It’s been a subject of yours for a while, and it’s remarkable just how much the culture of pornography has changed even since you’ve been writing about it.

In my early novels there are references to magazines, which seems quaint now. It didn’t really exist, except pictures of young girls showing their breasts. And then there was the breakthrough with pubic hair, 1970, I think. But it just felt illegal. And now it’s—

It’s sex education.

That’s how they get their sex education now. Watching Desiree Fairweather and some tattooed ex-convict in high-definition close-up. I shudder to think what my girls have certainly already seen. My oldest daughter—I had many candid conversations with her when she was in her twenties, about how certain things were expected, just taken from pornography, which, lest we forget, is a very misogynistic form. Why does every sexual act end with something that girls hate? You know, the facial. When I wrote a long piece about pornography, I hung out with this porn actress, who was incredibly bright, and I said, How many girls, even here in San Fernando Valley, how many of them like that? She said, Well, I like it. I like being spanked and spat on, I like that kind of thing. But she said about 5 percent like it—5 percent don’t mind it. And 95 percent hate it. And yet it’s the sine qua non of the sex scene.

Amateur porn is now a much bigger part of the diet, and yet it’s not any less misogynistic and not any less directed by male desire, even if it’s couples making it.

They talk about pornography becoming mainstream and accepted. And I thought, no, it never will, until masturbation is mainstream and accepted and cool. Women will never assent to it. And the reason is because their great power, gift, procreation, is just ignored in pornography—there’s no talk about getting pregnant, “Don’t make me pregnant.” There’s none of that. It’s as if procreation were caused by something else entirely, like sneezing. But I think that women are coming around to it. There’s a review by a woman I read the other day of that 50 Shades of Grey book. Last sentence is, I wouldn’t wank to it, but it’s not bad. And I thought, Christ, that’s sort of lad’s-mag talk—sort of more male than male.