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

by Paul, Pamela

• ISBN13: 9780805077452
• ISBN10: 0805077456
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-09-08
• Publisher: Times Books

Summary

Welcome to Porn America. Pornography, once the taboo vice that no one dared to mention, has become part of our daily livesaffordable, accessible, anonymous, and, increasingly, acceptable. The all-pornography, all-the-time mentality is everywherenot just in cybersex and Playboy magazine but in mainstream magazines, in Paris Hiltons saleability as a celebrity, in the advice columns of womens magazines, and on the bestseller lists. But, even more striking, porn has become a big part of the personal lives of many Americans. Critically acclaimed author Pamela Paul argues that as porn has become more pervasive, it has changed our marriages and families as well as our childrens ideas of sex and sexuality. In the dozens of interviews and a nationwide Harris poll that she conducted as part of her research for this book, Paul exposes how porn has infiltrated our lives. From a wife agonizing over the late-night hours her husband spends on porn sites to parents stunned to learn that their twelve-year-old son has seen a hardcore porn film, we see the costs and consequences of pornography, as intimacy is replaced by fantasy and emotional isolation. Pornified is an insightful, shocking, and important investigation that will rekindle the debate on how and where pornography meets the public eye.

Author Biography

Pamela Paul is a contributor to Time magazine and is the author of The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony

Table of Contents

Author's Note	xi
Introduction: A Pornified World	1	(11)
1. A Guy Thing: Why Men Look at Porn	12	(37)
2. How We Got Here: Life in the Porn Lane	49	(23)
3. Me and My Porn: How Pornography Affects Men	72	(35)
4. Porn Stars, Lovers, and Wives: How Women See Pornography	107	(31)
5. You and Me and Pornography: How Porn Affects Relationships	138	(34)
6. Born into Porn: Kids in a Pornified Culture	172	(39)
7. Fantasy and Reality: Pornography Compulsion	211	(28)
8. The Truth about Pornography	239	(21)
Conclusion: The Censure-Not-Censor Solution	260	(17)
Notes	277	(14)
Acknowledgments	291	(2)
Index	293

Excerpts

Pornified statistics:
The Pornified Man
• Preoccupied. Men look at pornography more than they look at any other subject online.
• Dissatisfied. Less than a third of men say pornography improves their sex lives, yet many find themselves getting pulled into harder and harder pornography to keep the initial buzz going.
The Pornified Woman
• Reshaped. Six out of ten women state that pornography affects how men expect them to look and behave (and four in ten men agree).
• Betrayed. One-third of women see men using pornography as cheating in absolutely all cases.
The Pornified Couple
• Distant. Nearly half of women describe fallout
in relationships because of pornography; only one-third of men say the same thing. Couples describe a breakdown in closeness and a growing absence of trust.
• Broken. Of the sudden rise in divorces related to the
Internet, more than half were the result of a spouse looking at excessive amounts of pornography online.
The Pornified Family
• Exposed. Among eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, who came of age with Internet pornography, more than half say it’s hard to go online without seeing porn. Eleven million Internet pornography users are under the age of eighteen.
• Sexed up. A quarter of adults believe that the greatest effect porn is having on kids is it’s making kids more likely to have sex earlier than they might have.

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Excerpted from Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families by Pamela Paul
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