Denny Burk, a professor of Biblical Studies at Boyce College, argues that what Time frames as a mere public health crisis is, in fact, a civilizational crisis with moral underpinnings that cannot be safely ignored. “This article is the latest evidence of our diminishing ability to speak about sex in moral terms,” he writes. “We are at a place in our culture in which sexual morality has been reduced to consent. Our society has embraced total sexual license. If anyone suggests any other moral norm beyond consent, they are dismissed as a puritanical, repressive throwback.”

That overstates the supremacy of consent.

Prostitution remains illegal in most of America, and has critics on the left and right, in academia as surely as churches, who are unmoved by the idea of consent as king. Two years ago, I suggested in this space that Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative might serve as a bridge between the sexual ethics of American Christians and secularists, and no one dismissed me as a puritanical, repressive throwback.

That said, many do believe consent ought to be the lodestar of right-thinking sexual morality, a proposition I have defended at length. And the surrounding debate came back to me as I read one of Burk’s subsequent claims.

“The sexual revolution promised us more sex and more pleasure,” he wrote. “It has actually delivered to us a generation of men who think of women as objects to be used and abused for their sexual pleasure. It 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. It teaches young men to use women for sex and then to discard them when they become unwilling or uninteresting.”

Let’s give this notion its due. In theory, it’s easy to see how ubiquitous pornography could lead more men to “think of women as objects to be used and abused.” There is no human relationship with the person onscreen in a porn video. He or she is as easily dismissed as pressing a remote control or closing a laptop lid.

What’s more, no one knows what today’s unprecedented porn environment will do to the children growing up within it. It is strange, if you think about it: People would be shocked by parents who filled their 9-year-old’s bookshelves with all the “great books,” a wall of reference volumes, and a selection of hardcore BDSM orgy scenes, but it’s perfectly normal to give them a smart phone connected to the whole Internet. I do not mean to suggest that traditionalists who regard that as madness are wrong.

But whether it’s social conservatives or feminists advancing Burk's particular arguments, I’m always unpersuaded for empirical reasons: Surveying the world around me, it just doesn’t seem as if the men in younger generations are more likely than their forbearers to use and abuse women. In fact, just the opposite seems to be true.