PAMELA PAUL, a journalist in her early 30s, never thought much about pornography until Time magazine assigned her to write an article called "The Porn Factor," published in January 2004. As she puts it, "my eyes were blown wide open." But not in a happy way. "The Internet is the crack cocaine of sexual addiction," one antiporn activist told her. Others blamed cyberporn for fostering male alienation, female submission, divorce and plastic surgery. In a matter of weeks, the once-innocent Paul was steeped in porn. Some journalists might resort to a cold shower. Paul got a book deal.
In "Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families," she argues that porn has undergone radical changes in the last 20 years, becoming more violent and more accessible. Meanwhile pop culture -- evidenced by the likes of Maxim, MTV and Hollywood's recent teen fantasy "The Girl Next Door" -- can't get enough of it. "Embracing pornography," Paul writes, "has become almost a new form of political correctness." Assessing the casualties, she interviewed more than 100 people on the role of porn in their lives. She quotes from those conversations throughout, using pseudonyms such as "Rajiv," who blames hard-core material for his problems achieving satisfaction in intercourse. "Dave" confesses his interest in Japanese bukkake porn, in which several men ejaculate on a distraught woman. Aspiring studs should take note of "Valerie," who thinks men become boring lovers when they imitate porn.
These cautionary tales offer a sharp rebuke to porn's glamorization, though any larger meaning is harder to gauge, since the author's selection of interviewees -- about 80% male, mostly in their 20s and 30s and exclusively heterosexual -- is not typical of the American public. As a former senior editor at American Demographics, Paul has a background in evaluating people by percentages, and she commissioned a more representative poll on attitudes toward porn from Harris Interactive. The results aren't terribly surprising. "Women," for example, "are significantly more likely than men to say pornography harms relationships (47 percent versus 33 percent)," and six out of 10 women "believe pornography affects how men expect them to look and behave." On the basis of such data, Paul generalizes about male and female sexuality. Anyone who doesn't fit into her picture comes off as vaguely suspicious or negatively conditioned.
"Denise," for instance, has only good things to say about porn and credits the videos of director Seymore Butts for opening her to experimentation. Paul can't accept this as a positive outcome; instead, she interprets it as evidence that female sexuality is "fundamentally shifting" in some ominous way. "Terrified of being labeled 'anti-sex,' 'humorless,' or 'feminist,' " she writes, "many women have neglected to stand up to pornography." Perhaps. Or perhaps they just don't have a problem with it.
Kenneth Tynan, creator of the nude revue "Oh! Calcutta!," once observed: "It's difficult to be an enemy of pornography without also disapproving of masturbation." Paul dismisses such "old-school defenders" of porn for being outdated but gives their defenses little consideration in "Pornified." The missing voices include important feminist thinkers such as cultural theorist Laura Kipnis, fetish chronicler Katharine Gates and essayist Sallie Tisdale. These women see porn not merely as an ugly stepchild of the 1st Amendment but as an aid to the imagination. They treat arousal as an experience too individual for polls to measure. "It's not possible to know how pornography affects people," Tisdale wrote in her 1994 book "Talk Dirty to Me." "We can't know such things about others, except in limited and suspiciously inadequate ways."
These women have been writing about sexuality for 10 to 20 years, whereas Paul arrives with somewhat less experience. Three years ago, her first book, "The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony," inspired by her own divorce, looked at people in their 20s and 30s whose marital unions had ended quickly. She examined multiple pressures -- family, identity, money -- while mostly ignoring the role of sex. Porn never came up.
In "The Starter Marriage," Paul wrote that "it's risky to draw sweeping conclusions from the particular circumstances of these individual marriages." In "Pornified," that admirable inhibition is gone. She interprets meaning from personal testimony like a prosecutor preparing an indictment. Her analysis implies objectivity while presenting only half a debate. Paul deploys the expression "porn addiction" without acknowledging that it's a colloquialism contested among sexologists, not an entry in psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Men and women who feel perfectly fine about their porn consumption are underrepresented -- and swiftly discredited.
