- Paul, Pamela.
Pornified.
New York: Times Books, 2005.
ISBN 0-8050-7745-6.
-
If you've been on the receiving end of Internet junk mail as I've been
until I discovered a few technical tricks
(here and
here) which, along
with Annoyance Filter, have
essentially eliminated spam from my mailbox, you're probably aware
that the popular culture of the Internet is, to a substantial extent,
about pornography and that this marvelous global packet switching
medium is largely a means for delivering pornography both to those
who seek it and those who find it, unsolicited, in their electronic
mailboxes or popping up on their screens.
This is an integral part of the explosive growth of pornography along
with the emergence of new media. In 1973, there were fewer than a
thousand pornographic movie theatres in the U.S. (p 54). Building on the first
exponential growth curve driven by home video, the Internet is bringing
pornography to everybody connected and reducing the cost asymptotically to zero. On
“peer to peer” networks such as Kazaa, 73% of all movie searches are
for pornography and 24% of image searches are for child pornography (p. 60).
It's one thing to talk about free speech, but another to ask what the
consequences might be of this explosion of consumption of material which is
largely directed at men, and which not only objectifies but increasingly, as
the standard of “edginess” ratchets upward, degrades women and supplants
the complexity of adult human relationships with the fantasy instant gratification
of “adult entertainment”.
Mark Schwartz, clinical director of the Masters and Johnson Clinic in St. Louis,
hardly a puritanical institution, says (p. 142) “Pornography is having a dramatic
effect on relationships at many different levels and in many different ways—and
nobody outside the sexual behavior field and the psychiatric community is talking
about it.” This book, by Time magazine contributor Pamela Paul,
talks about it, interviewing both professionals surveying the landscape and
individuals affected in various ways by the wave of pornography sweeping over
developed countries connected to the Internet. Paul quotes Judith Coché, a clinical
psychologist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and has 25 years
experience in therapy practice as saying (p. 180), “We have an epidemic on our hands. The
growth of pornography and its impact on young people is really, really dangerous.
And the most dangerous part is that we don't even realize what's happening.”
Ironically, part of this is due to the overwhelming evidence of the pernicious
consequences of excessive consumption of pornography and its tendency to
progress into addictive behaviour from the Zillman and Bryant studies and
others, which have made academic ethics committees reluctant to approve follow-up
studies involving human subjects (p. 90). Would you vote, based on the evidence in hand,
for a double blind study of the effects of tobacco or heroin on previously unexposed
subjects?
In effect, with the technologically-mediated collapse of the social strictures
against pornography, we've embarked upon a huge, entirely unplanned, social and
cultural experiment unprecedented in human history. This book will make people on
both sides of the debate question their assumptions; the author, while clearly
appalled by the effects of pornography on many of the people she interviews, is
forthright in her opposition to censorship. Even if you have no interest in
pornography nor strong opinions for or against it, there's little doubt that the
ever-growing intrusiveness and deviance of pornography on the Internet will be
a “wedge issue” in the coming battle over the
secure Internet, so the message of
this book, unwelcome as it may be, should be something which everybody interested in
preserving both our open society and the fragile culture which sustains it
ponders at some length.
October 2005 