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Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families
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Product Description
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.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #120889 in Books
- Published on: 2006-08-08
- Released on: 2006-08-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .88" h x 5.54" w x 8.24" l, .64 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Having already carved out a major niche among 20-to-30-somethings with The Starter Marriage, Paul takes on another bane of postfeminism: the Internet-enabled "all pornography, all the time" mentality of many younger men and its ripple effect on the culture. For this pornograph, Paul interviewed more than 100 people—80 of them young, straight men. Some findings are predictable: porn allows men "to enjoy the fantasy of endless variety," but can distract men from their partners, detract from their sexual skills and harm relationships. More valuably, Paul finds women caught under new forms of social pressure—from men and women—not to disdain porn: to do so, now, is (among other things) to be seen as limiting women's sexual self-expression. Paul also sees porn seeping ever sooner into preteen life and sensibly observes that there's no reason for porn to be limitless on the Net when it's regulated elsewhere. Still, a critique that aims to avoid religious conservatism's invocation of sin and radical feminism's emphasis on civil rights violations can get fuzzy. Like Potter Stewart ("I know it when I see it"), Paul can't always distinguish sex-related art from pornography other than on a case-by-case basis; things get especially thorny regarding the torture and pain that, she asserts, "many, perhaps most men, find alluring." She ends up arguing that pornography, like alcohol or cigarettes, should be "discouraged," and proposes an effort by the government and private sector to quell consumer demand. Paul's outlines and analyses can seem simplistic, and her prose rarely rises above the level of the Time magazine feature on which the book is based. But she covers a lot of territory, and there's plenty to unnerve the knee-jerk "free speech" crowd. This will be a major watercooler book this season.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
It's beyond argument that pornography in America today has achieved a certain respectability: think of porn star Ron Jeremy's reputation in the 1980s and his reputation today. Paul details how the ubiquity of pornography impacts our personal lives. She discusses studies on the subject--in one, 77 percent of respondents said they had looked at pornography at least once in a 30-day period--and shares interviews with many who watch it regularly. Paul's analysis is wide-ranging: why men look at porn and how porn affects them, how women see pornography, how porn affects sexual relationships, the effects of porn on children. If Paul is far less polemical than, say, Andrea Dworkin, her book reveals a sadness about it all, reflected in one user's comment: "I don't see how any male who likes porn can think actual sex is better, at least if it involves all the crap that comes with having a real live female in your life." Certain to generate discussion, as did Paul's previous book, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony (2002). Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"This is a quietly forceful book. It helps everyone—from libertarian to moralist—by offering a common ground from which to proceed: pornography is one more alienating product of a consumer culture, and in some ways a particularly lonely one. By definition it is selfish. That doesn't mean it needs to be banned; it does mean we need to think about what it's doing to each of us, and to our shared society."—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Enough
— Alissa Quart, author of Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers
“An alarming, thought-provoking overview of today’s cyber-sexual society.”
“Pamela Paul sets out to scare readers about the effects of pornography on American society, and she succeeds mightily.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
