Porn, An Oral History – book review
What happens when you start conversations about porn?
It would have been smart to publish this book review via a respected online publication, but posting about porn on a blog named Time Alone is funny so me, so here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When was the last time you discussed porn with a friend, partner, or lover? And was that conversation a candid exchange of your sexual enthusiasms, or was it a conversation fraught with anxiety, shame, and judgement?
Porn: An Oral History is Polly Barton’s second nonfiction book. Her first, Fifty Sounds (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021), is an evocative account of falling in love with a language, a person, and a culture; specifically, she is enchanted by the process of adapting herself to Japan. In Fifty Sounds she relates a conversation between her twenty-one-year-old self and her forty-something lover:
‘You don’t say much.’
‘No,’ I agree. ‘I don’t’
There’s a little pause and then he says, ‘Why don’t you talk like they do in porn films?’ There’s a hang-dog expression on his face. ‘Why don’t you say, oh yeah, or oh my god, you’re so good?’
‘Because we’re not in a porn film,’ I say, in as dismissive a tone as I can muster […] It occurs to me that I am having sex with the kind of person I vehemently dislike, who believes out of an unexamined male privilege and a sheer lack of imagination and inability to be present in the moment that life should imitate porn.
The premise of Porn: An Oral History is that conversations about porn aren’t happening – or at least, the ones being had are similarly surface-skimming and mutually disappointing. Which, Barton points out, is strange, given that anyone with an internet connection can access a cornucopia of porn within seconds. But few people publicly refer to watching it. We may swap opinions on the latest blockbusters, or hit TV shows – but if you want to discuss your latest porn discovery with a friend, the conversation may falter.
Or will it? Maybe you’ve had that conversation with a friend or lover before, and found it unremarkable and entertaining. Perhaps you got some pointers for your next search query. Or perhaps you have never watched porn to begin with, and so talking about it simply doesn’t come up. So who is the ‘we’ of Barton’s book?
Barton interviews nineteen individuals sourced from her circle of acquaintance. She asks them about their relationship to porn, and their take on the lack of conversation about it. The nineteen individuals are identified by their age, sexual persuasion, romantic status, and in some cases, location. This project is personal to Barton, and she usefully prefaces the book with her recognition of its limits. She acknowledges her positionality as a white middle class woman who knows ‘very little about porn’, and frames the book as an incomplete exploration of her own ignorance and curiosity.
Given that thirty-something Barton is talking to her acquaintances, it is natural, if frustrating, that thirteen of the interviewees are also in their thirties. Among the remaining six, there is a man in his early twenties, two women in their twenties, a man and a woman in their forties, and a man in his eighties. A range of queerness is represented, as are genders. Class, nationality and race are incidentally disclosed in some interviews and not referred to in others. A few interviewees have experimented with homemade porn. Only one interviewee refers to earning money through sex work.
At times, despite the author’s thoughtful preface explaining the tight focus of the project, it can feel patchy. For example, asking more people in the 18–22 age bracket about their porn habits is probably a queasy experience, but it would also inform debates around online safety and how young people perceive the porn they are exposed to from a young age.
And age does seem to play an interesting role in people’s relationship to porn: the person whose perspective I was most educated by was that of the man in his eighties. His view of porn, as a playful option that he enjoys most when used as a source of connection with a partner, noticeably differs from the views of his millennial co-subjects, who prefer it as a private, functional masturbation aid to be consumed as quickly as possible.
A lot of opinions are repeated across this cohort of interviewees: mainstream porn performers are disempowered if not actively exploited; Dominant/submissive dynamics are inherently patriarchal; ethical porn is unsexy and nigh-on impossible to get off to. A reader who is new to these opinions would be forgiven for thinking they are uncontentious. However, feelings are not universal facts, and even when, for example, one non-kinky interviewee defends the D/s dynamic in the abstract, there’s a lot of ‘talking about people, without them’ going on here.
Many of the interviewees flag their assumptions – but the transcription structure forecloses authorial research. I found myself wishing that Barton had included perspectives from at least one mainstream performer and, say, a subscriber to an ethically-produced kink channel. A more variegated picture would surely emerge.
Image courtesy of Four Chambers, an ethical porn production company. Read an interview with the co-founder, Vex Ashley, over on Vice.
Only one interviewee discusses a specific fetish in Porn, and all I’ll say is that it’s one of the more heartwarming, funny and mind-bending conversations in the whole collection. The interviewee doesn’t expect Barton, or by extension the reader, to ‘get’ their fetish – and by discussing their attraction to it in the abstract, we paradoxically get a little closer to appreciating porn in the round.
The tendency to universalise our point of view as a way of coping with shame – the shame of being gauche, or the shame of being deemed a wrong ‘un – is a theme of Porn. At one point, mid-interview, Barton herself says ‘Everyone knows that really everyone is consuming it’, then catches herself – ‘or do we? I don’t know.’ One interviewee declares that ‘[People will] have twenty tabs loaded up, each one focused on a different thing that they only want to consume for about three seconds before moving on to the next tab.’ Then he notes that ‘I’m probably speaking from personal experience. I open loads of tabs.’
One of Barton’s questions concerns whether the silence around porn provides cover to misogynists in our midst. Is violent porn an instruction manual for violent sex? If one looks at the rise in nonconsensual choking as a porn-popularised sex act, and then the use of the (now ended) legal defence of ‘rough sex’ for men who strangle their partners to death, it’s important to consider such questions.
An interviewee sums up the anxiety on this topic as he remembers his own teenaged discovery of porn: ‘There aren’t many things that teenage boys consume on such a regular basis during that critical period of identity formation. It’s like learning a language. That’s what I was doing: I was learning a language of sex.’
I thought of my teenage self, fearful of porn and sex, partly a result of being shown deliberately extreme porn (woman, horse) on just one occasion. That identity did not remain fixed, and since my perspective has evolved with age, I’ve tended to have faith in the plasticity of our sexual selves. After reading this book, I have revised this view a little. Judging by most of these interviews, the desires and anxieties formed in adolescence are hard to update, and a new survey of UK children indicates that a fifth of under-18s now watch porn frequently, and have traumatic experiences to show for it. Porn implies that when adults are able to have more confident chats about porn, we may become more understanding about what each other gets up to, and — perhaps paradoxically — be better able to lead conversations about sex, consent and boundaries with those who are coming of age.
A quirk of Porn: An Oral History is that it gave me sympathy with the interviewees who confessed to seeking out novelty in what they watched. I found myself feeling disconnected from the repetitive chicken-or-egg sexism argument, in part because I have had it many times, often with myself, and have concluded that malevolent (rather than violent, per se) porn is a symptom that also feeds the underlying sickness. As one of the women interviewed puts it, ‘talking about porn is not talking about the thing that’s the problem, which is patriarchy and misogyny’.
Mostly, I was absorbed by the outliers, like the straight man who, from the age of fifteen to the age of thirty-seven, simply did not watch porn: ‘I just found it so banal and objectifying and I couldn't inhabit any of those positions – I didn’t want to be the headless horseman.’ Such perspectives felt relatively novel. The interviewees who were aware of their outlier status also seemed more empathetic than those who opted for the ‘of course I masturbate to porn like anyone else’ line. Such rote defences makes a person sound insincere. And Barton identifies this insincerity in more social contexts:
Here we are in an age where it is perfectly conceivable that someone not dissimilar from me might, over a glass of wine at a dinner party, speak with friends about the importance of the erotic as opposed to the pornographic, and then, later on that same evening, watch a video entitled ‘Parents Keep Leaving Me Alone With My Cum-Hungry Stepsister’ or ‘Small tits hungarian BABE has romantic sex of a lifetime’.
I was annoyed by this paragraph – the brash porn titles deliberately pitched against the twirly middle class lexicon (‘perfectly conceivable that someone not dissimilar to me’) that precedes it. Cum-hungry stepsisters may be the most popular girls on PornHub, but there is more to find out there than that. And while the objectifying keywords ‘small tits’ and ‘hungarian’ may not align with the best public self of the person who clicks on the second example, there’s not a huge amount to actually object to in the all-caps babe having the ‘romantic sex of a lifetime’. Good for her!
However. As a provocation, I respect this paragraph, and the book as a whole. One of Barton’s motivations was to ‘preserve a record of what it was like to speak for the first time about something awkward.’ This book lays bare the this process, which involves testing out previously unvoiced and likely embarrassing assumptions, plus lots of self-conscious backtracking.
Perhaps because of its limitations, Barton’s book is a genuine conversation-starter. Her willingness to prompt discussion of this shame-adjacent topic is valuable. For her, ‘the agenda I’m pushing is […] the inherent value of conversations where one is allowed to try on ideas, say things that one may later regret, and contradict oneself.’ It’s not easy to do that. Hopefully, the book will initiate discourse that amplifies the more educated and/or professional perspectives that feel underrepresented here.
To use the parlance of #nofap redditors, Porn: An Oral History re-sensitized me to what talking about porn can open up, and close down. While reading the book, I read more media coverage about porn regulation, and an exposé of PornHub’s morally repulsive approach to criminal porn. I asked a friend why the stepsister/stepmother genre was so standard (his answer made a lot of sense: ‘they can make it cheaply in ordinary houses, and the scenario is a bit taboo without being too crazy or needing much backstory’). I even asked a guy I was dating about his porn preferences. His answer was disappointing to me, and he was uncurious about what I liked. This proved to be a helpful piece of the ‘should I keep dating him?’ puzzle (conclusion: no). As in life, so in Porn — even when I didn’t like the answers given, I appreciated the honesty.
Porn: An Oral History by Polly Barton is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions on 16 March 2023. Order a copy from the Fitzcarraldo website.