NEW YORK — The neo-puritan and anti-porn scolds love using the word “porn” because it lets them sound certain to each other while saying absolutely nothing to the rest of the world. They throw it around as if it were a precise category, when they’re really just using it as a catch-all insult for sexual material they dislike (and they think they’re being clever about it). It’s intellectual laziness masquerading as moral seriousness…

NEW YORK — There was a time, not that long ago, when people could do stupid, sexy, reckless things without a committee showing up afterward to explain what had gone wrong. A girl could take her clothes off because she liked the way the room changed when she did. A guy could put on lipstick, heels, a dog collar, a feather boa, or nothing but bad intentions and call it a Saturday night. People drank, danced, flirted, lied, strutted, got paid, got laid, got weird, got lost in the music, and nobody needed to write a dissertation about the collapse of civilization before last call. Now every thrill comes with a diagnosis. Every wink needs a framework. Every little act of consensual chaos gets dragged into traffic and flattened beneath ten thousand pounds of theory. Nobody can just WANT anymore. Nobody can just PLAY. Somewhere along the line, pleasure stopped being pleasure and turned into evidence…