Damage on Parade

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Much of Pornified is devoted to cyberporn addiction. Interviewing American men and boys, she learns how obsessive porn surfing wreaks havoc on their conceptions of women and sexuality. They become impatient with their real-life partners and numb to the pleasures of conventional sex. 'Pornography leaves men desensitized both to outrage and to excitement,' leading to dissatisfaction with the emotional tugs of their own lives, Paul writes. Their cravings encourage greater expansion of the global online 'pornotopia': more gonzo group-sex sites from Russia, wilder teen stuff from Japan.

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For all its moral outrage, Pornified advocates a tempered 'censure-not-censor' response aimed at moving society away from viewing pornography as 'hip and fun and sexy' and toward recognizing it as 'harmful, pathetic, and decidedly unsexy.' Here, one suspects, is the Rubicon none of us should seek to cross. What cyberporn permits isn't so much boundless tawdry choice and glum stimulation as too effortless an absolution from the reality of what is being observed. Flickering across a million monitors in a hundred countries at this moment are images of women and men, most of whom are performing lewd sexual acts before a camera because they are poor or damaged, or because they have been coerced into doing so. It shouldn't be so easy to ignore this while we are pleasing ourselves.

Paul cites a 1998 study that concludes that two-thirds of prostitutes suffer from symptoms identical to those of posttraumatic stress disorder-twice the percentage that was found among American soldiers returning from the war in Vietnam. 'There is something twisted about using a predominantly sexually traumatized group of people as our erotic role models,' she writes. 'It's like using a bunch of shark attack victims as our lifeguards.'

There is no end to the obvious damage on parade in extreme pornography, should one wish to acknowledge it. But a consensus about 'community standards' may no longer be available. Sex remains a moral issue for most adults, but not in the way it once was. The movement has been away from the morality of sex itself-no premarital sex, the proscription of homosexuality-to the issue of harm: people getting off on the acts of those who are themselves traumatized and are being traumatized by what they are doing. Maybe terms like obscene and pornographic have lost their nuance. Words such as dangerous and humanly disastrous might be more to the point.

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