Nobody talks about it. Nobody wants to. We are all complicit, and so we natter on about "privacy" and how looking at porn is "natural," and then we retreat to our private paradises where everything is normal, where no desire is questioned, no fetish forbidden. We go into the darkness, and the question that we should ask ourselves, as pornography takes up permanent residence in the basement of American life, is whether the darkness goes into us.
Ross G. Douthat '02 is a history and literature concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.
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