In the totality of human existence, so goes the cliche, the best time to be alive is now. I believe it. We can gesture to a kind of ambient liberalism, a better organising principle for society than anything else we have managed to come up with so far.

Then there’s all the stuff about literacy rates, women’s suffrage, epidemiology and declining crime. There have always been war, pestilence and suffering, but in sum there is just less of it now than ever. I hold this idea as foundational to my thinking.

Well, nothing has come along to shake my commitment to the principle more than a 26-year-old porn star from Derbyshire in the English midlands. Perhaps I did not cling to the axiom as robustly as I once thought if the whims of just one person can make me question it.

But forgive me and all the moralising prudishness about to spill out, because I suspect my feelings on the question – as visceral as they are – will be shared. If not, perhaps everything is even worse than I thought.

The innocent among us might not be familiar with the name Bonnie Blue, a nom de plume for Tia Billinger. She is a former recruitment agent and NHS staffer who turned to porn out of professional boredom.

She makes her money – sometimes as much as an estimated £2 million (€2.3 million) a month – on the “content........

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