Pornified

"[Paul] has stripped porn of its culture war claptrap . . . Pornified may stand as a Kinsey report for our time."—San Francisco Chronicle

"A dire portrait of porn's influence on our lives."—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

"A persuasive argument that today's pornography is not the Playboy centerfold or the Deep Throat of yesteryear . . . Paul's remedy charts a sensible middle ground between restraints and free speech."—The Washington Post Book World

"Does for pornography what Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation did for junk food—shinning a light on a vast industry most of us have spent little time thinking about."—Connecticut Post

"The great virtue of Pamela Paul's book is that it deals with pornography at the level of human experience . . . A refreshing and utterly correct response."—Commentary

"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


"Pamela Paul has written a brave and important book about the ubiquity of porn and how it shapes what we expect of women, sex, and human contact. It's enough to make defenders of an unbridled free market and even a few Girls Gone Wild fans think twice about the culture we're living in, and how we made it."—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

"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 reaction."—Alissa Quart, author of Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers

"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