Dr. J. Budziszewski

I used to write a monthly column of dialogues.

This was back when I was a Protestant, before I was Catholic, after I was no longer a nihilist.

Somewhere around there.

For a magazine that was produced by evangelical Protestants and it was for Christian college students.

And it was dialogues between an imaginary professor, Theophilus, and his students.

Well, I got so many letters from readers that I just was having difficulty.

It was taking up my whole week answering all these letters.

So it spun off a second column, a correspondence column.

called Ask Theophilus.

So the nature of the letters was interesting.

An astonishing number of them were about sex.

They were about all kinds of things.

They were about, you know, prudential things, pragmatic questions about life and making choices about relations with parents and relations with other people and evangelism and this and that and the other.

But a lot of them were about sex.

And an unusual number of people, especially young men, not so many young women, would write to me and say, I'm in trouble.

I started using pornography and it was a lot of fun and it was pleasurable and it was exciting.

And then it stopped exciting me.

So I turned to another kind, a more exotic, a more kinky kind of pornography.

And that restored the excitement.

And then that paled and didn't do it anymore.