More importantly, the arguments for banning pornography seem to be confused about the actual problem. Porn itself isn’t a social ill; misogyny is. Men don’t foist unlubricated anal sex on semi-willing women in porn in a vacuum. If porn narratives sublimate female desires and feature more choking than communication, it’s because they are a product of a culture that devalues women at every stage of their lives. Porn is not the only venue, or even the principal venue, in which men learn to demean women and women learn to accept mistreatment. Look to the White House, where multiple sitting and recently departed men, including the president, have been accused by multiple women of sexual and physical abuse, but continue to enjoy the privileges and powers of an administration beloved by rank-and-file Republicans.

Porn is not even the primary media disseminator of female degradation. Women’s subjectivity is lost in many mainstream films and television shows, which depict women through the eyes of male writers and directors, drop all interest in women once they turn 30, and only put a beautiful woman onscreen if she’s a love interest. One teen interviewed by Jones in her New York Times magazine piece cited Fifty Shades of Grey, a film in wide release, as an example of where he learned that women like to be dominated. Another mentioned a porn whose female protagonist “was bored by a man who approached sex gently but became ecstatic with a far more aggressive guy.” That tiresome trope is at least as old as Hollywood itself.