In ancient societies, nearly all people lived at a subsistence level with very little leisure time compared to the twenty-first century. That really affects people’s basic motivations. Americans have all their basic needs covered now because of the last century’s amazing technological discoveries. This removes one major source of motivational drive since survival is often a given for people in the West. This should cause a shift in focus to higher-order needs such as sex.

Yet data now shows that proliferation of Internet pornography has become an increasingly low-cost marriage substitute for men. Studies have found that “increased Internet usage is negatively associated with marriage formation. Pornography consumption specifically has an even stronger effect. Instrumental variables and a number of robustness checks suggest that the effect is causal.” This definitely shows a correlation between peak cheap nudity and reduced social productivity among men.

Least surprisingly, the folks most angered by this article were self-proclaimed “feminists.” The scare quotes are for a reason. These people do real harm to women daily with their ill-formed thoughts, angry continence, and myopic obsession with looking for “sexism.” If anything, the original article was a bit sexist about men.

Presuming female nakedness has such massive effects oversimplifies men’s drive, of course, but men largely enjoyed the piece, laughed, and agreed that while sex is not their entire drive in life women do make men better. Ask any man how he knew his wife was the one, you will invariably get a story of how “she was different,” “she got the best out of me,” and “I knew I had to work hard on this one because she was special.” You’ll also usually get the truth that these women did make their husbands work harder than what they were used to, and you know what? The men liked it.