Over at that bulwark of the hopelessly middlebrow The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf earlier this month engaged in some thumb-sucking about what porn is supposedly doing to young men.

In Time’s current cover story, “Porn and the Threat to Virility,” Belinda Luscombe writes, “A growing number of young men are convinced that their sexual responses have been sabotaged because their brains were virtually marinated in porn when they were adolescents. Their generation has consumed explicit content in quantities and varieties never before possible, on devices designed to deliver content swiftly and privately, all at an age when their brains were more plastic—more prone to permanent change—than in later life. These young men feel like unwitting guinea pigs in a largely unmonitored decade-long experiment in sexual conditioning.”

Young Friedersdorf sees fit to quote further someone called Denny Burk, a professor at one of America’s all-too-many Christian madrasas, who looks out at our putative sexual culture and really, really doesn’t like what he sees.

[The sexual revolution] has not given us men who know what virtue and honor are. It doesn’t teach men to pursue their joy in self-sacrificially loving and being sexually faithful to one woman for life.

Let’s call this complaint the “Porn breaks sanctioned sexuality” hypothesis,” PBSS for short. “Sanctioned” here meaning the kind of sex that Jerry Falwell and the Pope approve of — penis-in-vagina intercourse between married (to each other, wiseguy!) people undertaken in the hope of pooping out babies that you will then rear.

Now if I were being uncharitable I suppose I could spend some time bashing this Burk fellow for certain rather-too-obvious forms of moral obtuseness. (Does he not realize that there are a lot of women who look at porn, or that women young or old might be just as interested in sexual variety as young men? Does he really think that it’s worthwhile teaching gay men to be self-sacrificially whatevered to one woman for life? I guess you never can tell with Christians, who will believe the darndest things.) But such carping would be pointless and, in any event, wasn’t where my mind was on reading those words. My focus was the welcome implications of PBSS itself. My takeaway from PBSS was to think “Great! Not only does porn benefit humanity by providing an ever-available palliative to the misery of life, but it also discourages family formation by providing a diversion for young men away from sanctioned sexuality, and thus the production of children, and thus creation of more and more loci of suffering. Perhaps it even has a role to play in guiding humanity to the noble moment when we all give up the game and walk hand in hand into extinction. Truly, pornographers are among the world’s great humanitarians.”

Of course, as a pessimist, my second thought was that PBSS is probably not true. You just can’t win in this world.