Knox’s pathetic story wouldn’t be worth examining — exploiting? — if it didn’t say something deeper about the hook-up culture run amok and the demise of shame. In an age of sexting and Snapchat, of “Girls Gone Wild” and friends with benefits, perhaps it’s easy to confuse the relative merits of waitressing and sex work.

“To be perfectly honest, I felt more degraded in a minimum-wage, blue-collar, low-paying service job than I ever did doing porn,” Knox said of her high school waitressing job.

Knox’s experience also calls for discussing the demand side of the pornography transaction. She was outed, after all, by a porn-consuming classmate who recognized his fellow freshman and told his frat-boy friends.

It would be naive to expect that they, like thousands of teenage boys, don’t spend some computer time on activities other than studying. Fine. Boys will be boys, and girls too, for that matter. What should concern us is the extreme nature of the content they’re viewing and the way that inevitably seeps into their attitudes toward real-life sex.