For these reasons and more, I find the world that I see around me hard to square with the claim that we’re living amid “a generation of men who think of women as objects to be used and abused for their sexual pleasure,” and that pornography is the cause. “It’s not merely that so many young men are unprepared for marriage,” Burk writes of porn-saturated generations. “They are unprepared for dinner and a movie. We have sown to the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind—especially our daughters, who are less likely than ever to find a man who hasn’t been corrupted by this.”

Consider, however, that “in the two decades since the United States Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act, domestic violence has declined dramatically. Annual rates of nonfatal domestic violence fell by 63 percent between 1994 and 2012 – from 13.5 victimizations per 1,000 people to 5 per 1,000.” Does Burk think American women were better off in 1994?

None of that answers whether pornography is medically healthy or morally permissible. But given that the rise of ubiquitous porn has coincided with significant declines in rape and spousal abuse, and with increasing support among men for gender equality, how can anyone be confident that it makes men disrespect women, let alone that it causes harm so dramatic that it represents a civilizational threat?

The same logic applies abroad.