Perilous times: Katrina Kent is the pen name of a British escort who wrote a column for this magazine in the years before COVID. She began as a stripper in Las Vegas and Miami before returning to London, where she started a sexting service and financed porn videos in which she starred to reap even greater profits. After several successful years, she was able to sell her business and revel in financial self-sufficiency, her goal from the start. Her own interest in voyeuristic sex was marginal, she told me, but she recognized early on that puritanical America was sex-crazed enough to enrich a shrewd and clever business operator. The door was opened by the web, which led to the dark web, which led to addictive algorithms, which has culminated in the introduction of the generative side of Artificial Intelligence as the ultimate and unrestricted sex toy. But it is impressionable youth (the Epstein files tell a sad story) who are the most vulnerable and likely to suffer in this new libertine world. The Internet had the chance to regulate itself in its early days but did not. The last I spoke to Katrina, more than five years ago, she worried about the fate of her children, should she have them. She understood the cravings that allowed countless child brothels to flourish in Industrial Revolution Era London, and as a result she feared bleak days ahead for minors. She was painfully right.