This seems like an opportunity for many of us to clarify what we believe the role of government should be in maintaining a healthy, orderly, just society. Should regulations be limited to policing bad outcomes—as in, punishing and jailing people convicted of sexual assault? Or should regulations look upstream, at causes and influences, and try to prevent problems like assault? And if so, is banning pornography an effective way to do that?

There is a basic consensus among experts that it’s possible to develop unhealthy relationships with porn. Its consumption can become habit-forming and isolating. Of course, so can Netflix. And definitely Twitter. But when porn factors heavily into a person’s understanding of what sex is, it can become a formative force in interpersonal dynamics at levels beyond the romantic or sexual. This could be relevant to domestic violence and general patterns of objectification that are disproportionately depicted in porn. Though, again, the same could be said of ultraviolent movies and the video games where people shoot each other for 18 hours at a time.

As we spend more time on screens, it's increasingly clear that what we consume has the potential to lead us to treat others badly, and that this can lead to broader societal decay. I’m not here to suggest whether or how best to regulate sex-related media in order to prevent people from behaving badly toward one another, or to suggest how regulations might help optimize the human-porn relationship across societies. What’s interesting is the idea that this is possible at all, and who tends to support the idea.

To draw a line around what constitutes a tastefully artistic depiction and what should be illegal would presumably require the appointment of some sort of national Pornography Czar, a tremendous position of judgment imposed on what constitutes a healthy depiction of sexuality. Few object to images of a bare-chested male or a woman in a swimsuit—or would consider that pornography at all. Female nipples are the line drawn on some platforms between acceptability and indecency. Images of two people kissing is usually allowable. What if they are naked, though? And then they are also touching one another, you know, down there? And these people are married, and they are in love, and they are doing this to make a baby? At what point is it a bad influence?

Ideally that process would be informed by evidence. If there were a spate of domestic-violence incidents that were clearly linked to watching a certain video, or genre of video—like, for example, the sort that include people having sex and then shooting one another—a case could be made that since a lot of people don’t know how to separate fantasy from reality, videos like that should be banned. At this point I would probably support the banning of a virtual-reality game in which the player is the male CEO of a multinational corporation and the objective is to grope as many subordinates as possible.