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 but 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.”