Porn is bad for society and bad for you. Right?

PAMELA PAUL, a journalist in her early 30s, never thought much about pornography until Time magazine assigned her to write an article called “The Porn Factor,” published in January 2004. As she puts it, “my eyes were blown wide open.” But not in a happy way. “The Internet is the crack cocaine of sexual addiction,” one antiporn activist told her. Others blamed cyberporn for fostering male alienation, female submission, divorce and plastic surgery. In a matter of weeks, the once-innocent Paul was steeped in porn. Some journalists might resort to a cold shower. Paul got a book deal.

In “Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families,” she argues that porn has undergone radical changes in the last 20 years, becoming more violent and more accessible. Meanwhile pop culture -- evidenced by the likes of Maxim, MTV and Hollywood’s recent teen fantasy “The Girl Next Door” -- can’t get enough of it. “Embracing pornography,” Paul writes, “has become almost a new form of political correctness.” Assessing the casualties, she interviewed more than 100 people on the role of porn in their lives. She quotes from those conversations throughout, using pseudonyms such as “Rajiv,” who blames hard-core material for his problems achieving satisfaction in intercourse. “Dave” confesses his interest in Japanese bukkake porn, in which several men ejaculate on a distraught woman. Aspiring studs should take note of “Valerie,” who thinks men become boring lovers when they imitate porn.

These cautionary tales offer a sharp rebuke to porn’s glamorization, though any larger meaning is harder to gauge, since the author’s selection of interviewees -- about 80% male, mostly in their 20s and 30s and exclusively heterosexual -- is not typical of the American public. As a former senior editor at American Demographics, Paul has a background in evaluating people by percentages, and she commissioned a more representative poll on attitudes toward porn from Harris Interactive. The results aren’t terribly surprising. “Women,” for example, “are significantly more likely than men to say pornography harms relationships (47 percent versus 33 percent),” and six out of 10 women “believe pornography affects how men expect them to look and behave.” On the basis of such data, Paul generalizes about male and female sexuality. Anyone who doesn’t fit into her picture comes off as vaguely suspicious or negatively conditioned.

“Denise,” for instance, has only good things to say about porn and credits the videos of director Seymore Butts for opening her to experimentation. Paul can’t accept this as a positive outcome; instead, she interprets it as evidence that female sexuality is “fundamentally shifting” in some ominous way. “Terrified of being labeled ‘anti-sex,’ ‘humorless,’ or ‘feminist,’ ” she writes, “many women have neglected to stand up to pornography.” Perhaps. Or perhaps they just don’t have a problem with it.

Kenneth Tynan, creator of the nude revue “Oh! Calcutta!,” once observed: “It’s difficult to be an enemy of pornography without also disapproving of masturbation.” Paul dismisses such “old-school defenders” of porn for being outdated but gives their defenses little consideration in “Pornified.” The missing voices include important feminist thinkers such as cultural theorist Laura Kipnis, fetish chronicler Katharine Gates and essayist Sallie Tisdale. These women see porn not merely as an ugly stepchild of the 1st Amendment but as an aid to the imagination. They treat arousal as an experience too individual for polls to measure. “It’s not possible to know how pornography affects people,” Tisdale wrote in her 1994 book “Talk Dirty to Me.” “We can’t know such things about others, except in limited and suspiciously inadequate ways.”

These women have been writing about sexuality for 10 to 20 years, whereas Paul arrives with somewhat less experience. Three years ago, her first book, “The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony,” inspired by her own divorce, looked at people in their 20s and 30s whose marital unions had ended quickly. She examined multiple pressures -- family, identity, money -- while mostly ignoring the role of sex. Porn never came up.

In “The Starter Marriage,” Paul wrote that “it’s risky to draw sweeping conclusions from the particular circumstances of these individual marriages.” In “Pornified,” that admirable inhibition is gone. She interprets meaning from personal testimony like a prosecutor preparing an indictment. Her analysis implies objectivity while presenting only half a debate. Paul deploys the expression “porn addiction” without acknowledging that it’s a colloquialism contested among sexologists, not an entry in psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Men and women who feel perfectly fine about their porn consumption are underrepresented -- and swiftly discredited.

“To argue that pornography has no effect on the people who consume it,” Paul writes, “would be like arguing that the multibillion-dollar advertising business is all for naught....” True, advertising entices us with fantasies that exert a strong pull, but we trust our common sense and our education to guide us. When it comes to porn, critics discount free will; they’d rather see government restrictions than let adults set their own limits. Paul dwells heavily on extreme porn, yet the debased imagery she describes is no more shocking than violent video games, slasher movies or “Fear Factor”-style television.

If our society were to overcome its squeamish reluctance to discuss sex, it would undoubtedly be better equipped to deal with sexual abuses. Indulgence in Internet porn requires the same self-control we apply to gambling or shopping. Children’s access requires the same vigilance parents exercise over alcohol, drugs and guns. Porn’s potential to disrupt relationships requires discussion and compromise just like any problem. Instead of focusing on communication and education, Paul longs for more draconian solutions -- lawsuits, boycotts, congressional investigations. She concedes that these efforts -- feminist Catharine MacKinnon’s legal crusade, the 1986 Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (known as the Meese Report) -- have a history of fizzling out, so instead of censorship she calls for a “censure” movement to produce a consensus that sees porn as “harmful, pathetic, and decidedly unsexy.”

So whose porn do we censure? Paul gives the thought police a broad mandate, even though according to her own commissioned poll most Americans (53% of women, 67% of men) apparently don’t believe that porn harms relationships. Nor does Paul note that censuring brings its own repercussions of accusation, guilt and deceit. Gays and lesbians are excluded from her discussion, on the grounds that they deserve their own book. But if porn is inherently harmful to heterosexuals, why not homosexuals? Any censure campaign may well vilify their tastes more harshly than others. In her rush to sound the alarm, she tells only part of a more fascinating story. The last 20 years have also championed plenty of progressive messages about sex, reducing shame, affirming the right to say “no,” even giving rise to feminist-run sex shops. Paul takes random swipes at popular sex columnists like the widely syndicated Dan Savage and the Village Voice’s Tristan Taormino for validating porn but neglects their extensive advocacy of mutually satisfying sex.

When the old-school defenders of pornography catch up to Paul, they might point out that its new wave is a lot more diverse than she lets on. The women are not always submissive (note “Bend Over Boyfriend”) and represent a greater variety of body shapes, sizes and quirks than Playboy (or Madison Avenue, for that matter) ever did. You’ll find a more unified and retrograde portrayal of women in the multibillion-dollar wedding industry. Or in most fundamentalist religions. If we can tolerate their proselytizing, we should be able to handle porn. *