The Pornification Of America

An up-close look at how porn permeates our culture Pictures of half-naked girls and women can seem to litter almost every screen, billboard, and advertisement in America. Pole-dancing studios keep women fit. Men airdrop their dick pics to female passengers on planes and trains. To top it off, the last American President has bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy.” This pornification of our society is what Bernadette Barton calls “raunch culture.” Barton explores what raunch culture is, why it matters, and how it is ruining America. She exposes how internet porn drives trends in programming, advertising, and social media, and makes its way onto our phones, into our fashion choices, and into our sex lives. From twerking and breast implants, to fake nails and push-up bras, she explores just how much we encounter raunch culture on a daily basis—porn is the new normal. Drawing on interviews, television shows, movies, and social media, Barton argues that raunch culture matters not because it is sexy, but because it is sexist. She shows how young women are encouraged to be sexy like porn stars, and to be grateful for getting cat-called or receiving unsolicited dick pics. As politicians vote to restrict women’s access to birth control and abortion, The Pornification of America exposes the double standard we attach to women’s sexuality.

An up-close look at how porn permeates our culture Pictures of half-naked girls and women can seem to litter almost every screen, billboard, and advertisement in America. Pole-dancing studios keep women fit. Men airdrop their dick pics to female passengers on planes and trains. To top it off, the last American President has bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy.” This pornification of our society is what Bernadette Barton calls “raunch culture.” Barton explores what raunch culture is, why it matters, and how it is ruining America. She exposes how internet porn drives trends in programming, advertising, and social media, and makes its way onto our phones, into our fashion choices, and into our sex lives. From twerking and breast implants, to fake nails and push-up bras, she explores just how much we encounter raunch culture on a daily basis—porn is the new normal. Drawing on interviews, television shows, movies, and social media, Barton argues that raunch culture matters not because it is sexy, but because it is sexist. She shows how young women are encouraged to be sexy like porn stars, and to be grateful for getting cat-called or receiving unsolicited dick pics. As politicians vote to restrict women’s access to birth control and abortion, The Pornification of America exposes the double standard we attach to women’s sexuality.

From the golden age of comic books in the 1940s and 1950s to the adult film industry's golden decade of the 1970s and up to today, the authors trace porn's transformation--from lurking in the dark alleys of American life to becoming an unapologetic multibillion-dollar industry.

"Strips porn of its culture-war claptrap . . . Pornified may stand as a Kinsey Report for our time."—San Francisco Chronicle Porn in America is everywhere—not just in cybersex and Playboy but in popular video games, advice columns, and reality television shows, and on the bestseller lists. Even more striking, as porn has become affordable, accessible, and anonymous, it has become increasingly acceptable—and a big part of the personal lives of many men and women. In this controversial and critically acclaimed book, Pamela Paul argues that as porn becomes more pervasive, it is destroying our marriages and families as well as distorting our children's ideas of sex and sexuality. Based on more than one hundred interviews and a nationally representative poll, Pornified exposes how porn has infiltrated our lives, from the wife agonizing over the late-night hours her husband spends on porn Web sites to the parents stunned to learn their twelve-year-old son has seen a hardcore porn film. Pornified is an insightful, shocking, and important investigation into the costs and consequences of pornography for our families and our culture.

A classic work on gender culture exploring how the women’s movement has evolved to Girls Gone Wild in a new, self-imposed chauvinism. In the tradition of Susan Faludi’s Backlash and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, New York Magazine writer Ariel Levy studies the effects of modern feminism on women today. Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig—the new brand of “empowered woman” who wears the Playboy bunny as a talisman, bares all for Girls Gone Wild, pursues casual sex as if it were a sport, and embraces “raunch culture” wherever she finds it. If male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women as pieces of meat, Female Chauvinist Pigs of today are doing them one better, making sex objects of other women—and of themselves. They think they’re being brave, they think they’re being funny, but in Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy asks if the joke is on them. In her quest to uncover why this is happening, Levy interviews college women who flash for the cameras on spring break and teens raised on Paris Hilton and breast implants. She examines a culture in which every music video seems to feature a stripper on a pole, the memoirs of porn stars are climbing the bestseller lists, Olympic athletes parade their Brazilian bikini waxes in the pages of Playboy, and thongs are marketed to prepubescent girls. Levy meets the high-powered women who create raunch culture—the new oinking women warriors of the corporate and entertainment worlds who eagerly defend their efforts to be “one of the guys.” And she traces the history of this trend back to conflicts between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution long left unresolved. Levy pulls apart the myth of the Female Chauvinist Pig and argues that what has come to pass for liberating rebellion is actually a kind of limiting conformity. Irresistibly witty and wickedly intelligent, Female Chauvinist Pigs makes the case that the rise of raunch does not represent how far women have come, it only proves how far they have left to go.

Today, seven states in the country allow possession of child pornography. Pornographers want their customers to keep their porn private. They want to silence witnesses' testimony about the negative effects this material has had on so many people.

Pornograpy and sex-related sites make up nearly 60 percent of daily web traffic. For some of us, it's going on in our very own basements or in the den after the family goes to bed. Over twenty million Americans spend a good deal of their waking hours looking at pornography. And they won't stop, because they can't stop. At least not on their own. They are addicted. Porn Nation captivates readers with the true story of Michael Leahy, a sex addict who only came to terms with his problem after losing his marriage and children. But it's also the story of the rest of us. It's the story of America- our porn nation. How is it affecting us? How is it changing the way we see ourselves and others? And what can be done about it?

There is a new wave of pornographic entertainment in contemporary American culture. Liberated from X-rated bookstores and strip clubs, porn is everywhere, and Pop-Porn seeks to examine this phenomenon in some of its most striking manifestations. Written from a variety of perspectives and on a variety of topics representing the widespread increase of soft-core porn in our culture, Pop-Porn offers a detailed and complex approach to the porn industry in America. Rather than focusing on the current polarity of basic pro and con views on this topic—a polarity that ultimately hinders discussion—these essays show that pornographic content is subtly and profoundly embedded in our cultural fabric. This current state of affairs raises questions beyond what's right and what's wrong. It demands that we examine what these representations mean in the first place and what effects they have upon the way we live our lives. The content of this volume is not limited to the usual porn sites and practices, such as video, prostitution, sex sales, magazines, and the Internet. The essays here go further, examining porn in places many would not expect, such as in grooming practices of pubic hair and the self-promotional strategies of Paris Hilton. The authors who do examine the conventional sites for porn do so in a unique way. Ultimately, these essays collectively demonstrate that Americans are addicted to porn, but are forced to disguise it as fashion, hygiene, class commentary, or other forms of entertainment. Contributors to Pop-Porn come from a wide variety of disciplines—including English, Women's Studies, Communication, Psychology, and Theatre—and their essays address a wide range of porn-infiltrated sites, from magazines to radio to film to television to fashion. While each contributor may perceive porn differently, they all address its pervasiveness in America's current, conservative state.