It is an “unspoken” logic of pornography because if we name it, if we admit that in pornography we momentarily allow ourselves to believe that a mass-reproduced image represents intimate and personal affirmation, then it would lose much of its power. It is also unspoken because, for men at least, it’s easier to admit to being biologically driven by lust than emotionally driven by loneliness or inadequacy. And as the sociologist Alain Ehrenberg argues in his history of depression, inadequacy is the pathology of contemporary depression.
