Slashdot Mirror
Pornified
stern writes "Pamela Paul’s Pornified surveys the effects of pornography in America. On the basis of the book jacket, this might seem more appropriate material for iVillage than Slashdot, except for one thing: pornography pervades the Internet and drives the adoption of new technologies. You can’t fairly tell the story of one without the other." Read on for the rest of Stern's review.
Pornified
author
Pamela Paul
pages
320
publisher
Times Books
rating
Worth reading
reviewer
Stern
ISBN
0805077456
summary
A study of the technology-fueled expansion of pornography and its effects on those who use it
Paul spoke with researchers and therapists, she surveyed the academic literature and commissioned her own study, and then, most remarkably, she tracked down more than 100 people who were willing to talk about their experiences with pornography. Men and women, detractors and fans, casual users and perverts. She arranges this material into chapters about how pornography affects men, on how it affects women, another on children, and so forth.
This is not a “gee whiz, look at all the dirty pictures” screed urging us to hang up our mice and go to church. It is more a summary of research than an opinion piece, and though the preponderance of the research presented is damning to pornography, defenders appear in most sections as well.
The book is remarkable in two ways. First, it presents a greater amount of hard data than I have ever seen on this topic before. Second, the interviews are amazing. Where does she find these people? The military man who masturbates by the side of the highway, the child porn addict who fantasizes about the girls he is teaching in Sunday school, the adult virgins with the almost clinically precise descriptions of what they expect in a woman (“I’m a big fan of full shaved,” etc.).
Pornified is worthwhile for this research and these stories, even if you disagree with the conclusions that Paul draws from them.
I found fascinating, for example, that a number of double-blind studies of the effects of pornography were completed over twenty years ago, but that the results were so damning that it has been difficult to follow up on them. The effects of dirty movies on the people who look at them were so profound that ethics boards at universities deny researchers the approval to show them to human subjects.
What are these effects? The book devotes chapters to this, and I can summarize only very briefly. For many people, porn has quasi-addictive characteristics, requiring escalation to maintain a constant level of stimulation. It dampens empathy, it changes expectations, and it damages relationships. The interviews in the book back this up; it contains example after example of people who started with modest porn searching online, then graduated to more heinous stuff.
And this is all about the Internet. Paul pays lip service to Playboy and smutty VHS tapes, but this is a story about X-rated websites, Usenet groups, and p2p file sharing.
Paul cites a study from 2000 that ties that the expansion of technological avenues for pornography to its growing more explicit, more dehumanizing, and more violent. In other words, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica was pretty tame. But then a.b.p.e.blonds and a.b.p.e.asians appeared, and these refined the expectations of their users, paving the way for the creation of a.b.p.e.bukkake and a.b.p.e.rape. And where the original newsgroup probably didn’t cause too much damage to anybody, the same can not be said for its increasingly brutal descendants.
Consider this — prior to the Internet, law enforcement believed that child porn had been basically wiped out. It was a crime from a previous age, like body snatching. But then came the Web. Between 1996 and 2004, child-porn cases handled by the FBI increased 23 fold. The research presented in Pornified argues that technology does not merely make it easier to serve an existing desire, it allows deep exposure that for many people results in stronger and more specific versions of the the original demand.
Paul presents most of this neutrally, but you can sense contempt for non-pornographic websites that link to porn sites, or endorse them. She doesn’t name any names, but the savvy reader will recognize Fark as one of her targets, and I suspect that Farkers figure among her interviewees.
Such “smut” can be defended, of course, and the book gives defenders their say. The obvious response is “porn has been around forever, so stop complaining that it is suddenly a threat to society.” But it seems to me that this response is disingenuous. You can’t compare an issue of Playboy and the Atari 2600 cartridge of “Custer’s Revenge” to the seamless infinity of smut that lives on the Internet today.
The second major response to the claims in this book follows the First Amendment. Regardless of harm, we must not start down the slippery slope of restricting access to objectionable material. Paul considers this, but her the book discusses concrete harm, and she argues that civil liberties are not absolute where one person’s rights hurt other people (not many argue for their right to cry “fire” in a crowded theater, for example).
Though Paul did not set out to explore the industry of porn production and distribution, in the course of her research, she did discover things I didn’t know. For example, she interviews one man who works in the oil industry and spends 25% of every working day surfing porn sites and submitting reviews to “porn aggregators” for a fee. It’s not about the money, though; he feels pride in his influence as a kind of porno tastemaker.
The material about pornography and children, and the chapter about sex addicts, were particularly strong.
Some of Paul’s interviewees play off the awkwardness of the topic, and one in particular starts something like a stand-up routine, criticizing the porn movies of the early 1980s for their lack of strong plotting. Personally, I thought it was funny that two women independently complained about the “cheesy... crappy” quality of black porn, relative to porn made for whites.
What’s bad? The topic is a difficult one, and perhaps impossible to approach without prejudice. Some readers will dislike Paul's conclusions and will dismiss the entire book as a result. Also, in the interviews, some stories leave out details the reader is bound to want to know. One of the interviewees is the “former CEO of a large international corporation,” who “lost his job due to pornography.” How? What happened? Did he dress in a leather teddy at a board meeting? The chapter about porn and relationships was less interesting to me than the rest, but your mileage may vary.
Paul comes to strong conclusions, and each reader will have to decide for himself whether or not he thinks her recommendations are wise. Her main goal, however, is probably to change the debate on pornography so that it is no longer simply about morality and free speech, but also includes a discussion of whether or not technology-fueled porn hurts people. In this regard, I think she is apt to be successful.
You can purchase Pornified from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Paul spoke with researchers and therapists, she surveyed the academic literature and commissioned her own study, and then, most remarkably, she tracked down more than 100 people who were willing to talk about their experiences with pornography. Men and women, detractors and fans, casual users and perverts. She arranges this material into chapters about how pornography affects men, on how it affects women, another on children, and so forth.
This is not a “gee whiz, look at all the dirty pictures” screed urging us to hang up our mice and go to church. It is more a summary of research than an opinion piece, and though the preponderance of the research presented is damning to pornography, defenders appear in most sections as well.
The book is remarkable in two ways. First, it presents a greater amount of hard data than I have ever seen on this topic before. Second, the interviews are amazing. Where does she find these people? The military man who masturbates by the side of the highway, the child porn addict who fantasizes about the girls he is teaching in Sunday school, the adult virgins with the almost clinically precise descriptions of what they expect in a woman (“I’m a big fan of full shaved,” etc.).
Pornified is worthwhile for this research and these stories, even if you disagree with the conclusions that Paul draws from them.
I found fascinating, for example, that a number of double-blind studies of the effects of pornography were completed over twenty years ago, but that the results were so damning that it has been difficult to follow up on them. The effects of dirty movies on the people who look at them were so profound that ethics boards at universities deny researchers the approval to show them to human subjects.
What are these effects? The book devotes chapters to this, and I can summarize only very briefly. For many people, porn has quasi-addictive characteristics, requiring escalation to maintain a constant level of stimulation. It dampens empathy, it changes expectations, and it damages relationships. The interviews in the book back this up; it contains example after example of people who started with modest porn searching online, then graduated to more heinous stuff.
And this is all about the Internet. Paul pays lip service to Playboy and smutty VHS tapes, but this is a story about X-rated websites, Usenet groups, and p2p file sharing.
Paul cites a study from 2000 that ties that the expansion of technological avenues for pornography to its growing more explicit, more dehumanizing, and more violent. In other words, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica was pretty tame. But then a.b.p.e.blonds and a.b.p.e.asians appeared, and these refined the expectations of their users, paving the way for the creation of a.b.p.e.bukkake and a.b.p.e.rape. And where the original newsgroup probably didn’t cause too much damage to anybody, the same can not be said for its increasingly brutal descendants.
Consider this — prior to the Internet, law enforcement believed that child porn had been basically wiped out. It was a crime from a previous age, like body snatching. But then came the Web. Between 1996 and 2004, child-porn cases handled by the FBI increased 23 fold. The research presented in Pornified argues that technology does not merely make it easier to serve an existing desire, it allows deep exposure that for many people results in stronger and more specific versions of the the original demand.
Paul presents most of this neutrally, but you can sense contempt for non-pornographic websites that link to porn sites, or endorse them. She doesn’t name any names, but the savvy reader will recognize Fark as one of her targets, and I suspect that Farkers figure among her interviewees.
Such “smut” can be defended, of course, and the book gives defenders their say. The obvious response is “porn has been around forever, so stop complaining that it is suddenly a threat to society.” But it seems to me that this response is disingenuous. You can’t compare an issue of Playboy and the Atari 2600 cartridge of “Custer’s Revenge” to the seamless infinity of smut that lives on the Internet today.
The second major response to the claims in this book follows the First Amendment. Regardless of harm, we must not start down the slippery slope of restricting access to objectionable material. Paul considers this, but her the book discusses concrete harm, and she argues that civil liberties are not absolute where one person’s rights hurt other people (not many argue for their right to cry “fire” in a crowded theater, for example).
Though Paul did not set out to explore the industry of porn production and distribution, in the course of her research, she did discover things I didn’t know. For example, she interviews one man who works in the oil industry and spends 25% of every working day surfing porn sites and submitting reviews to “porn aggregators” for a fee. It’s not about the money, though; he feels pride in his influence as a kind of porno tastemaker.
The material about pornography and children, and the chapter about sex addicts, were particularly strong.
Some of Paul’s interviewees play off the awkwardness of the topic, and one in particular starts something like a stand-up routine, criticizing the porn movies of the early 1980s for their lack of strong plotting. Personally, I thought it was funny that two women independently complained about the “cheesy... crappy” quality of black porn, relative to porn made for whites.
What’s bad? The topic is a difficult one, and perhaps impossible to approach without prejudice. Some readers will dislike Paul's conclusions and will dismiss the entire book as a result. Also, in the interviews, some stories leave out details the reader is bound to want to know. One of the interviewees is the “former CEO of a large international corporation,” who “lost his job due to pornography.” How? What happened? Did he dress in a leather teddy at a board meeting? The chapter about porn and relationships was less interesting to me than the rest, but your mileage may vary.
Paul comes to strong conclusions, and each reader will have to decide for himself whether or not he thinks her recommendations are wise. Her main goal, however, is probably to change the debate on pornography so that it is no longer simply about morality and free speech, but also includes a discussion of whether or not technology-fueled porn hurts people. In this regard, I think she is apt to be successful.
You can purchase Pornified from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Remember, when Bram wanted folks to test BitTorrent, he put up a porn flic -- he knew there'd be enough who'd want to get it that they'd download and install BitTorrent, and then wait for the porn to (maybe) download.
I bet porn leads to people installing lots of software, good and bad.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Internet billing? Maybe more camcorder sales than you'd like to think.
-- Only information exists, the rest is just smoke and mirrors.
Is that how it's being portrayed in Europe? No wonder you guys are so hostile towards Bush (I have my own reasons, but not because of misinformation).
No troops were withdrawn from the middle east. These national guard soldiers were home on a regular rotation, and instead of getting some time off, were ordered to disaster relief duty.
And AFAIK, the only people that the troops shot were part of a group that was itself shooting at some engineers working on a bridge. They got what they deserved.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
The items that porn has driven into the mass market:
- The VCR, especially VHS. Before the VCR you had to go to a porno thatre and sit in a dark room with abunch of other lonely guys doing things you didn't want to know about. With the VCR you could watch your porn in the privacy of your own home. Hell, you could even watch it with your wife, who would rather die than be seen going into a porno thatre. I was there. I saw it happen with my own eyes.
- The CR-ROM drive. The first three products that came out for the CD-ROM drive were Bible-search programs, MYST and porn. Porn was the main reason many people bought CD-ROM drives.
- DVD players/DVD-ROM drives. These made porn movies even easier to watch than VCRs as the discs were smaller, the image quality better (yay, the pimples on Ron Jeremy's butt are much more visible!) and you can skip to your favorite parts. And as of today, porn is one of the few genres in video to bother using the multi-angle option.
- Broadband Internet: What do people use all that bandwitdh for? Porn. More than pirated movies, warez, and music, it's porn. Look around Usenet sometime. The busiest newsgroups are the porn groups in the ALT branch.
Now, none of these technologies were created for the expressed purpose of make, selling, or dispributing porn. And the author didn't say they were. These technologies were first exploited by the porn industry.Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
But does this mean that child porn has actually increased or that the internet has just made it easier to find? I hate when people try to use a statistic like this to prove some point, becuase it doesn't really prove anything.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Every single media advance since the year 1000 has been pushed forward by porn.
.NET because it failed the pr0n test.
Johann Gutenberg made his printing press around 1448, and one of the very first books to appear in print was Il Decamerone, an erotic book. Photography was invented in 1832, and in 1874 London police confiscate 130,000 photographs and 5,000 slides from one guy.
One wag predicted the non-dominance of
How many people a day view pornography online? thousands, millions? They get a double blind study of a couple of hundred, and that's supposed to tell us something?
I've worked on scientific studies, and I can say with certainty that they are highly dependent on the researchers who are doing them (and the groups that are funding them). I've worked on studies that didn't get published becuase they dind't have the results the funders wanted. I've also worked on studies where the results had to be skewed (ie, those samples are contaminated, remove them).
I'd be willing to bet that a anti porn book would sell more copies than a pro porn book.
Another issue is, how did they find the people that they interviewed? Most 'normal' viewers probaby wouldn't take the time out of their day to sit through a long interview. It's only the minority of people that feel some compelling reason to talk about it (ie, they feel it destroyed their lives), that would go to the trouble to get interviewed.
Since when did operating systems become a religion?
child porn going from a non-existent problem to an FBI priority is pretty telling
I think what the FBI means is that it's gone from "underground child porn rings swapping polaroids that we don't even know exist" to "yet another idiot has started a #!!!!!hotpreteenz IRC channel thinking he can hide it using +s"
If you can't do anything about it, it's in your best interests to pretend it doesn't exist so you don't look bad for failing to clean it up. If you can, it's in your best interests to make it look like a widespread plague in order to get as many people as possible to surrender their civil liberties and fork over millions to save the children like it was some kind of new problem that the internet created.
Well, the title IS meant to be funny. Åmål is the name of the small town, and it's used in the context "Why do I have to live in fucking ÅMÅL!?" in the line of dialog the film takes its title from.
That said, I think most Swedes who scoff at the re-titling of the movie for english-speaking countries simply don't understand just how offensive a word "fucking" really is to most native english speakers. Especially since, if you don't know that Åmål is a small town, the context in which it's used here is by no means obvious.
If someone made a movie here in sweden with the word "knulla" or "fitta" in the title and put up posters for it in the subway or type the title out in 30cm tall letters on the movie marquee, i believe it would probably cause a bit of fuss, even here. Although probably just a little.
And I'll have to chime in that I *am* deviant, and I personally know and meet up with dozens of women who are like minded. Some of the tamer things that are partaken tend to be some of the most extreme things you would find in mainstream porn. Things like violence, pain, humiliation and degradation are being forced upon these women.
Are these women being victimized, emotionally and physically abused?
Fuck no. They engage in this kind of thing not only consensually, but gleefully.
Are these people psychologically damaged? Actually, they're easily the most stable and well-adjusted people I've ever met. "Normal" people are much more neurotic by and large.
Does this sort of sexual deviancy hurt intimate relationships? Sure. I hear of past marriages having been broken up by wild incompatibilities all the time. The story generally goes "Once I realized I was kinky, and that our sex life lacked passion because all I really wanted was to be beaten and sodomized, and he would have none of that, it kind of went downhill from there."
Sex is like food. For the Japanese, raw squid is a delicacy. For Americans, it's disgusting. For some people, including the author of this book, anal sex and bukakke are disgusting. For other people, it's the epitome of their sexuality. Basically, we can't all be the same. People should be free to find their own path so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
That particular comment says nothing about violence, merely stimulation, and it's not demonstrably untrue.
Many friends of mine, including myself, at first finding porn, were happy with any thing; a nude picture was enough to get us horny and off. It escalated to multiple pictures, then moving pictures, then full DVD rips, and then many DVD rips, most of which are watched once and deleted because they didn't do anything for us.
That seems to fit in with what the author was trying to say, and I'm willing to bet that mine and my friends' experiences are not unique.
-Terralthra...