One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people. There’s a resurgence of the kind of offensive and dehumanizing behavior that we saw in popular culture during the 2000s, and this time it’s not being doled out by gossip bloggers and celebrity commentators, but by politicians and people with massive media platforms. And my theory for why it’s happening is that certain kinds of porn have inured so many people to cruelty. So that’s one part of it. But when I wrote that sentence, what I was thinking about was how so much of porn has really enforced the idea that men should be catered to, in all aspects of culture. That concept is deep in the recesses of our imaginations, in ways we maybe don’t realize or can’t quite put into words.

Muh victimhood, men bad! Men can’t be victims, they’re the oppressors!

Of course! I’ve written for this very magazine in the past defending romance novels as subversive portrayals of female desire, female agency, female humanity. There is nothing wrong with smut. The reason I think and write so much about porn as a form of culture is not because it’s explicitly sexual. It’s because much of it depicts and encourages very rote, regressive, cruel, and even violent treatment of women, and there’s no way that these elements haven’t changed us.

But female porn depicts men and women so kindly right? 50 shades of grey? The bazillion rape porn books? The bazillion billionaire baby daddy with 6 packs who force women into sexual relationships books?

About a year or so ago, I encountered this fascinating analysis by the social scientist Alice Evans, who argues that the status of women in a particular society can be predicted by examining how that society prizes romantic love. So it’s not surprising to me at all that so many women enjoy explicit romantic content—it’s gratifying their desires while also affirming that they are fully human and deserve to be treated as such.

So she figured out pussy on a pedestal? Shocking that women almost, almost figured out why they are valued in society