One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers wrote in to lecture him on the evils of masturbation, saying, “The main sin is that masturbation (with minuscule exception) involves fantasy which is a distortion or absence of reality. In other words, it is a lie.”

Can you say give me a fucking break? The idea that fantasy is so evil is hard to take seriously; as other readers wrote in to point out, it suggests that theater and thinking about vactions you aren’t actually going to be able to take are also evil. But the argument is worse than that: what if you masturbate to fond memories of things past, or what you’re planning on doing in three days when you next see your partner again.

Someday I’d like to (am I fantasizing now?) teach an intro ethics course with a focus on decisions that normal people are actually faced with on an every-day basis, including sex. And I’d like to be able to get students thinking about extremely conservative views on sex, such as those held by the Catholic Church. But the arguments for those kinds of positions that I’ve seen are always unbelievably crappy. Can anyone suggest better ones?