Porn: An Oral History

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Porn engulfs us wordlessly. Like any art form it has the potential for joy, but mostly it consumes us, not we it, and the structure of this book, consciously or not, is a metaphor for this dynamic. Porn is a function of the subconscious, and there is simply too much of it for Barton to tidy away into a book. As a result, Porn: An Oral History collapses under the weight of its material. Polly Barton’s new work from the garlanded literary publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions is entitled Porn: An Oral History. This may come as a surprise to those familiar with her prize-winning debut, Fifty Sounds, a memoir of her study of the Japanese language and career as a literary translator. Barton is well aware that she may not seem the most qualified person to write a book about porn, let alone one with a title so boldly all-encompassing. In her introduction, she describes her initial, vague plans for a book of essays on the subject; then her thoughts of travelling to the San Fernando Valley to write a “journey of discovery”; then, finally, her decision to write an oral history focusing on “laypeople, and their experiences with and thoughts about porn”. Indeed, an oral history drawing not on a representative cross-section of porn users – Barton did not feel equipped for a “full-blown research project” – but, instead, a handful of friends. Lisa-Jean Marie: There are women who enjoy semen. But I really feel that if [porn turns the money shot into an expected part of all sex], it is deeply troubling. I don't think you can turn on your critical brain and not be affected on a subconscious level by [watching porn]. Everything I see affects my sense of eroticism. Part of why I stopped researching this is that I think it had a toxifying effect on me. That's not to say I am anti-porn. But you have to be a careful consumer. I was molested by my father, who is now deceased. That experience definitely messed up my mind. From that I went into the falling path of being a porn star. You start with being with a pimp to being a stripper. And after the dancing I went into the porn business. At first it was only for money, but now I feel like this is where I belong, because I am controlling my own destiny. I love being on camera… I’m a total attention whore. It’s a screwed-up situation how I got here, but I’m now very happy where I am. Porn is a fascinating, timely and humane testament to the value of uninhibited conversation between grown-ups. Its candour and humanity is addictive and involving – I couldn't help but join in with the pillow talk! Reader, be prepared for your own store of buried secrets, stymied curiosities, submerged fantasies and shadowy memories to shamelessly awaken.’

But there is good porn too. People film themselves and sell it because it excites them. “Since it’s now easier to make pornography, and dirt cheap,” an interviewee says, “all of a sudden, it’s become commercially viable to make porn around fantasies and kinks and sexualities that weren’t served before. Kids these days, they don’t know how good they have it!” Ethical porn is expensive: an Erika Lust film, for example – stylish, consensual – might cost 30 euros, presumably because her performers are properly paid. In the conclusion you interrogate the idea that perhaps you should have come out with a point of view. Without spoiling the beautiful world of the book where you don’t come down on one side or the other, have you reached any conclusions about porn? A Manichean struggle emerges from these interviews: between good porn and bad porn. (Only a fool will argue for no porn. We have porn from the Palaeolithic Age. Porn will find a way.) The evidence for the triumph of the second is overwhelming: the BDSM circulating on TikTok; the trend for choking and spitting; the monstrous volume. It is an expression of masculine dominance, in which women have no agency, and seek none.

Will Ryder, a producer who's been in the industry (behind major parody films) since the 1980s: I often got bored with the standard pop shot to the face. But people have been conditioned that the pop shot belongs on the face. So that is where the boatload of semen goes. Your support changes lives. Find out how you can help us help more people by signing up for a subscription The book is 19 conversations that the author has with friends or friends of friends about porn. I think this was actually the best way to do it, I think that Barton really accomplished what she set out to do in structuring it this way. Deep Throat entrenched money shots in the industry, but it didn't establish where they ought to be shot. Experimentation with the location of the money shot continued into the 1980s. 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.

Shine-Louise Houston: The mainstream is always going to be the mainstream. They've been branching out a little bit. But it's harder for them to change. It's the tiny companies that can do radical things. Now, where technology has radicalized filmmaking, you have a multitude of new voices telling stories. There're a lot of young filmmakers who are pushing the boundaries of what porn is and what sex is, and I think that's amazing. My hope is that there will be a young underground filmmaker takeover. It's kind of happening now. My rating is going up to 5 stars because I’m still thinking about it & asking my friends (and mum, and mum’s friends, and mum’s mum) lots of inappropriately timed questions about their porn consumption. What does one learn from this book? That Barton’s friends – in the main highly educated, well-travelled queer women in their thirties – have considered that porn may be related to the denigration of women, may change relations among the sexes, and may impact one’s relationship with one’s own sexual appetites, but are not sure what to do with any of these questions.

Porn: An Oral History

In the introduction to her latest book for Fitzcarraldo Editions, the translator and author Polly Barton questions why we are all so uptight about porn. It is something that everyone on the planet consumes and yet nobody ever wants to discuss. So, Barton decides to reach out to her friends and mutuals and conduct 19 anonymous conversations about porn. This book, Porn: An Oral History, is the transcripts of these conversations. A man in his 80s tells her: “One of the lovely things about sex is that you grow into these things. You find someone and you take a journey, and if that journey is leaping on to the fastest train possible, you wonder what else is left.” 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.

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’. Rather than provide something with a claim to objectivity,” she writes, “a representation of the full range of thoughts and opinions or, heaven forbid, which attempted to locate some kind of ‘standard’ or majority position, I wanted with this book to set my sights on what it looked like to talk about these things.” I adored the interview structure and took something unique from each conversation, whether that be a new idea, new perspective, or a reinforcement of my beliefs and complete disagreement with the interviewee. Speaking of new perspectives, the 80 year old man was my absolute favourite interviewee. I agree that the best way to start a conversation on such a deeply private topic is to literally just have a conversation with people you know (easier said than done). Porn is many things – a prompt for dreams, the outsourcing of fantasies, a heuristic for the construction of desire – but it is often omitted from our “spoken life”, to use Polly Barton’s wonderful phrase. In Porn, she manages to get people to talk about this subject both omnipresent and omnipresently swept under the rug, peeling off her informers’ ideological armour to get at what they really like and why, and invites us to ask, without forcing any answers, what it means for an entire society to possess an entire guilty conscience surrounding a genre now constitutive of our understanding of what sex is.’ I think the title of 'An Oral HIstory' (however punning) is misleading and set up expectations for me that the book doesn't fulfil. This isn't a 'history' at all and doesn't have any intellectual or scholarly underpinning, and doesn't explore the topic of porn historically.One thing that I think makes talking about porn so fraught or thorny is that often our fantasy doesn’t line up with our desire. Like I might fantasise about being a hero in a bank robbery, but I don’t actually want to experience that in real life at all! Did you find that people expressed that gap? And then I wasn't. The thing is - there are so many great topics mentioned, but are just skimmed through. It's not an essay collection or a non-fiction book that one could expect; it's basically a transcript of 10+ conversations with anonymous people about porn. And sex. And masturbation. And other random topics that come up.

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.None of this is enough. We desperately need a book to go deeper: how do our desires come about? What should we do about them? Is it wrong to feel alienated from one’s sexuality? How can we treat others ethically? When is a “power imbalance” too much? What are the conditions for consent? There are paradoxes in the world of sex, and new norms are being violently hashed out. In the face of this, is there any unifying principle of sexual ethics whatsoever? As it is, it seems that sex is an arena in which no moral or philosophical progress can be made, even by those who bill themselves as its most astute observers.