By Mario Vargas Llosa, from Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society, out next month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Vargas Llosa, who is the author of more than a dozen novels, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. Translated from the Spanish by John King.

A few years ago, a small media storm erupted in Spain when the Socialist government in the region of Extremadura introduced, as part of its sex-education curriculum, masturbation workshops for girls and boys over the age of thirteen — a program that it somewhat mischievously called Pleasure Is in…