Alt headline: ‘Stuff they taught me 30 years ago in Catholic school? Still true!’

What would we do without “studies”?

“I used to race home to have sex with my wife,” says Perry, a 41-year-old lawyer. “Now I leave work a half-hour early so I can get home before she does and masturbate to porn.” Throughout the course of our conversation, Perry insists that he’s still attracted to his wife of twelve years. Still, he says, she can’t quite measure up to the porn stars he views online. “Not to be mean, but they’re younger, hotter, and wilder in the sack than my wife,” he says. “Me and her, we still ‘do it’ and everything, but instead of every day, it’s maybe once a week. It’s like I’ve got this ‘other woman’ … and the ‘other woman’ is porn.”

Everything conservatives keep telling liberals will happen, happens.

And they keep calling us morons.

Then they take credit for “discovering” whatever “it” is, years later.

No one has a right to be shocked by this development. It’s been “coming” — if you’ll forgive me — since the invention of the cinema. Artists saw this generations ago.

And a couple of years back, I may even have posted about an Ivy League student counsellor who wrote a book, in part about kids telling her they couldn’t have sex with their girlfriends because they didn’t act and look like porn stars.

Nothing is real to us now, unless and until it is photographed. We watch our children’s baseball games through the viewfinder of our camcorder. We photograph crimes on our cellphones instead of using them to call the cops. We prefer having a filter between ourselves and the world. “Mankind cannot bear too much reality.” Etc etc.

UPDATE: once again, The Man Show was ten years ahead of the New York Times…