Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families - Softcover

Paul, Pamela

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805081321 ISBN 13: 9780805081329

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2006

Synopsis

"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.

About this title

About the Author:

Pamela Paul is a contributor to Time magazine and the author of The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony. Formerly a senior editor at American Demographics, she writes for such publications as Psychology Today, Self, Marie Claire, Ladies' Home Journal, The Economist, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives in New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction
A Pornified World

“What’s a nice girl like you doing writing a book about porn?”

This was the first question editors asked when I initially proposed this book. And I was asked over and over again. Two months into my research, I was hunched over a worn paperback, making cramped notes in the margins, on a bench outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the well-dressed man seated next to me lean over and peer at the book cradled in my lap. “Why are you reading a book about pornography?” he asked in a gruff midwestern voice. His primly coiffed wife looked up. “A book about what?” she asked.

I had never discussed pornography with septuagenarians before. I saw myself through their eyes and wondered what they could possibly make of me, a young woman calmly flipping through a book on pornography in the middle of the day, smack out in public. “I’m writing a book about it,“ I said, somewhat abashed. “This is just research,“ I explained, realizing how defensive I sounded.

“Are there any girlie pictures in that book?” the man asked, squinting at the pages. I told him it was a collection of essays and he frowned.

“It’s ruining this country,“ muttered his wife. “Just terrible. Pornography everywhere. Not like it was when we were young.” She shifted in her seat and sighed, then suddenly became animated. “Do you remember your uncle Joe?” she asked her husband, nudging his side. “He had those special poker cards, with the naked girls, remember? That’s what pornography was when we were young.”

“Wolf cards,“ her husband responded with a slow smile, pleased at his recollection. “That’s what they were called. Wolf cards.”

“But it was so much tamer than what’s out there today,“ his wife continued. “Nothing like what you have in Playboy or one of those magazines. We just didn’t have that. Kids today are exposed to such awful things.” She fingered her pearl necklace, staring at its clasp.

“So,“ her husband said, turning to me once again. “Pro or con?” I looked at him, confused, and he repeated, “Is it pro or con? Your book, I mean. What are you going to say about pornography?”

···

For most of my life, I gave little thought to pornography. It was not something I considered relevant to me, nor did I consider it—in the daunting spectrum of social, cultural, and political problems—a particularly pressing issue facing this country. Pornography had played a negligible role in my own life and, I assumed, had little effect on the lives of those important to me. Like many Americans, I believed pornography was no big deal. But on assignment to write about pornography for Time magazine, my eyes were blown wide open. During the weeks spent researching my article, I spoke with dozens of men and women about how profoundly pornography had affected their lives. I talked to male pornography users, female pornography fans and girlfriends of pornography fans, sex addicts and their wives, child psychologists and couples therapists.

One twenty-four-year-old woman from Baltimore confided, “I find that porn’s prevalence is a serious hindrance to my comfort level in relationships. Whether it’s porn DVDs and magazines lying around the house, countless porn files downloaded on their computers, or even trips to strip clubs, almost every guy I have dated—as well as my male friends—is very open about his interest in porn. As a result, my body image suffers tremendously.... I wonder if I am insecure or if the images I see guys ogle every day has done this to me.” She later confessed that she felt unable to air her concerns to anyone: “A guy doesn’t think you’re cool if you complain about it. Ever since the Internet made it so easy to access, there’s no longer any stigma to porn.”

A thirty-eight-year-old woman from a Chicago suburb described her husband’s addiction to pornography: “He would come home from work, slide food around his plate during dinner, play for maybe half an hour with the kids, and then go into his home office, shut the door, and surf Internet porn for hours. I knew—and he knew that I knew. I put a filter on his browser that would e-mail me every time a pornographic image was captured.... I continually confronted him on this. There were times I would be so angry I would cry and cry and tell him how much it hurt.... It got to the point where he stopped even making excuses. It was more or less ‘I know you know and I don’t really care. What are you going to do about it?’“

From the other side, from dozens of men, I heard about how something that once seemed fun was having unexpected side effects. A twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker wrote me an e-mail that said, “I used to view porn online, but I began to find it more difficult to stay aroused when having sex with a real woman. It’s an interesting feedback loop, because I watched porn before I ever had sex, and in the old days, if I was having trouble staying aroused for other reasons (e.g., too drunk), I could visualize scenes from those movies and that would help. But later on, during a dry spell, I discovered i-porn, and the easiness of it made it easy to glut—to the point where now, even though the dry spell is over, real sex has now lost some of its magic. And that’s sad.”

Much of what I heard was not just news; it was revelatory. There was a story about pornography that had not yet been told, a story many Americans, male and female, don’t realize is unfolding—in front of their eyes, inside their minds, on their family computer—at this very moment.

But instead of hearing these stories, we hear about the new craze for porn-star-penned memoirs and for the latest pornographic movies, TV shows, and Web sites. Still, no widespread public outcry. Men and women who came of age during the sixties, seventies, or eighties, or whose experience with pornography date to those eras, think of pornography in terms of gauzy centerfolds, outré sexuality, women’s liberation, and the Hugh Hefner lifestyle. Back then, the lines between softcore and hardcore pornography were clear and distinguishable. Mainstream nudie magazines differed fundamentally from the tawdry interiors of adult stores and even from the pages of Hustler magazine. You could easily limit your consumption by selecting the desired publication. Likewise, the lines between the pro-pornography and the anti-pornography forces were distinct. To be for pornography was to stand in favor of civil liberties, sexual liberation, and science. Opposition to pornography was considered repressive, reactionary, and anti-sex. Dislike or disgust with obscenity could simply be reduced to some form of religious superstition, sexual shame, or fear.

Scroll back to the fifties, when pornography was relegated to dusty newsstand corners or to run-down adult theaters on the wrong side of town. Or even to the eighties, when pornography was surreptitiously obtained on videocassettes via mail-order catalogs or watched in the back rooms of video stores. People were ashamed of, or, at the very least, embarrassed by, the prospect of being caught looking at porn. It just plain wasn’t considered nice to look at dirty pictures. (Of course, pornography’s secretive nature contributed to its allure.) When confined to certain all-male circumstances—bachelor part

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0805081321
• ISBN 13: 9780805081329
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320