Pornified: How Pornography is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families [Paperback]

I have a very keen interest in women and body image and am particularly interested in how the media impacts on us as women and how this translates to every day life. This book was a great find, it was well researched and presented, easy to read and a very enjoyable read, though at points I was very angry, but I guess that is how we are supposed to feel.
As a woman i could relate to the stories and as a worker i was delighted to have such cold hard facts to work with.
I'd definately recommend this one- and pass it along to all your friends.

Pornified is exactly what it claims to be: a dissection of how porn is damaging lives, relationships and families. However, whereas most authors on this topic write lengthy prose full of opinion and lacking context, Pamela Paul goes straight to the root of porn - its users - and explores how we, they, everybody thinks about it.

Porn being such a taboo, hearing the views of so many different kinds of people on this sordid subject is very enlightening. Paul systematically reveals why men use porn, how women feel about it, why the actors do what they do, and the consequences for all.

Her writing is succinct and professional, interspersed with direct quotes, and each page feels more like a thesis or a report than - as is often the case - an editorial. On any other subject, this approach would be boring, but such a matter-of-fact analysis of something as controvertial as porn is fascinating.

Highly recommended to any seeking a better understanding of this new, underhand side of modern life: just as Paul consults people from all walks in the book, so the book is accessible to people from all walks.

This book, written by the American Time magazine contributor Pamela Paul, is about the impact of pornography on the U.S. culture and society.

It describes how XXX entertainment proliferated from "seedy porno theaters" back in the 70's to VHS and Betamax in the 80's, to Cable channels and DVD's later and to the Internet (where it goes unfettered, thus increasingly more omnipresent, degrading and violent) and cell-phones nowadays. Moreover, porn is now seen as "hip" or "liberating" in the American culture.

Based on more than 100 interviews of American men and women (both porn users and nonusers), an American nationwide Poll, the Zillman-Bryant experiment (investigating on the effects of pornography on the viewers' conscience) conducted in 1979 and many other interesting data, Pamela Paul is trying to raise the awareness of how damaging porn actually is. She argues that as it has become so ubiquitous, it has a corrosive impact on relationships between men and women, affecting the way men can relate to women, gradually impairing men's ethics and sense of humanity towards women; Porn is unsettling many women in their everyday lives as they feel pressured to accept men's porn viewing as it being a "natural thing for a guy" (a myth proved wrong in chapter 8 of this book) even though they (women) become jealous and fear they cannot compete with the surgically enhanced porn stars who, in porn videos, always seem eager to do everything men want them to do and appear to enjoy the degradation inflicted on them (a huge difference from most real life women's sexuality). Paul shows that Internet pornography can abet men to porn addiction and sexual compulsion. She also point out that unrestricted Internet pornography is having a negative effect on children and their developping understanding of human sexuality.

This book also mentions the horrible increase of child pornography online.

Although "pornified" is an American book, I have noticed similar opinions, attitudes and behaviours regarding pornography nowadays in the UK as many British men are similarly praising the availability of porn on the Net these days so I think it would be very useful for Britons to read this book because it would inform them on how to understand the harms of something that is currently poisoning our society as well. And the worst is that most people do not notice it and have no sense of the damage being done !!!

Furthermore, in "Pornified" Paul shows how people in the United States have been misled into believing that accepting porn was liberal and pornography should be defended as "free speech" though she gives evidences that the First amendment was never meant to sanction the dissemination of such obscenity but too many American people unfortunately give little thought to what the Founding Fathers would make of the current application of the constitution's free political speech. Paul reveals that pornographers and their lobbying arms have successfully made Americans believe that opposing to pornography can only be reactionary, religiously fanatic, typical of the Right Wing or anti-sex. That's the way pornographers have so far shut up even honest, legal and feminist anti-porn activists and this is why the general opinion hasn't budged. And now Americans live in a "Pornified" culture.

Pamela Paul says that as soon as people realize its harmful effects, Porn, like tobacco smoking, should be discouraged.

Finally, I have to point out that if you choose to read this book you have to know that Pamela Paul had to include some strong language and graphic XXX depictions of pornography but, as she explains at the beginning of "Pornified", avoiding such language in this book would give less than a full picture.