Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families,   ISBN:9780805081329

Customer Rating: 

OK, she exaggerates, sometimes wildly. And OK, being a woman, she doesn't really understand what makes men tick (though she's certainly no man-hater). Nevertheless, her main argument is undoubtedly right.

If your sex life is real sex with a real woman, then unexpected things are always happening. Especially if you're spontaneous and can laugh at yourself and be yourself and encourage your partner to be herself, too, then sex rarely gets boring. You're never sure what's going to happen, because you're not really in control (sex is best when you're completely out of control); instead, life is in control of whatever happens. Not that it ever works out perfectly, but when you both end up feeling so good and so grateful, who cares? When these great times are shared, there's nothing else like it.

Porn is the opposite. Or haven't you been using it long enough to see that it gets old pretty quickly? When the same images start to bore you, you try something a little more "edgy." At first, you'll say to yourself, "I'd never consider THAT repulsive stuff." But eventually, you wind up in precisely that gutter yourself.

I'm sure she's right that well over half of US men use porn at least monthly. But since she exaggerates, it's hard to know just bad the problem really is. Porn might resemble alcohol: terribly corrosive for some, but relatively harmless for most. So if you're a woman, and you catch your hubby using porn some night, it's not necessarily any worse than his having a couple of beers. But if he also does other things that are starting to "really creep you out," then it's probably gotten worse than "just a couple of beers." If he treats you rudely during sex, or wants you to get into porn, too, or puts a lot of pressure on you to do things that gross you out -- then he's probably become the equivalent of a full-blown alcoholic.

Everybody's going to find something different in this book that really disgusts them. For me, it's the idea that so many young men think they are learning how to be better lovers by watching porn. (They probably think that drinking helps them drive better, too.)

I'll close with three quotes. First, there are some minor exaggerations that are flat-out ridiculous: "Even Playboy has a highly harmful effect on men's sexuality and ability to be in a serious relationship."

Page 85 is so well-written as to be worth the price of the book all by itself. Here's the first paragraph: "...with porn, certain vital emotions are bypassed altogether. Pornography contains little in the way of kissing, hugging, caressing, or holding--all the supposedly `feminine' aspects of sex that, stereotypes aside, can be key experiences for men as well. No one is ever vulnerable or insecure in pornography; there are no reassurances or exchanged intimacies."

The author is very sex-positive: "If men truly prefer sex to porn, they should be allowed and encouraged to act that way." The women in the book are always complaining that their "pornified" men don't want sex with them enough.

Sex is healthy. Porn has become common, and it can be addictive. It'll never be as healthy as good sex. And it can eventually drag you down into the gutter of perversion.

Customer Rating: 

First, I applaud Pamela Paul for tackling what is a very sensitive topic and attempting to provide some useful information to guide an intelligent discussion. Too many people are subject to uninformed biases about this topic which makes resolving any issues impossible.

The best part of the book is the statements from her interviewees who show how pornography has affected their lives. These statements from real people provide a glimpse into real lives that are difficult to ignore. Too much rumor and hearsay influences how people regard pornography. In addition some opinions are based on ideological principles that don't take into account real-world affects. Paul brings us many of these real world affects and, consequently, gives us a fuller account.

I also like her censure-not-censor solution. As she demonstrates in her book, pornography can have very detrimental affects on people's lives and, just like other things, should be controlled in some way. The comparison to alcohol and tobacco is very appropriate and I agree that that is the course our society should take.

However, I cannot fully recommend this book as an unbiased scholarly work. Her position against pornography clearly drives her writing. She repeatedly emphasizes the negative aspects of pornography while being very dismissive of anybody who speaks in favor of it. Among her informers there are some who do not show any negative impacts of in on their lives. But she only includes a few quotes from these people while extensively quoting all those whose lives were destroyed by it. Towards the end of the book while discussing "the truth" about porn she automatically dismisses anybody who has anything good to say about it without a careful evaluation of their position and offers an overintellectualized refutation. I do not consider this to be unbiased reporting.

I am also bothered by the way she comes down against men. While including statistics and quotes showing that a significant number of women regularly view porn and admits that the number is rising, her final conclusion portrays pornography as a male problem. Men only are the ones who use it negatively and are victimizing women. She seems to forget some of her own research, two of her informers were men who claimed to not view porn at all and saw no point in it. Her conclusion certainly contradicts my experience with some of my female acquaintances who admit to watching porn and have no issues with it.

Overall the book has a strong influence from feminist theory that disdains pornography and keeps it from being an objective treatment. The book is a good introduction to a subject that needs more discussion, but, please, take the overall message with a grain of salt.

Customer Rating: 

Oh, the title will grab some sales (I like the guy who sez leaf thru it for free), but this is basically one person's opinion stretched into book length suppositions and limp assertions. Porn deserves real scientific study, not pop psychology and trendy fluff. Sad.

Customer Rating: 

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.

Customer Rating: 

It is easy to see what drives people to write books like this when one considers the porn explosion on the internet. But this book attacks the effect without looking at the cause, which is (1) the puritanical demonizing of one of God's greatest gifts to mankind, and the resulting condemnation of men for feeling normal biological feelings, which, thwarted from their healthy biological expression, degenerate into obsessions and perversions; and (2) the complicated demands placed on men today to satisfy an increasingly demanding partner with possibly little in return for the invested time and money. Pornography is the outcome, and things won't change until society changes.

If you have lived in the US (or most Anglo-Saxon countries) and Western Europe you'll notice a considerable difference in porn obsession that is directly proportional to how puritanical or repressed the society. When we repress God's greatest gift, the energy may emerge in a food or work obsession, when we become fatter or workaholics, but if not, it will seek expression in the only outlet allowed to men whom society has prevented from having normal relationships. Condemning the end result of a long series of cause and effects is naive and will do nothing to decrease interest in porn, whose chief damage is the reduction of an individual's likelihood to function in a loving human relationship.