A very insightful novel, with many complex points of view. This was a really eye opening book. I thought I would know most of the information about objectification of women/femmes but I learned a lot while reading.

This is an excellent analysis of the damage being done to *everyone* who is being raised in a pornographic culture. It's less statistical and academic and focuses more on the perspectives of a wide variety of people (different ages, races, and both sexes) who have both grown up in and watched this pornification happen.

In a world where women's sexual subjugation has been sold back to us as ~true empowerment,~ work like this is really important. While there aren't a ton of solutions offered (that's not the point of the book), it's good to show everyone that we're being gaslighted en masse about what's ~really good for us~ and what women are worth.

The only complaint I have is about the last chapter, which dives into liberal feminist garbage and actually calls women "TERFs" which is frustrating, not only because it's a slur, but because the author didn't bother to actually talk about that particular issue while maligning so-called "TERFs" as ~bad radical feminists~ (hint: the only way to be a feminist is to recognise biological sex).

Very well worth the read overall.

I received a copy of this book for free from NetGalley and NYU Press in exchange for an honest, voluntary review.

I enjoyed reading some of the interviews but would agree with other reviewers who thought this book was somewhat oversimplified and lacking in scope which limited its usefulness both for a general readership and a more specialized audience for books about sexuality.

I read this book in preparation for talking about pornography and digital sexual activity with a group of parents and teens. This book was filled with a lot of eye opening information, and beyond that, some compelling reasons behind the stats, addictions and "raunch culture" we live in. At times the book was hard to read but that was simply because of the nature of the topic. I do wish that some more practical responses had been offered in the book, especially for those of us raising kids and students in this culture - but perhaps that was not the purpose of the book. Overall, well done!

Did Not Finish at 27%
This book doesn't even deserve 1-star.

The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture Is Ruining Our Society by Bernadette C. Barton is a missed opportunity about the oversexualization that is plaguing the media. When I went into this book, I was expecting one thing, but the content of this book was problematic and handled an important topic rather poorly. The writer had oversimplified matters and based most of her content around statements and interviews of a certain niche of people. Where I ended up finally putting the book down, there had been mostly interviews of white people of a certain age demographic (Millennial and Gen-Z) as well as people who were straight and/or cis. This was an uncomfortable aspect because it excluded so many individuals who are affected by the oversexualization of society.
I felt like the writer had poorly researched some of the things she'd mentioned. In one statement she'd stated: Perhaps you've seen kindergartners twerking, or puzzled over the sexual violence portrayed in shows like American Horror Story. This is the "pornographication" of the culture once reserved for the sex industry filter into mainstream. For example, consider the following products, activities, and body modifications now commonly marketed: twerking, fake nails, breast implants, push-up bras, long dyed hair, smoky eye makeup, plump lips, Brazilian waxes, platform stiletto shoes (or "stripper shoes"), pole dancing classes for exercise, thongs, and hairless bodies.
Okay, I'm only going to mention a few things about this; twerking is thought to have originated in West Africa, pole dancing is thought to have originated in India, dyed hair has been around for a long time with signs of Ancient Egyptians having used henna in their hair, false nails has origins dating back a long time as well, used as symbols of status, thong underwear as we know it was a 70s design, but other evidence of thong-like undergarments can be dated back to BC as a traditional Japanese undergarment favored by sumo wrestlers and divers - you see a pattern here?
I felt like no research was done. The writer made comments that came off racially insensitive to me. There was a distinct anti-sex work feel to the narrative. There was a cis and heterosexual normative to the narrative. There were some comments that felt like they were bi/pan/ace erasure.
The writer came of as anti-porn and also anti-sexy in a sense. The way the writer phased things made it feel like she felt like anything a person does (even if it's for themselves) was inherently playing into the patriarchy, whether it was consciously or subconsciously. The writer generalized women and what they like in the bedroom and considered certain acts as body punishing when there are people who enjoy certain acts.
When I did a search of the book, no where is the term asexual mentioned, meaning an entire demographic was not given a voice on this matter. And the writer stated that she hated the word TERF because it undermines the message of radical feminism. The moment you start talking like that is the moment you come off as a TERF.
While there is a lot I can say about this book and the content I'd read up to 27%, I'm ending it here because this book was just a major miss.
I wish I could have given it a full read, but the undertones of the narrative was just too problematic, oversimplified and generalized for me to continue.

Overall this book did such a great job exploring the sexual exploitation of femme presenting people in our society and raising important questions concerning how femme presenting people choose to express themselves. Certainly an important and necessary read.

DNF'd at 40%. While I do think this book brings some relevant and interesting perspectives to the discussion about raunch culture and its influence across all our lives, I found it oversimplifies certain aspects. It's also written in a somewhat academic language that grows tedious after a while. I would love a "poppier" version of this book though.

My thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
The gist of Bernadette Barton's position is that we are all a product of social brainwashing. These days, sex sells. just about every commodity - even burgers!

In these sexually enlightened times, are we truly choosing to pursue, express or flaunt our sexuality as freely as social media would like us to believe, or are we mainly falling victim to a degenerate marketing scheme? Bernadette Barton makes a powerful case for the latter in this book.

I truly believe we humans have messed ourselves up. We have slaves to fads and fashion. We are addicted to labels and brands. No matter what the cost, we have to have the latest clothes, cars, phones, monster homes.... Everyone literally wants to be a millionaire and be the star of their own on-line reality show. When someone tries to discuss the moral or psychological implications of raunch culture, they are accused of being oppressively religious or judgemental.

Ultimately, to thine own self be true: make sure that the choices you are making are not being dictated by the media or your peer group. Once again, we are exhorted to think before embracing widespread "norms." I'm rating this well-written and well-presented book a 4 out of 5.

I've watched this happen to the country since the 1960's. I was only a child back then, and had nothing really to relate it to. But as the 70's came and went, I did have a background to the pornography and what it was doing to society. It has been interesting watching it grow with every decade. Not sure exactly how it all started, but I really miss some human decency these days. This book was very readable by the average person, it's not written for an academic audience, so I didn't really feel it needed as many footnotes (or endnotes!). I did worry about the culture shift back in the mid-80's of allowing young girls (pre and grade school) to wear makeup and dress like name scantily clad teen idols of choice here. Sexualization of children of children was really wrong, and I wondered about the parents who allowed it! Belly dancing was risque in the 60's and 70's, now it's a norm. Pole dancing is now the norm, too. Language had become more obscene in public. Clothing more casual and baring. Internet is a vast land of porn and no one seems to be thinking twice about posting porn of themselves. I have no idea how basic human self respect seems to have vanished in so many people. Now sure where it ends. But books is spot on in many instances. Needed to be written. Hope lots of people step up to right the wrong. Kudos Bernadette Barton! Well written.

I would like to thank NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book for review purposes.
There are a lot of very solid points made within this book, and it is certainly an interesting dive into raunch culture for those not previously familiar with it, however, oftentimes things get bogged down with anecdotal evidence, and concepts are often structured poorly. There are a lot of interesting topics covered within the book, but so much of it seems to come from a very small group of interviews. And while a lot of her points are well made, there are a lot of sections that seem to imply that most of the actions women make are based on society telling them to do so, or trying to appeal more to men. Such as the section on Instagram that implied that women complementing each other's pictures or bodies were done in order to impress men. Additionally, the section on the male gaze felt like it could have been explained better. While I was already familiar with the term, she repeatedly mentioned how when teaching, this was the topic that she was able to convey the easiest, however, it seemed as though that got lost a bit within the change of format from in-person lecture to book.

Overall, it's an interesting book, and it's worth a read, but there are definitely some things that should be taken with a grain of salt.

DNF at 16%

I'm so frustrated by this book. It's talking about something really important, but it does so in a way that oversimplifies everything and it also has an uncomfortable anti-sex work undertone. There's also this tacit assumption throughout what I've read so far that any decision a woman makes regarding, say, looking "sexy" (whatever is meant by that, as everyone is going to interpret it differently) is because society and men tell her to, whether consciously (and reluctantly) or unconsciously, but as I said before I think this is an oversimplification.

Again, this book is talking about something very important, I just don't think it's doing so very well.

“The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruing Our Society” (2021) is a highly interesting, informative, and fully illustrated book of the meaning of Raunch Culture, the widespread influence and how deeply ingrained Raunch Culture is in American society, and why it matters. This is the third book written by Dr. Bernadette Barton Ph.D., she is the Professor of Sociology and Director of Gender Studies at Morehead State University, KY.

The book is a lively narrative and features class discussions throughout the book based on interviews of students, mostly Millennial and Generation Z. Professor Barton is a popular lecturer that rarely hesitates to engage in controversial topics. It is notable that the book was written during the Trump administration, there were numerous bikini clad, thong wearing Trump supporters/MAGA with the sole purpose of “looking hot”. The “Bro Culture” encouraged women not only to “look hot” and “proudly display their bodies” to please men, but also to act like and fit in with men, and judge other women sometimes in a negative and harsh manner.
Female students noted how porn had infiltrated their intimate relationships. Some women dismissed “porn sex” as unavoidable with a shrug; others ended relationships when their boyfriends acted out porn scenes that included slapping, spitting and choking. In his book: “Killer Triggers” Joe Kenda (2021) warned that choking must never be done and can lead to death. According to media analyst Gail Dines the choices for women in the porn nation are to be sexually appealing or invisible and “ashamed” of their bodies.
Centered around patriarchy and “Toxic Masculinity” many young men felt entitled to act out in harmful and demeaning ways. The demoralizing examples of Donald Trump were far from honorable presidential behavior: hush payments to a porn actress, his wife Melania Trump appearing in the *“G.Q. Naked Supermodel Special” (G.Q. January 2000). Trump has also been accused of sexual misconduct and harassment by 24 women. He has appeared on the show of “Shock Jock Howard Stern” 39 times between 1993-2015.

Feminism can serve as a powerful force against Raunch Culture, according to Barton. With the Covid-19 pandemic people are examining the effects of inequality and injustice like never before. Feminist legislation— in all areas of climate change, employment, politics, health science, economic justice, human rights and more offer a positive change and renewed hope for all people across the globe. (3.5*GOOD) ** With thanks to New York University Press via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review.

Well...this was an interesting take on the situation and factors evolving from raunch porn and while I found myself agreeing with certain statements and ideas, I was turned off by a few points and can only view this as an interesting read rather than one that's revolutionary, mind-changing, or inspiring.

There's a distinct target audience here and I don't think it's as all-encompassing as it needs to be. First, where are the implications and effects of this type of porn on the Trans community? One interview? That's it? Not enough and to find that this book is very cis focused was disappointing. How about people in their 30's? That generation is one that wasn't born into the raunch porn culture, but rather one that grew up alongside it as it was evolving. And how about older generations that saw its inception and could offer some kind of comparison as the industry changed? There were talks about those changes, but the sample size of the population interviewed and studied was far too narrow to give a truly comprehensive understanding.

So while these aren't my only complaints they were glaring enough to frustrate me. I'm not saying the book is bad, the message bad, or the study bad, it's just not what I was hoping for and didn't find myself yearning to discuss it with others beyond posting this review.

This book was an interesting perspective to think about.. As a sexualities scholar and intersectional feminist, I find some of the generalizations within to be troubling. It seems to delegitamize sex work and sex-positivity. It does raise very important questions about pornography and the immersion of sex into daily life. I appreciated the discussion of sexism and, indeed, much of pornography is sexist. However, there was not much, if any, attention paid to feminist sex-positive perspectives on pornography or sex work.

Given this, I would be hard pressed to assign this work to my students.

What started as a feminist movement to empower females to have the same sexual options as males has turned into The Pornification of America.

Raunch culture is everywhere! It’s in advertising, movies, social media, and even music. This book attempts to explain how we got here and why this environment is so toxic to women.

The new sexual freedom of women was supposed to empower them to control their own lives. But now instead of being the perfect 1950s housewife, all women must be the porn bot of every man’s fantasies. Ever since the 2000s, there are impossibly high standards for female beauty (and sexiness) set by the surgically enhanced Kardashians and their Insta copycats. Who has the time and money to reach that level? And why does everyone want to look like twins? How boring is that?

The book looks ever deeper into raunch culture from Insta models performing free sex work to how the prevalence of violent porn is changing men’s sexual expectations to toxic masculinity like Trump’s “locker room talk” becoming pervasive. I agree with the author that once you hear about the “male gaze” you won’t be able to stop seeing it literally everywhere. The book occasionally may go a few steps too far. However, overall The Pornification of America is an eye-opening read. 4 stars!

Thanks to NYU Press and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

One senses Bernadette Barton doesn't have a lot in common with Rick Santorum, but I couldn't help but wondering what the foremost social conservative politician of the 2000s would think of his book. "The Pornification of America" explores how "raunch culture" has come to dominate American society in a way that Santorum would have similarly decried two decades prior, and it would have been interesting to hear Barton engage with critics of explicit pornography, overtly sexual commercials, and rampant sexual misconduct on college campuses from the right. As it is, this book is a blend of in person interviews and cultural observations that serves as a great primer for anyone who doesn't believe the American approach to a consent-based criterion of morality is inherently flawed. Her suggestions of what to do about it don't seem to match the scale of the problem she describes; but they are worth exploring nonetheless.

In my Grade 11 and 12 English class for adult learners, I always try to do at least a week on media literacy. We talk about bias and stereotypes, particularly as they relate to race, gender, and disability. One of my favourite activities regarding gender stereotypes involves examining ads and asking students to identify stereotypes present in those ads. It always provokes enlightening and interesting conversations from them. The hypersexualization of women as sex objects, and the positioning of men as sex subjects, is indisputable no matter where you turn. So I was definitely interested in reading The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture Is Ruining Our Society (what a clickbait title) and appreciate the review copy from NetGalley/New York University Press.

I did go into this book with some reservations. The last time I read about raunch culture, I didn’t much enjoy the way the subject was evaluated and the conclusions drawn. Indeed, this book is in some ways a spiritual successor to that book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, by Ariel Levy—Barton mentions the book a couple of times in the introduction. Whereas that book was a journalist’s dive into raunch culture as a phenomenon, Barton’s focus as a gender studies professor is more sociological and attempts to bring more data to the party. In that sense, I like this book much better. Levy’s approach to the topic felt heavy-handed, whereas Barton approaches the topic with much more nuance. And of course, this book is as up to date as it can be, including some of the emboldening effects that the Trump presidency has had on raunch culture.

So I started to feel more comfortable and optimistic with this book’s approach to the subject. Let me be clear: raunch culture is absolutely a problem. I just find some analyses of the issue to be far too fraught with generalizations. For example, a lot of blame for raunch culture is (rightly) laid at the feet of porn (hence the title of this book). And I always get nervous when feminists start discussing porn in an entirely negative light, because then we’re veering into anti–sex work territory in general. So to my relief, Barton’s analysis is far more nuanced. She establishes herself as sex-positive out of the gate (and offers a great explanation for how raunch culture has co-opted the language of sex positivity without actually being sex positive, particularly for women). Her condemnation of the negative consequences of easier access to increasingly violent, absurd Internet porn is balanced with the acknowledgment that porn is not going way, and that some people use porn in healthy ways as part of their sex life. Barton says, “What we need in place of internet pornography, or at least alongside it, are more conversations about women’s sexual pleasure.” Yes, so much this!! Blanket condemnation and calls to ban porn disguise the issue. Unlike Levy, Barton acknowledges that “feminist porn” exists, but she makes the excellent point that you will never see it unless you seek it out—it is the structure of the porn industry, and the discoverability of it online, that is the problem. If porn were more centred on women’s pleasure, and if it weren’t relied upon for sex education because schools are too moralistic to talk about that stuff, then it would not be as large a contributing factor to raunch culture.

In a similar vein, Barton approaches numerous topics with sensitivity and an eye for teasing out the actual relationship between the topic and raunch culture. She does this through quoting from numerous interviews, citing studies, and supplying personal anecdotes from her teaching experience. As a result, the book builds up this overall picture of the ubiquity of raunch culture within American society. This isn’t just a porn problem or an advertising problem or a political problem: it’s everywhere.

In the final chapter, Barton tries to offer, if not solutions, than a framework that could help us dismantle raunch culture. I appreciate that she admits to the limitations of her work here. Confronting raunch culture is a difficult task and one that must be furiously intersectional and anti-capitalist to succeed (earlier in the book, Barton observes that raunch culture is closely tied to white people in particular, and it is likely an outgrowth of white supremacy’s hegemonic role in our society). This book is quite depressing at times with the picture Barton offers us, but it is also forthright and honest.

A couple of critiques before I go!

First, a correction: Barton says that Twitter employees created Tay, an AI bot released on Twitter that was supposed to learn from its interactions with Twitter users. In fact, Microsoft created (and subsequently … decommissioned) this ill-fated experiment. This error has no substantive impact on Barton’s analysis.

Second, Barton’s cozying up to radical feminism made me uncomfortable at points. It was one thing to say, “You know, the anti-pornography feminists had a point,” earlier on in the book—I understand and can appreciate that perspective. Much later, though, Barton proudly recounts a time she challenged a friend for using the term TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) because she views it as besmirching radical feminism. Which … yeah. I get it, and I admit the term TERF isn’t great—not because it reflects poorly on radical feminism, but rather because if your feminism is trans-exclusionary, it ain’t feminism. This just seemed like a very unnecessary digression that caused me, as a trans person, to bridle. I am going to continue to “trash TERFs” all I like, thank you very much, because they literally do not want me to exist.

On a similar note, this book is quite cisnormative. Barton does interview a non-binary person. However, acknowledgment of how raunch culture affects trans people as a category is absent from this book. We are mentioned only a small handful of times, and usually in passing, such as this sentence from the conclusion: “Despite a loud and at times violent backlash, trans and non-binary people are changing the culture….” From this I can conclude, thankfully, that Barton is not herself a TERF and is quite supportive of trans people and willing to include us in this discussion. Rather, this feels more like an oversight—either unintentionally as a result of cis privilege, or intentionally out of the idea that, as a cis person herself, she shouldn’t be the one to speak on these issues. If it’s the latter (and I want to assume the best intentions), I wish at least some kind of disclaimer had been made to this effect—but more importantly, cis people need to stop “it’s not my place” as an excuse to erase and ignore us. Yes, it is true that cis researchers should not make trans issues their primary area of focus. But Barton could easily have interviewed more trans people, just to help round out her sample, for instance. Raunch culture affects me so much as a trans woman, because of its relationship to ideals of femininity and sexual expression, but my experiences are nowhere to be found here.

Anyway, I needed to bring that up, but I also don’t want you to think this is a deal-breaker for me. On the whole, The Pornification of America turned out better than I expected. I appreciate that there is a more academic look at raunch culture, updated for this decade, that we can refer to as we unpack and attempt to dismantle this aspect of our patriarchal, white supremacist society. Barton does good work here, even if I have some critiques of it. In particular, I recommend anyone who hasn’t read a lot about this issue, but wants to learn more, to dive into this. Its overview is thorough, thoughtful, and comprehensive.

Definitely an interesting look into what society expects of women. I think some of what Bernadette Barton says is a little too extreme and maybe a reach but I understood the point she was trying to make.

As a young woman who grew up in exactly this culture, this book was deeply uncomfortable to read, simply because every single word is true. Many of my students have told me similar stories that confirm what Barton writes.

Fabulously written. Such an interesting topic. Enjoyed every page. Highly recommend. Thank you for the opportunity to read this.