Rated X.

Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families, by Pamela Paul (Times, 320 pp., $25)

COMMENTING on our contemporary sexual mores, the poet and agrarian essayist Wendell Berry has written that "in sex, as in other things, we have liberated fantasy hut killed imagination, and so have sealed ourselves in selfishness and loneliness. Fantasy is of the solitary self, and it cannot lead us away from ourselves. It is by imagination that we cross over the differences between ourselves and other beings and thus learn compassion, forbearance, mercy, forgiveness, sympathy, and love."

Berry's observation dates back to the early 1990s, before the explosion of Internet pornography. The cultural impact of that explosion is explored in Pornified, by Pamela Paul, a journalist. Based on more than 100 interviews and a nationally representative poll of "pornography consumers," Paul's book never rises to Berry's level of ethical insight, but it confirms Berry's thesis as it describes in ample, if often repetitive, detail our "pornified culture."

Paul stumbled into the Sadean world of Internet pornography while on assignment for Time magazine. Although she eventually addresses the legal issues surrounding the censorship of pornography, her focus is more on pornography's cultural and psychological impact.

The narratives of "pornography consumers" are, with minor variations, tediously similar. A wife or girlfriend discovers--sometimes through the surprising appearance of obscene images on a computer screen--the heavy Internet-porn activity of her male partner. She objects and is rebuked as sexually frigid and closed-minded. At this point, she can back off and tolerate the man's habits, rebuke him in turn, or join in. Some of the women who opt for the last path proclaim that their decision is in accord with sexual freedom but almost in the next breath confess to gnawing feelings of inferiority as they compare their own bodies to those of the eager sexual gymnasts the man finds so tantalizing. With or without the woman's complicity, the man's online activity often intensifies and focuses increasingly on, to put it delicately, taboo sexual practices. In one accidentally humorous case, the man's interest in sex with his female partner gradually subsides and he begins perusing online sex shops for the purchase of a life-size doll. Confronted, he explains: "It has nothing to do with you. When you're not available, I could use this."

Although she did not initially intend it this way, Paul's new book reads very much like a sequel to her first book, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, for which she interviewed 60 couples from starter marriages, defined as childless marriages that last less than five years. In that book, she argued that engaged couples need more "realistic expectations" as to "what marriage can and cannot offer"; now, in Pornified, she notes that marriage counselors and divorce lawyers increasingly identify porn addiction as one of the contributing causes of marital splits. Even apart from addiction, porn usage fosters false expectations about marital sex. The intensity of stimulation is difficult to parallel in the world of matrimonial sex. Porn, in which there is "no reciprocity" and "nothing veers from the automated path to pleasure," is geared toward the "adolescent mind: simple, primal, hormone-driven, results-oriented, a winnable game." Not exactly the best preparation for marital commitment and fidelity--and this is porn at its most mild.

The massive increase in the popularity of pornography in recent years is directly traceable to the ready availability of pornography on the Internet. Paul stresses the "intoxication effects of anonymity, accessibility, and affordability" of Internet porn, whose power of attraction frequently overwhelms the resistance of otherwise well-adjusted individuals. Americans spend more than $4 billion a year on video porn, more than is spent on any professional sport. Half of hotel guests order "adult" entertainment. While mainstream Hollywood produces about 400 pictures a year, the porn industry cranks out 11,000 videos, most on a measly $5,000-$10,000 budget. The regularity of such images on the Internet is likely contributing to the steady demise in the longstanding taboo against pedophilia. From 1996 to 2004, the FB1 witnessed a 23-fold increase in the number of child-porn cases.

Paul is not arguing that every adolescent who takes a peek at Playboy is on an inevitable path to the practice or even the viewing of sadomasochistic sex and bestiality. There is little evidence in her research of any direct correspondence between the viewing of taboo sexual activity and the practice of such activities by viewers. There is, however, some evidence that exposure to pornography has a striking impact on how severely individuals view sexually violent crimes: Members of one studied group were inclined toward much lighter sentences for rape.

Ironically, the very thing that militates against imitative enactment--namely, the isolation of the Internet viewer and his sense of the unreality of the images he views--causes all sorts of other problems. The isolation of sexual acts from all human complications places a premium on intensely powerful visual stimulation. It is, to use Berry's language, about the fulfillment of the fantasies of isolated sexual consumers. Paul attributes some of the fascination with formerly marginal fetishes to the American spirit of "more, bigger, better." But she comes closer to the reason for the increase in her assertion that porn needs an "edge." Internet porn is, not surprisingly, subject to the laws of diminishing returns. A number of men testify to the need for greater stimulation, moving from sexual acts of a variety of sorts to an interest in sex with children, other men, or even animals. "To my surprise, I was curious," confesses one man.

Paul's book is repetitive, both in its empirical narratives and in its conclusions--yet there is a bracing freshness to her approach, the approach of someone who once assumed pornography was simply an innocuous and occasional entertainment for a minority of adults, but whose seasoned knowledge of the reality of the industry registers genuine horror. It may help her case that she brings no religious doctrines to bear upon the issue; indeed, she thinks that the attacks from religious groups on the porn industry have made it all too easy for the industry to label its opponents fanatical puritans. She thinks the Religious Right's campaign against sex education is counterproductive; sexual education is precisely what is needed to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy conceptions of sexuality, she says.

Part of the rhetorical force of the porn industry is the way it has insinuated itself into the ideals of progressivism and the defense of civil liberties. To speak against it is to be "pornophobic" or to engage in sexual correctness. Of course, the way the pro-porn industry makes its case by foreclosing the very possibility of argument is itself an egregious example of political correctness. She rightly mocks the notion that these folks are motivated by the defense of free political discourse and stresses repeatedly that porn is an industry with big bucks on the line. The ACLU argues that requiring a credit card for access to porn sites to try to deter children from viewing them violates the Bill of Rights and constitutes an undue burden on citizens. Although her emphasis is less on criminalization than on condemnation and public outrage, the author does suggest that pornography could be governed by the rules appropriate to commerce rather than to communication--much in the way guns and pharmaceuticals are regulated.

Reforming a pornified culture, Paul rightly observes, will require multiple strategies. One strategy she does not mention would take aim at contemporary liberalism's values deficit with the American public. What does it say about the shrinking ambitions and declining seriousness of contemporary liberalism that Larry Flynt is lionized as a civil-rights leader? Paul's remarks about sex education might be turned to good effect as well, although she seems ignorant of how clinically abstract such an education is apt to be in today's public-school curriculum. Here we might return to Berry, and his observations concerning "the best representations" of sexual love as "surrounded and imbued with the light of imagination, so that they make one aware, with profound sympathy, of the two lives, not just the two bodies, that are involved." That's precisely the sort of education--found in great literature, art, and music--needed to combat a "pornified culture" and educate the passions and imagination of today's youth.

Mr. Hibbs, the author of Shows About Nothing, is a contributor to National Review Online.