"What was previously arousing is no longer arousing. It's almost like someone with a heroin addiction needing more heroin. They haven't changed the drug, but they've increased the intensity of it," Tomb said. "Soft porn will become hard porn. Hard porn will become violent porn."

Anti-porn activists have long warned that porn causes men to objectify women. If it is not limited, they say, men will beat, cheat, even rape.

However, in a recent essay for New York magazine, the feminist Naomi Wolf argued that the proliferation of easy-to-access pornography has not made men into "raving beasts," as many had predicted it would.

"On the contrary," she writes. "The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as 'porn-worthy.' Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention."

Wolf writes that when she visits college campuses women tell her they feel like they can't compete. "For how can a real woman . . . possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer's least specification?"

Reid says he hears the same thing from spouses or partners of porn addicts who come in for counseling at the Gathering Place.

What cannot be denied, he said, is the effect pornography has on relationships.

"It creates unreal expectations," he said. "Pornography in and of itself is just a fraudulent message about human sexuality."

Today, Paul Turner is in the maximum security wing of the Utah State Prison, serving a 15-year sentence for attempted murder. His wife has divorced him and has sole custody of their child. Turner declined comment for this story.

On Wednesday, Darrell Kinyon, who has been found mentally competent to stand trial, appeared in court for a pre-trial hearing. He will next appear in court Sept. 22.

Those who know both men wonder what role pornography played in their crimes.

Turner was described by his older brother as "the 'good kid' who wanted desperately to maintain an appearance of strength and success." Kinyon was said to be despondent over the thought of his family learning of his porn addiction.

"I think he was really torn with the way he was acting. It was so aberrant to his core beliefs. I think it ate him up," said Turner's attorney, Tom Means.

Schaler assumes both Turner and Kinyon were suffering from a state psychologists call "cognitive dissonance," defined as a condition of conflict or anxiety resulting from an inconsistency between one's beliefs and one's actions. He said this condition had more to do with their crimes than their pornography habit.

"Obviously there were other factors," said one associate of Turner who asked not to be named. "But I think (pornography) played a large part in what happened."

---

E-mail: jhyde@desnews.com