Pamela Paul

Explores the influence of pornography on virtually every aspect of modern society, examining its pervasive impact on the institution of marriage, family life, intimacy, and children's views on sex.

How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families

Pornified

Lindy

Since reading Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture I have become interested in the connections between what Levy terms "raunch culture" (which includes the mainstreaming of pornography) and nationalism in post-9/11 America. With this mindset, I read Pornified because it was published in 2005 and features a star-spangled thong on the cover.

Aside from this short passage on page 240, it did not prove relevant to my initial thoughts at all:
In the United States, the outrage over the actions at Abu Ghraib was accompanied by a strange hush regarding the inspiration of those acts and images, which are perpetuated in pornography, in this country as elsewhere in the world, every day. Few people think to question,
 let alone fulminate over, the messages sent by 'legitimate' porn.

In this book, Paul chooses to focus solely on consumers of pornography, as opposed to the workings of the pornography industry. She says that other people are already doing that research so she's not going to; I don't have a problem with this, but I wish I'd known that before I'd started reading. So basically it's a lot of interviews of people talking about how pornography use affects their lives. I liked that Paul commissioned a nationally representative poll about attitudes towards pornography for the book. 

Paul does not write from a feminist perspective, but rather a general liberal one. In fact, she somehow manages to misrepresent both feminist anti-porn viewpoints and feminist pro-porn viewpoints, and never makes more than a half-hearted attempt to delineate either. Honestly every attempt to sum up theory in this book was a total mess.

The introduction makes it sound like there would be discussion of how pornography has come to influence other spheres of American life, but that never really came up.

Pornified How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families

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