Ahh, I remember the first time a young man masturbated near me without my consent. It was 2021. The Covid era. His mother had been haranguing me for months to talk to him about “sociology.” When I asked her what that meant, she told me, “He just said he wants to talk to you about sociology.”

The thing was, he was a sociology major at a private liberal arts college. I was a sociology professor. His mother and I were friends.

I didn’t see the harm in talking to him. I thought he must have questions about how I achieved my fabulous success. Perhaps he’d wanted to learn from a real G about how to thrive in a discipline that purports to challenge the racism it often mobilizes instead to keep white men in positions of authority? There were few people in the city more versed in navigating this particular conundrum than me.

When we finally got on the phone, he didn’t seem to have much to ask me at all. Every now and again he’d ask me to explain this or that, but mostly I was listening to dead air. I kept thinking the call was dropped, and I’d be like, Hello? A second later he’d return lethargically to the conversation.

It only dawned on me right as he was suddenly rushing me off the phone after I mentioned his mother (dunt! dunt! dunt!), that he must have been masturbating to my voice, without my prior knowledge, or of course, my consent.

He is what I call a “cis-handed” man. It’s a man who gets off on masturbating to women who have not consented to be involved. It combines the idea of “cis-het,” with the backhanded compliment of being abused by a man who thinks you’re hot.

It disgusted me to realize that this student didn’t view me as a sensei, but simply as jerk material. But more than anything, I was confused. Why would he have done this? Why would he have gone out of his way to get one of his mother’s friends on the phone for this?

Bill Burr to the rescue! At the time when this happened, I was a regular listener to his Monday Morning podcast. I especially loved when his no-nonsense wife hopped on to tell him and the listeners about themselves. Hilarious. But it just so happened that mere weeks after my surprise violation, he read a letter on the show. It was a young man asking if it was “OK” that he had a girlfriend, but nevertheless went on dating apps to find attractive young women, and masturbate to their voices over the phone, before ghosting them? Bill had enough sense to say effectively, No, it’s not. But better, he explained his view that what was leading this young man to effectively become a repeat masturbatory offender, was a pornography addiction.

Too many of us treat the ubiquity of pornography as if it’s harmless. This could not be further from the truth. In reality, pornography is addictive, and many people, especially straight young men, are addicted to it.

There is a panoply of mental health issues associated with this. But for my taste, too much of the conversation about its social effects focuses on how men end up treating their partners, rather than how they come to view and treat women writ large.

Here are some of the ways continuous porn viewing affects men:

— It can lower their empathy for women in general, not just their partners. In a great deal of mainstream porn (that is neither queer nor humanist), women are getting f%&ked for male pleasure alone, not for women’s pleasure, or for love. This presents women as a collection of juicy, waiting cavities, and not people with feelings and desires that should be honored.

— It can desensitize them to the importance of consent. There’s not a whole lot of porn where women say no, and mean it. Worse yet, did you know there is an entire (popular) genre of porn called “non-con”? This means young men can literally Google search for porn where women are being assaulted, find it, and get off on it.

— It can lead to sneaky, deceptive sexual behavior. Because so much porn presents women’s consent as taken for granted — or worse yet, treats violating women as erotic — men might try to orchestrate scenarios where they get off by using a woman who has never consented to being involved. And, because porn can contribute to a fear of real intimacy, and often performance anxiety and erectile fails, these assaults might just be masturbatory.

When the #MeToo movement was at its height, did you notice how many men were #MeToo’d for non-consensual masturbation? Besides the best-known cases (e.g. Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, and Jeffrey Toobin), there was Matt Dababneh (a former California assemblymember), director and producer Brett Ratner, screenwriter and film director James Toback, pianist and composer Danny Elfman, and another (dis)honorable mention for Harvey Weinstein. So many cis-handeds.

We are only beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to identifying the problems of porn addiction. It is facilitated by porn’s extraordinarily easy access; in this country it is available to anyone, of any age, from birth. While smut is absolutely involved in the dissolution of long-term partnerships, we should acknowledge that the menace it creates is not just a private matter. It affects people who never consented to have anything sexual to do with that hominid over there.

— Learn more about the history of the maligned gold digger in my latest book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance