For those who aren't into porn and don't want to be, this book is a helpful education. Paul manages to tell us what's really going on in porn without forcing us to walk hip-deep into the muck. She also makes it unblinkingly clear, both from important, documented studies and from porn watchers' own disclosures, that a steady diet of porn is indeed a slippery slope into worse and worse stuff. She provides the information needed to avoid getting sucked into the "it's just harmless fantasy" and free "speech" defenses while, at the same time, standing firmly against Puritanism and outright censorship as the only alternatives.
Paul also makes it painfully clear that the kind of porn so easily accessible via the Internet today is nothing like the old Playboy centerfolds (which could be characterized as Hugh Hefner's endlessly adolescent fantasies). Today's horrifically hardcore stuff is distorting in the worst possible way even to adults but even more so to pre-teens and young teens just learning about sexuality. Saying that porn is an inevitable guy thing is like saying men truly believe they are helpless in the face of pornifed images, have no say in their fantasies or in what turns them on, that porn is the only way they know how to deal with repression and silence about sex, that what they learned at age 13 is good enough for the rest of their lives, or that they are incapable of distinguishing between the "forbidden" and their own internal standards.
Even remaining totally within the realm of fantasy, it is perfectly legitimate to ask of porn advocates (ourselves or others), why would you even *want* to be turned on--even in fantasy--by the kinds of things porn purveyors produce? In the end, porn says virtually nothing about sexuality or the paid players. It says a whole lot, however, about the purveyors who for whatever reasons--some possibly even tragic--learned to associate and condition their own erotic feelings with degrading acts. And this association appears to be the monument to "speech" they wish to pass on to future generations.
There are, of course, many additional aspects that are and could be discussed, and Paul's main points are that we need to stop putting our heads in the sand about the very real and negative effects this cynical and sometimes life-threatening activity is having on our lives and those of our children, that there are alternatives to the proliferation of this stuff, and that there are things we can do to bring about those alternatives.