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

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

Pamela Paul
$24.14
This product is not returnable.
Publication Date: August 8th, 2006
Publisher:
St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN:
9780805081329
Pages:
320
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Description

"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 the Author

Pamela Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and oversees books coverage at The New York Times. She is also the host of the weekly podcast, Inside The New York Times Book Review. Prior to joining the Times, she was a contributor to Time magazine and The Economist; her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, and Vogue.

She is the author of My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues; By the Book; Parenting, Inc.; Pornified; and The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony.

Praise for Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families

“Pornified is rife with tales of Americans experiencing a new level of sexual pathos, filled with snapshots of surreptitious lives: it is as compelling as it is troubling. A provocative book, sure to stir debate and reflection.” —Margaret Talbot, senior fellow, New American Foundation, and staff writer, The New Yorker

“Pamela Paul convincingly and sometimes shockingly details the effects on men, women, and children living in a 'pornified' world. Her book should be a wake-up call for parents and should change the way we view--and rationalize viewing--pornography today. As Paul makes clear, porn is not 'cool,' or 'liberating,' or basically benign. It is a poison eroding relationships between men and women and darkening our children's horizons.” —Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness

“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

“Pornified is rife with the tales of Americans experiencing a new level of sexual pathos, filled with snapshots of surreptitious lives: it is as compelling as it is troubling. A provocative book, sure to stir debate and reflection.” —Alissa Quart, author of Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers

“A sharp rebuke to porn's glamorization.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“An alarming, thought-provoking overview of today's cyber-sexual society.” —The Seattle Times

“Pamela Paul sets out to scare readers about the effects of pornography on American society, and she succeeds mightily.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch