legal battles. Even Larry has backed off to await the coming storm. In the 1980s, he spent half his fortune on a legal fight against Rev Jerry Falwell that went to the supreme court and enshrined certain journalistic liberties forever.

Without a comparable champion today, porn will retrench, contract and batten down the hatches for the next four years. The idea of John Ashcroft triumphing is simply too abhorrent for me to contemplate, so I'm rooting for the perverts.