ALVIN. I guess it’s just the romantic in me.

Bongi flags down a nicely dressed man with the intention of hustling him into buying her dinner. (Valerie did this kind of thing all the time.) His name is Alvin, and he fancies himself a ladies’ man. He reads all the “more zestful men’s magazines—Tee-Hee, Giggle, Titter, Lust, Drool, Slobber, and, just for thoroughness, Lech.” His apartment is arranged around an enormous revolving bed he read about in Playboy. “Why’d you approach me?” he asks Bongi, fishing. “You must have sensed something unusual.” She gives a practiced pout. “Sensed it! I was overwhelmed by it,” Bongi exclaims. “Any woman can see you’re a ball of fire.” She ushers him to a nearby expensive restaurant; she’ll end up giving him a brisk hand job in the alley for twenty-five bucks. He scurries away, disappointed not to have been given a chance to perform.

In 2013, onetime child actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote and directed a romantic comedy called Don Jon. In the film, Gordon-Levitt stars at Jon Martello, a latter-day Don Juan from a working-class Italian-American family in New Jersey. Jon’s reputation for being able to bed any woman he pleases has earned him the nickname “Don Jon” among his friends. But Jon has a secret: he’s addicted to online pornography. The film depicts his addiction through a series of quick, graphic cuts: the chirpy fanfare of a booting-up laptop, the unassuming triangular play button of a pornographic video, a close-up on Jon’s face, a climactic musical cue, a hand pulling a tissue from a box and then the same tissue, now crumpled, tossed into a wastebasket to the sound of a digital file’s being deleted. This masturbatory loop is mirrored, during the day, by Jon’s unbroken Sunday routine: Jon fastidiously making his bed, Jon cursing at other drivers, Jon running up the steps to church, Jon’s face behind the confessional window, Jon swaggering to the weight room at the gym, Jon pumping iron to the rhythm of a Hail Mary, Jon eating dinner in a wifebeater at his parents’ house while his macho father yells at a televised football game. The message is clear: Jon’s in a rut.

Jon’s addictive behavior ends up sabotaging his budding relationship with a beautiful girl named Barbara (Scarlett Johansson, obviously), who finally puts out after he starts taking a night-school class in order to escape his current employment in the service industry. When Barbara nearly catches him sneaking out of bed to watch porn, Jon puffs out his chest and tells her that only “fucking losers watch porn.” He’s talking about himself, of course. Whereas being on top means he’s expected to “do all the work” in sex with women, pornography does all his desiring for him. “I don’t gotta say anything, I don’t gotta do anything,” he explains in voiceover, “I just fucking lose myself.” Jon’s eyes slide in and out of focus, his mouth hangs slightly ajar, his skin dimly electric with the guilty glow of the screen. Like all men, Jon watches porn not to have power, but to give it up.

In short, pornography feminizes him. This is where the film’s implicit theory of pornography—call it anti-porn postfeminism—both joins and splits with those of its forerunners in the sex wars. Don Jon basically agrees with the MacKinnonite doctrine that porn is structured by the eroticization of dominance and submission—but it locates this power dynamic not in the sex acted out between the commanding men and degraded women onscreen, but in the sex unfolding between the addictive pornographic image and the essentially female viewer it dominates. When Barbara discovers that Jon’s browser history is stuffed full of porn sites, she will accuse Jon of having “more sex with that thing”—his screen—than with his own girlfriend. When she leaves him, he relapses hard, barely leaving his apartment for days.

Luckily, Jon finds help, in the form of an emotionally fulfilling relationship with a wise older woman named Esther whom he meets at night school (Julianne Moore, obviously). After making slow, tender love to Esther on her couch, Jon mans up: he stops sleeping around, starts singing in traffic, mixes up his routine, stands up to his domineering father, and never watches porn again. In Don Jon’s concluding montage, Jon and Esther stare into each other’s eyes while Jon’s voiceover describes their new, “two-way” kind of love. “I do lose myself in her,” he confides, “I can tell she’s losing herself in me, and we’re just fucking lost together.” The film closes with Jon and Esther making gorgeously sunlit love in Jon’s bed, each penetrating the other’s eyes with their own in an accelerating series of radiant shot–reverse shots. Neither of them, we are asked to believe, are female.