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On Friday evening, a federal judge in Texas ruled to block access to the abortion drug mifepristone; this afternoon, the Justice Department appealed the decision. This case is about more than abortion pills: It also signals a potential new strategy for anti-abortion activists across the country.

But first, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The pornography paradox The problem with weather apps The ruling that threatens the future of libraries The three biggest misconceptions about Israel’s upheaval Capturing the Courts

For those keeping up with the abortion fight in America, the news of recent days has felt like watching a game of ping-pong with very serious stakes. On Friday, two federal judges released contradicting opinions on mifepristone, one of two drugs used to induce a medication abortion. Texas district-court Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk ruled that the FDA erred when it first approved mifepristone in 2000. Mere minutes later, news broke that Judge Thomas O. Rice of the Eastern District of Washington State had ordered the FDA to preserve access to the medication in a suit filed by 17 states and Washington, D.C.

Kacsmaryk’s ruling, which would have blocked mifepristone access nationwide, was set to go into effect within seven days barring an appeal—but an appeal came just this afternoon from the Justice Department. The department has asked Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges to keep the Texas order on hold until the appeal is decided. However these next stages play out, it is very likely that the Supreme Court will eventually step in to adjudicate between Friday’s two conflicting federal rulings.

Beyond all of this complicated legal volleying is a simpler story: The future of abortion in America is being decided in the country’s courtrooms. As I noted in February, abortion policy is at something of a standstill in Washington; a nationwide abortion ban would have no chance of passing the majority-Democrat Senate, and there isn’t much Congress can do to restore an ironclad federal right to abortion either. But in America’s courts, the fight is escalating—and recent developments are signaling a possible new strategy for the anti-abortion movement, which consists of reinterpreting a 19th-century law to influence abortion access nationwide.

The Texas ruling “is not just a bid to block access to abortion pills,” the legal scholar Mary Ziegler explained in an article yesterday. “It is an open invitation to anti-abortion-rights groups to use the Comstock Act—a law passed 150 years ago and rarely enforced in the past century—to seek a nationwide federal ban on all abortions.”

The federal Comstock Act of 1873 is an anti-vice law that prohibited the mailing of “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion,” as well as anything “advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.” The FDA has long followed a consensus interpretation of the Comstock Act, allowing the mailing of abortion drugs when the seller doesn’t intend for them to be used unlawfully. But reinterpreting this act would essentially ban even lawful abortion procedures. As Ziegler puts it:

No abortion method exists in the United States that does not use something “designed, adapted, or intended for abortion” and sent through the mail or via another carrier. Abortion clinics do not make their own drugs or devices; they order these items from pharmaceutical-distribution companies and medical-equipment suppliers. Taken to its logical conclusion, Kacsmaryk’s ruling means that all abortions already violate criminal law.

Abortion opponents are aware of the consequences of reinterpreting the Comstock Act, Ziegler writes—and they’re also aware that doing so “is the only realistic way to force through a national ban” in a country where strict anti-abortion policies repel a majority of voters.

“That’s because it has nothing to do with what the American people want or what the Constitution means,” Ziegler argues in her article. “Anti-abortion-rights activists have made the same bet that Judge Kacsmaryk has: They have not captured the hearts or minds of the American people, but they may have captured the courts.”

I called Ziegler today, after the Justice Department’s appeal, to get her take on what happens next. She told me that if the conflicting mifepristone rulings make their way to the Supreme Court, which they’re likely to do, it’s worth noting that the Texas decision that would block the abortion medication was “designed to appeal to these conservative justices, not just because of their views on abortion but also because they’re hostile to the administrative state”—in other words, agencies such as the EPA and the FDA.

“I don’t think you can rule anything out,” Ziegler told me. “We’re in a world where the Supreme Court is not behaving in a way we’re used to.”

Related:

The Texas abortion-pill ruling signals pro-lifers’ next push. I’m pro-life. I worry that the abortion-pill ruling could backfire. Today’s News A gunman killed four people and injured nine others at a bank in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. Authorities report that the shooter, an employee at the bank, was shot to death by police on the scene. At today’s annual White House Easter Egg Roll, President Joe Biden told the Today show co-host Al Roker that he plans on running for reelection in 2024 but is not yet ready to officially announce his campaign. The U.S. State Department officially designated the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich as wrongfully detained in Russia, a spokesperson announced in a statement. Dispatches Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on Donald Trump’s legal woes. I Have Notes: Nicole Chung reflects on the release of her new book and the act of writing a memoir.

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Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Chen Yong / Getty; H. Armstrong Roberts / Getty

Quit Your Bucket List

By Richard A. Friedman

Years ago, just after I finished my psychiatry residency, a beloved supervisor called to say she had some bad news. At a routine checkup, she had glanced at her chest X-ray up on the viewing box while waiting for her doctor to come into the room. She was a trauma surgeon before becoming a psychiatrist and had spent years reading chest X-rays, so she knew that the coin-size lesion she saw in her lung was almost certainly cancer, given her long history of smoking.

We had dinner soon after. She was still more than two years away from the end of her life and felt physically fine—vital, even. That’s why I was so surprised when she said she had no desire to spend whatever time she had left on exotic travel or other new adventures. She wanted her husband, her friends, her family, dinner parties, and the great outdoors. “Just more Long Island sunsets. I don’t need Bali,” she told me.

Read the full article.

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“We sway this way and that / In makeshift stances / Until, in rougher water, / We doubt our sense / Of balance will ever set us / Straight again.”

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P.S.

For further reading on this moment in anti-abortion activism, I recommend my colleague Elaine Godfrey’s article ahead of the March for Life protest this past January. “Overturning Roe was only the first step. The next isn’t exactly obvious,” Elaine wrote. She spoke with different factions within the anti-abortion movement about what they believe this next step should be.

— Isabel

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My grandfather José was a dark-skinned, thickly accented man who lived in Escondido, California, where 52 percent of the 150,000 inhabitants are Hispanic. But José, born in Portugal, was not Hispanic, at least not according to present-day federal definitions. Throughout the 60 years that my avô lived in the United States, such federal classifications changed constantly. He was once a minority, now not. For a while he was Hispanic, until he was white. The question of who Portuguese Americans are has become an existential debate for members of the community, with profound consequences for their daily lives.

Portuguese Americans—and other groups that defy simple categorization—complicate America’s approach to race and ethnicity, which tends to classify people as either minority or nonminority. Whether a group is considered a minority affects how the U.S. census counts them. It can influence which universities accept them, and whether an employer decides to hire them. It guides their eligibility for programs and policies meant to uplift marginalized groups. But for Portuguese Americans, there is no consistent answer.

[Adam Serwer: Demography is not destiny]

Today, Portuguese Americans are not a minority under federal guidelines, but their classification varies by state. Some states, such as Florida, categorize Portuguese Americans as Hispanic, while others, such as California, do not. In a few places, including Massachusetts, laws and regulations treat them as a disadvantaged group for at least some purposes.

Ethnic categories aren’t necessarily static; neither are the policies that make use of them. Indeed, a looming Supreme Court decision on affirmative action could upend the government’s whole approach to assessing and addressing racial and ethnic disparities, raising anew the question of which groups are disadvantaged and how, if at all, public policy should respond.

For now, how Portuguese Americans should be classified remains ambiguous. Carlo Matos, a second-generation Portuguese American poet and writer, told me that the only label he’s comfortable using is “not quite white.” He grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts, where more than 40 percent of the population is Portuguese, and said he had little in common with white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. Matos and his non-Portuguese friends used to make light of how strangers outside Fall River would treat him. “We had a joke—everybody called me ‘random ethnic man.’”

In the late 1870s, the first major wave of Portuguese immigrants began arriving in New England whaling ports from the Azores, an archipelago 1,000 miles from Lisbon. The islands were beset by overpopulation, war, and poor economic conditions. The Portuguese Heritage Society estimates that up to 90 percent of Portuguese Americans descend from the Azores. Their lives in America weren’t much better. Whaling had already peaked, so many worked in New England’s textile mills and factories, living mostly in squalor. Azoreans in Central California, who settled on the West Coast during the Gold Rush, fared somewhat better because available jobs in the dairy industry matched the skill set of the recently arrived.

Over the next century, immigration from the Azores fell with the passage of anti-foreigner legislation and rose again when a volcano erupted on the island of Faial in 1957. Portuguese immigrants’ experience followed some preexisting patterns. Onésimo Teotónio Almeida, a professor of Portuguese and Brazilian studies at Brown University, told me that they have the most in common with Italian Americans. Italians arrived in the U.S. as dark-skinned others—not Black, but certainly not white.

Gradually, though, Italians were absorbed into white America. The status of Portuguese Americans remains more complicated—partly because they are frequently confused with people who trace their ancestry to Spain or its former American colonies. The Library of Congress’s list of Hispanic American members includes the Portuguese Americans David Valadao, Jim Costa, and Lori Trahan. Such categorization directly contradicts definitions of Hispanic used by federal administrative agencies. The Office of Management and Budget, from which the Census Bureau takes its guidelines, defines Hispanic or Latino as “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.”

[Read: How racial data gets ‘cleaned’ in the U.S. census]

Portuguese Americans themselves have divided views on how to self-identify. In 1973, more than 500 Portuguese and Portuguese American community leaders gathered for the first annual Portuguese Congress in America. There, they discussed whether to push for local and federal recognition as a legal minority. Almost all, including Almeida, the Brown professor, voted for the Portuguese to be considered a minority; only three members dissented. Although some Portuguese Americans saw themselves as white, many voted for minority recognition in order to reflect the “difficulty of social integration, social marginalization, and discrimination” that Americans of Portuguese descent faced, according to Miguel Moniz, an anthropologist at the University Institute of Lisbon who studies Portuguese racialization.

Claiming minority status, however, is not the same as identifying as Latino or Hispanic, though federal guidelines sometimes conflate the two. In 2013, the Department of Transportation included Portuguese Americans under its definition of Hispanic, leading Portuguese advocacy groups to worry that the Census Bureau would adopt that same definition in the 2020 count. The Portuguese American Leadership Council of the United States surveyed community members about whether they identified as Hispanic. According to Dulce Maria Scott, an Anderson University sociology and criminal-justice professor who oversaw the research as a PALCUS consultant, 90 percent of the 6,000 respondents rejected the label.

In her survey for PALCUS, Scott notes that during the early 20th century, Japanese and Indian immigrants lobbied hard to be considered white. The takeaway is not about who is or is not white—a term that, again, is social rather than scientific—but that these groups had a vested interest in others seeing them as such. Scott told me that this could partially explain why the Portuguese Americans she surveyed did not want to identify as Hispanic. For many Portuguese immigrants, “adaptation and integration into the U.S. was very painful,” she said. “I think that not wanting to repeat that is, in part, what’s under this rejection of the Hispanic label.”

Others are reluctant to claim that label in contexts where it might benefit them unduly. Although Matos, the poet, feels confident that “Hispanic” captures his experience better than “white,” he remains conflicted about using it. “Half the time I [mark myself as Hispanic], and half the time guilt overcomes me and I say no,” he said.

In Rhode Island, Massachusetts, California, and Florida—states with large Portuguese American populations—Portuguese American household income today modestly exceeds state medians. In 2018, a Superior Court judge in Boston ruled that although Portuguese businesses are not “minority-owned,” and thus cannot receive benefits earmarked for government contracts, they do have “Portuguese business enterprise” status in Massachusetts, which makes them eligible for special consideration on specific projects.

In Rhode Island in 2020 and 2021, the then–state House member Anastasia Williams tried to ban Portuguese Americans from eligibility for minority-business-enterprise programs. (Williams said in a 2020 legislative debate that the current guidelines identified “Portuguese as a racial minority when in fact they are not,” arguing that Portuguese Americans tend to identify as white.) PALCUS, the same organization involved in preventing Portuguese Americans from being grouped under “Hispanic” on the 2020 census, adamantly opposed the legislation. After Williams’s first attempt, PALCUS released the following statement: “In our view, this is a blatantly DISCRIMINATORY action against the Portuguese people of Rhode Island. At 9.7% of the population, the Portuguese are clearly a minority, can be of any race, and are part of the immigrant population of the state.” Even if Portuguese Americans don’t identify as Hispanic, surrendering the minority label would disqualify them from receiving certain financial benefits—which may explain why some would want to keep that status.

If Portuguese Americans are indeed following the assimilation journey of Italian Americans, then maybe in years to come they, too, will simply fall under the umbrella of pan-European whiteness. But perhaps this binary between white and nonwhite misses a more nuanced reality. When my avô was still alive, people often asked him what his background was and where he was from. “I am Portuguese, from the country of Portugal,” he’d reply. His response rarely satisfied those who asked, because their implicit question was more about race than geography. But for my avô, it was the only possible answer.

Content, some say, wants to be free; so, reportedly, do we. At any rate, such conclusions jibe with at least 9 billion visits a month to porn websites and “tubes,” where professionals and amateurs upload sex videos for others to stream, at any hour we please, at no monetary cost. As many reading this presumably already know. (Not judging.)

Is nonstop free pornography liberating, or is it shackling, leaving us less humanlike than ever? This is one of the contemporary conundrums that the sociologist Kelsy Burke explores in The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession. The answer depends on how you define “us,” because those producing the stuff, as is true of other content providers laboring in the digital sweatshops of our time, are barely scraping a living together. Though Pornhub alone gets more visits a month than either Netflix or TikTok, according to one online guide for budding porn entrepreneurs, a video garnering 1 million views will net its producer roughly $500.

Unlike back in the 1970s and ’80s—the heyday of XXX-rated features with multiday shoots and catering budgets, of ample profits and thriving stars—the new porn economy generates its revenues primarily from ads, accruing to site owners, not performers. The subscription site OnlyFans produces big paydays for a few stars, but elsewhere the story for workers is depressingly familiar, and porn performers are doubly screwed, so to speak. They’re kept busy, as Burke details, creating new content—one-on-one interactions with customers in “camming” sessions, for example—to supplement the content they’re barely being paid for. But even that material often finds its way to free sites.

[Read: Can you be addicted to porn?]

Whether ubiquitous pornography degrades or emancipates us, Burke writes, also depends on whom you talk with. She is less interested in porn as such than in the debates that people keep having about it—arguments about the ills of porn consumption that have only grown more polarized since Congress passed the first of many ineffectual curbs on the distribution of obscene material, back in 1842. In her wide-ranging book, Burke hopscotches among porn producers, viewers, activists, and various experts (including the self-appointed). At the core of her project are interviews with a smallish and nonrandom selection of those invested in these battles: 52 people who align themselves with the anti-porn cause, and 38 whom she calls “porn positive.” Approaching her subjects “with curiosity rather than judgment,” Burke mostly lets their competing views duke it out on the page, challenging myths on both sides while noting where those with divergent beliefs occasionally coincide.

Her anti-porn contingent is largely male, religious, and associated with porn-addiction recovery programs, some as clients, others as clinicians; she also spoke with nonaffiliated proselytizers and activists. Porn does physical and emotional harm to those who watch it, they maintain. Many think that it’s even biologically addictive, snaking its way into our brain and rewiring things. Or that the dopamine system’s response to online porn has the effect of fostering compulsive behavior—scientific-sounding theories abound. Here Burke intervenes to say that she’s found no definitive evidence for such neurobiological claims. But it’s also a thorny question to study under lab conditions, she points out: A subjective topic such as behavioral addiction is “all but impossible” to assess with objective measures like brain scans, and as the sociologist Gabriel Abend observes, the researchers themselves can never be neutral or objective about the morality of human behavior. As to whether we come equipped with hardwired brains dictating that males want to sever sex from romance while females dream of blissfully uniting the two, Burke gives the last word to Cordelia Fine, a psychologist who has spent her career debunking such theories: The word (Fine’s coinage) is neurosexism.

Burke’s anti-porn interviewees—a “strange alliance,” she observes, evenly split along lines of political ideology—also include a secular wing of feminists who lean more on arguments about misogyny and the commodification of sex. Women’s pleasure, they say, is left behind or inauthentically performed to please men. Burke again pushes back: This sort of activism rests on what she considers weak grounds—personal distinctions between good and bad sex, and presumptions about “what authentic sexuality for women should look like.”

Even porn-addiction discourse, she astutely observes, reproduces gender inequality. A woman who likes porn is more readily pathologized than a man who likes porn, her taste seen as a sign of past trauma or victimization. Among men, Burke writes, overindulgence in porn is often chalked up to a strong sex drive, and their efforts to kick the habit are seen as proof of triumph over natural urges. In her view, there’s already more than enough shame and penance-seeking to go around.

Burke focuses in particular on the growing number of Millennial men committed to overcoming “fapping,” an onomatope for masturbation. (A Reddit forum called NoFap has nearly 1 million followers.) Among the book’s eyebrow-raising revelations is how heavily porn-addiction rhetoric, especially the versions emphasizing purity and abstention, figures in white-nationalist and incel online communities, where porn’s ubiquity is blamed on liberals, feminists, socialists, and Jews (interchangeable villains for this crowd). Actually, plenty of liberal feminists and Jewish socialists are no doubt alarmed themselves that porn-watching is replacing the challenges of three-dimensional sex and real-life relationships for generations of young men.

Burke has the gift of being supremely unruffled about even the most incendiary of subjects, including whether children—first exposed to online porn, according to reports, at ages 10 to 15—are being damaged by pornography, a concern that brings her opposing camps closest together. “All the educators, therapists, religious leaders, and activists I interviewed, regardless of their position on porn,” she writes, “agreed that it makes for bad sex education,” especially the free streaming fare to which kids have readiest access. All emphasize the need for better parent-child communication about porn, including the sex worker and sex educator Andre Shakti, even as she also insists that porn is entertainment, not an instruction manual: “We don’t take our kids to see Fast and the Furious and then expect them to learn how to drive like Vin Diesel.”

[Crazy/Genius: What is pornography doing to our sex lives?]

Anti-porn allies, alarmed by the normalizing of acts, such as facial ejaculation, that teen girls can feel pressure to go along with, endorse a strategy of inculcating the dangers of porn, starting very early (see a “bad picture,” and “turn, run, and tell!”). Some favor removing all electronic devices from children’s bedrooms at night, the digital-age equivalent of Victorians prescribing anti-masturbation gadgets. The “sex positive” approach, born of concern about dating and sexual violence, encourages “porn literacy” rather than avoidance, guiding parents in discussing the difference between real sex and porn sex with their teens. The progressives and social scientists Burke talks with tend to be realists: Sexually explicit media abound in our society, and porn is hardly the single source of all misogyny and bad sex; the priority should be teaching about consent and context. Conservatives (of both the religious and secular stripes) stress harm: “Pornography gets inside your brain and hurts it,” a Christian-themed picture book for children ages 6 and up instructs.

Among Burke’s “porn positive” interviewees, most of whom are women and secular, the focus in general is less on porn consumption than on the production end of the industry. She speaks with sex workers and activists who bridle at the recent conflation of the anti-porn movement with the anti-trafficking movement, which has meant the conflation of all sex work with trafficking. It reduces consent to an impossibility—a paternalism that Burke balks at too. Meanwhile, activists take issue with credit-card companies’ decision to cut ties with Pornhub, arguing that the move won’t significantly diminish its profits (which come from ads) or reduce the posting of nonconsensual videos; it will, though, directly affect legal and consenting porn performers, many of whom have turned to the internet in search of greater safety and control over their work.

Burke also hears from a feminist pornographer who says that taking control of the camera is a way of reclaiming her own sexuality, and from an industry-reform group that has published a “Performer Bill of Rights” that prioritizes consent. The problem, they themselves acknowledge, is that the “feminist” and “ethical” porn produced by porn progressives ends up as just another niche category on porn sites, jostling for views with “anal” and “Asian.” No one should conclude that the reformists are reshaping the industry: Burke has some pretty horrifying and no doubt all-too-common tales about the ongoing sexual and financial exploitation of young women trying to break into the business; they’re ripe for manipulation by anyone who calls himself a “manager” (whose managerial duties might include casting himself as the male lead in his client’s first film).

Another hitch for those attempting to move “ethically” through the maze of online porn is that our sexual desires don’t always line up with our values or our politics. A queer feminist sociologist bemoans being less aroused by homegrown feminist porn than by the nasty mainstream stuff, despite being appalled by the sexism, racism, and terrible labor practices. A Christian woman who says she is a masturbation addict found she had to quit watching even such profoundly anti-libidinal TV shows as The Handmaid’s Tale, lest she slip. That’s the problem with having an imagination: Anything can be porn. And the porn that turns you on doesn’t necessarily correspond to the sexual identity you embrace: Recall the poignantly hilarious scene in The Kids Are All Right in which the two gay-mom characters watch gay-male porn to try to perk up their sex life. In 2017, Pornhub said that 37 percent of its viewers of gay-male porn were women.

As someone who is occasionally baffled by why I choose the subjects I do, I always wonder about the personal impetus for ostensibly scholarly book projects. Burke doesn’t leave us in the dark about hers. As a teenage born-again Christian, she discovered that she liked looking at her father’s hidden stash of Playboys, knowing she was committing “the sin of lust” and also beset by queer fantasies—“homosexual perversion,” in the language of her adopted tribe. Now grown, she’s devoted her academic career to navigating the same antipodes: “Sociology became the tool I used to make sense of my sexuality and religious faith and the persistent ways that sex and religion collide more broadly in American culture and politics.”

[From the June 2017 issue: Screw wisdom]

Though I count Burke as fortunate to have been saddled with such a productive dilemma, I also wonder if those teenage prohibitions led to certain conceptual lacunae as she mapped her inquiries. Because of her focus on the pitched battle, you’ll search in vain to find anyone in her pages, male or female, who simply likes porn without needing to turn it into a therapeutic mission or a cause. Nor will you learn anything much from Burke about the actual content of porn, although after sifting through studies, she concludes that 21st-century porn is more violent than earlier porn, and that the victims of that violence are disproportionately people from marginalized groups. (Of course, popular culture in general has become more violent, which goes unmentioned.) The details that do surface suggest some interesting untapped themes. Incest porn was among the top searches on Pornhub in 2014, she notes in passing. What might be said—aside from hot stepmoms being a perennial fantasy—is that porn has always been dedicated to taboo-smashing and impropriety, which may be something we rule-saddled humans like about it.

But, as if looking too hard at porn might still be verboten, Burke shies away from thinking very much about why, aside from the obviously compelling fapping opportunities it supplies, such large numbers of people are as devoted to pornography as they are. You won’t catch her wondering whether there may be more complexities and emotional lures to the experience—perhaps even a few deeper human yearnings.

Those lures bring me to the other issue I kept expecting Burke to take up, given how thoroughly religiosity permeates her work: the terrain that porn and religion share. To be sure, religion offers purposes and consolations that are alien to porn. Yet both address a common desire—to get outside ourselves, to break free of this world, if only temporarily. Porn doesn’t have to be read only literally: Women can fantasize about being men and men women, and about rebelling in other potentially liberating, and dangerous, ways. And porn-on-demand promises abundance (whatever you want, whenever you want it), unboundedness (a world without inhibitions), maybe even a little transcendence, or at least an escape hatch.

In an essay titled “Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood,” the Yale literary and queer theorist Michael Warner, now an atheist, writes that “religion does things that secular culture can only approximate.” Without wanting to reduce religion to sex, he nevertheless finds overlap, as have others, Georges Bataille and Harold Bloom among them. Religion offers rapture; it “makes available a language of ecstasy”; it gives us the “strobe-light alternation of pleasure and obliteration.” As does sex at its most intense.

Though Christianity is always pretty queer in Warner’s telling (“Jesus was my first boyfriend”), his teenage struggles sound quite similar to Burke’s. The “two kinds of ecstasy” on offer became an agonizing dilemma for him as well; having to choose, on a nightly basis, between orgasm and religion was excruciating: “God, I felt sure, didn’t want me to come.” At the same time, religion’s celebration of ecstasy offered a way of understanding “transgressions against the normal order of the world” as a good thing.

Burke takes a less transgression-celebrating path to reconciling her own antinomies. The anti-porn and porn-positive camps she’s been chronicling actually care about the same things, she concludes: “human rights, sexual consent, and living a fulfilling life.” Everyone wants to achieve “a real and authentic sexuality” and break away from the “fake sex that surrounds us.” Her perspective is reassuring, and no doubt the authenticity of tender, caring sex with another person has much to recommend it. But it’s out of reach for many, and even the sound of it is a little tedium-inducing.

[From the December 2018 issue: The sex recession]

Pornography’s immense audience suggests that a lot of us would like some respite from authenticity, too. Porn offers a world where you don’t have to deal with other people’s personalities and expectations just to have sex, a world where (even more fantastically) men and women want the same things in bed, a world where (as in the Freudian unconscious) there’s no “no” or sexual scarcity. It’s utopian in the truest sense: a world that doesn’t exist.

Nor will a world ever exist in which the great porn wars are settled—a world where sexual morality triumphs, or a world without sexual prohibitions. The combatants themselves, Burke found in the course of her interviews, are well aware of this. No one thinks they’ll win this fight. What both sides do mostly agree on is that the porn sites everyone would be better off without are the ones you can stream for free. Now just convince the users.

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “The Pornography Paradox.”