Personally, I suspect the real criticism is that he makes any connection at all between the rampant misogyny in our culture and porn. We’re supposed to pretend that men actually care about women, but the rampant misogyny kinda throws a wrench in that idea, so let’s pretend that liberation equals pornification, shall we?

Only an academic could believe that ‘masculinity’ could be eradicated, that we could be become beings so abstract and formal.

Should ‘femininity’ be likewise excised? Retaining love and joy sounds like the answer would be no, in practice, if not in theory.

We are animals. We live and love and compete in a space that has other animals in an ecology fraught with scarcity. This will always evoke feelings of fear, happiness, and rage.

No amount of therapy, volition, insight, or conversation can undue this basic context of struggle. Since Freud it’s been a 100 years. No end in sight to misery, yet.

There has to be a place for such unacceptable impulses. They will come out here or there. Pretending that the blank slate is true at this point in the social sciences is just intellectual malpractice. There are demonstrable differences between the sexes, which needn’t be hyped as insurmountable to make my point, either.

It’s always odd to see academics, who prize their nuanced learning, advocate positions that are starkly, embarrassingly black and white in the most puritanical way.

There’s just no way to take his analysis seriously, and I’m tired of theorists spinning yarns who don’t have the analytic chops to demonstrate their conclusions.

Just because a man watches or enjoys porn doesn’t mean that he will act on this in his regular life. Does Jensen offer evidence of this?

Has anyone ever tried to attain this neutered nirvana and reported back to the rest of us on what it was like? Has he?

Real life is so much more complex than radical gender theorists like Jensen can even begin to comprehend. Polymorophous perversity has real, numinous power over us. It’s vibrant, epic, confusing, ephemeral.

In psychotherapy it is a commonplace that one cannot have good or desirable feelings without being able to have unpleasant ones. It sounds like Jensen is trying to somehow imagine away all the nasty and brutish parts of man, as if this kind of psychic surgery could be done.

This misses the core lesson of psychotherapy, if we have learned anything! You can’t cherry pick feelings, thoughts, attractions, lusts, desires, or appetites any more than you can any other fact of the outer world. They’re all equally real and needing of respect.

I used to think that these radical types were cool, avant garde. Now I see that so many postmodernists are poseurs, they are impervious to evidence and have the simplest of worldviews. Porn is bad, women are good. Men are brutes, women are victims.

A real dialectic is maddeningly ambiguous. Enchanting, potent, seductive. He’s a shill for sex as vapid as the religious right sees it.