Deathless Prose About Sex

This morning some bloggers are agog about a four-year-old magazine article.

Matthew Iglesias is commenting on a Feminista.com post reacting to a New York Magazine cover story titled “The Porn Myth” by Naomi Wolf “on Saturday” that spoilsport Ann Althouse then points out was published October 20, 2003.

Wolf’s hot news then was that college women were complaining about men losing interest because they couldn’t compete with the pneumatic perfection of always available women on Internet porn, a dubious thesis then and now.

The subject is timeless. Sixty years I wrote a free-lance article for a now-extinct magazine, Coronet, with the title “Sex on the Campus.” The gist was there was more talk than action, another iffy conclusion.

But the current issue of New York has in its “Sexual Diaries” series a first-hand report by “The Peripatetic Young Thing,” which details in stenographic entries the hyperactive week of a serial-dating 20-year-old professional woman. No sign of men “losing interest.”

All this leads to one indisputable conclusion: You can talk about paucity, distraction or bored abundance, but sex still sells. Just check the expiration date of your sources.