“Strips porn of its culture-war claptrap . . . Pornified may stand as a Kinsey Report for our time.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Porn in America is everywhere—not just in cybersex and Playboy but in popular video games, advice columns, and reality television shows, and on the bestseller lists. Even more striking, as porn has become affordable, accessible, and anonymous, it has become increasingly acceptable—and a big part of the personal lives of many men and women.
In this controversial and critically acclaimed book, Pamela Paul argues that as porn becomes more pervasive, it is destroying our marriages and families as well as distorting our children’s ideas of sex and sexuality. Based on more than one hundred interviews and a nationally representative poll, Pornified exposes how porn has infiltrated our lives, from the wife agonizing over the late-night hours her husband spends on porn Web sites to the parents stunned to learn their twelve-year-old son has seen a hardcore porn film.
Pornified is an insightful, shocking, and important investigation into the costs and consequences of pornography for our families and our culture.
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Pamela Paul is the author of Parenting, Inc., an investigation of the "parenting" business, published in April 2008 by Times Books. A New York- based journalist, Paul writes about social and cultural issues, demographic trends, consumer culture, psychology and health, and family. Her first book, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, was named one of the best books of 2002 by The Washington Post ; her second book, Pornified, was named one of the best books of 2005 by The San Francisco Chronicle.
A graduate of Brown University, Paul began her writing career as a London- and New York-based correspondent for The Economist, where for four years she wrote a monthly column on world arts trends, and contributed film, theatre, and book reviews between 1997 and 2003. She was previously a senior editor for American Demographics magazine, where she wrote about political opinion, and social, media and demographic trends. She currently writes for Time magazine and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The National Post, Psychology Today, Self, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, More, The Brown Alumni Monthly, 02138, The New York Sun, and Marie Claire. Online, she has written for Slate, Salon, and Inside.com, and she blogs at The Huffington Post. A frequent public speaker, Paul has also been a guest on Oprah, Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Early Show, and Politically Incorrect, and has made regular appearances on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, and on National Public Radio.
Ms. Paul feels that the debate about porn in the civic arena is stuck in the 1970s, oblivious to the rapidly deteriorating landscape around us. Most Americans now view pornography on a regular basis, and most of those viewers do not consider Playboy to be porn. Clearly something wild is afoot, something akin to a social earthquake or a drug epidemic.
Porn today is far more intense, far more accessible, far more violent, and, yes, far more chauvinistic than anything we've had before, and we as a society are in denial. Pornography is now cool, and nobody dares transgress almighty cool. Somehow porn has progressed from the domain of dark-sunglasses-and trenchcoat-wearing loners to movie stars and A-list entertainers. Today it is cool for the male mind to gorge on the objectification of women, and decidedly uncool for women to complain.
Paul's solution - "censure not censor" is a good one. For reasons from free speech to globalism in commerce, any large-scale prohibition of pornography is highly unlikely to have an impact on production or consumption. What is really needed, Paul argues, is good old-fashioned shame. As a culture we can regress in our crudeness. It has happened before.
This book is worth purchasing and reading or at the very least leafing through at the library.
The author does an interesting job of presenting controversial material. Today if you're not supportive of the Porn Industrial Complex, somehow you're either a puritan or another woman with an axe to grind!
Paul is on to something with this well-read (read not another dry academic polemic) and so-so researched book. I don't think her "study" meets the requirements of an acceptable social science inquiry, but that is another issue.
The quotes and observations from people who view porn are the most telling and allow her to make her point easily.
For those who aren't into porn and don't want to be, this book is a helpful education. Paul manages to tell us what's really going on in porn without forcing us to walk hip-deep into the muck. She also makes it unblinkingly clear, both from important, documented studies and from porn watchers' own disclosures, that a steady diet of porn is indeed a slippery slope into worse and worse stuff. She provides the information needed to avoid getting sucked into the "it's just harmless fantasy" and free "speech" defenses while, at the same time, standing firmly against Puritanism and outright censorship as the only alternatives.
Paul also makes it painfully clear that the kind of porn so easily accessible via the Internet today is nothing like the old Playboy centerfolds (which could be characterized as Hugh Hefner's endlessly adolescent fantasies). Today's horrifically hardcore stuff is distorting in the worst possible way even to adults but even more so to pre-teens and young teens just learning about sexuality. Saying that porn is an inevitable guy thing is like saying men truly believe they are helpless in the face of pornifed images, have no say in their fantasies or in what turns them on, that porn is the only way they know how to deal with repression and silence about sex, that what they learned at age 13 is good enough for the rest of their lives, or that they are incapable of distinguishing between the "forbidden" and their own internal standards.
Even remaining totally within the realm of fantasy, it is perfectly legitimate to ask of porn advocates (ourselves or others), why would you even *want* to be turned on--even in fantasy--by the kinds of things porn purveyors produce? In the end, porn says virtually nothing about sexuality or the paid players.... It says a whole lot, however, about the purveyors who for whatever reasons--some possibly even tragic--learned to associate and condition their own erotic feelings with degrading acts. And this association appears to be the monument to "speech" they wish to pass on to future generations.
There are, of course, many additional aspects that are and could be discussed, and Paul's main points are that we need to stop putting our heads in the sand about the very real and negative effects this cynical and sometimes life-threatening activity is having on our lives and those of our children, that there are alternatives to the proliferation of this stuff, and that there are things we can do to bring about those alternatives.Read more ›
Most people have a gut level opinion about pornography. Mine is the same as Pamela Paul, pornography "Damages our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families." I was excited to pick up a book that I hoped would offer some strong evidence toward confirming my suspicions. Disappointment ensues.
Here is how "Pornified" is structured: cite three of four examples from personal interviews about the effects of porn, make a broad statement about the effects of porn in general, then move on to the next set of personal interview examples, ad nauseum.
Although the anecdotes were helpful in deglamorizing porn (often stories of men who seemed pretty loser like), they were often redundant and had me begging for something more concrete. As I look back through the book, I realize that I underlined nearly every statistical figure given. Disappointingly, these statistics were few and far between and were often heavily qualified by phrases like "this was not a national representative sample."
One positive thing is the rawness of some of the descriptions. For the naive reader, this book is a good introduction to the underbelly of the industry. Pornography includes more than the glitzy images from "The Girls Next Door" and Paul does a good job introducing the reader to things like beastiality, child pornography, and a host of other weird stuff.
In all, if you agreed with Paul before reading the book, you'll probably enjoy reading it. If you are a fan of pornography, you will find plenty of holes in Paul's arguments and will find very little concrete evidence toward proving the author's main contention that pornography damages our lives, relationships, and families.
