thank you, Laura Kipnis

Laura Kipnis kicks off an exchange at Slate with Wendy Shalit and Meghan O'Rourke about Pornified and Female Chauvinist Pigs, today asking "Is Porn Really Transforming Our Sex Lives?" and really calling Pamela Paul to task for the gross inaccuracies in her book Pornified. I also asked Jill Soloway about both these books and will post what didn't make it in to The Black Table here tomorrow. (thanks to Dan McCoy for the link)

From Kipnis:

Wendy, I think that to understand anything about the popularity of porn, we have look beyond porn. For instance, let's notice that the mainstreaming of porn occupies the same cultural moment as the rise of abstinence-only education (with which it technically complies). I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the two aren't exactly unrelated: They're both products of a culture that's deeply conflicted and hypocritical about sex...

We're a culture that hates and fears sex, but can't get enough of it.