‘Porn: An Oral History’ Tackles a Thorny Issue

Writer and translator Polly Barton has misgivings about pornography. It is a source of ‘nebulous [...] worry and discomfort’ and has, at times, generated an ‘overpowering sense of an unbridgeable gap’ between her and her male sexual partners. Her new book, Porn: An Oral History, comprises a series of candid interviews with 19 anonymized friends on this most thorny of topics. Their conversations occasionally alight on technical points: preferred camera angles; the ideal duration of a porn clip; one man tells us he likes to line up a number of videos across multiple tabs before commencing a wank. For the most part, however, they revolve around questions of interpersonal dynamics – shame, embarrassment, jealousy – and, of course, ethics.

Gender politics loom large. On the one hand, there’s a broad consensus that the hardline position advanced by writer and activist Andrea Dworkin in the 1980s – that pornography equals violence – is too prescriptive. One woman interviewee says adopting such a stance would involve ‘some element of self-annihilation [...] because I do think it’s part of my sexuality’. At the same time, there’s a feeling that ultra-libertarian sex-positivity carries an unacceptable moral cost, effectively preventing people from calling out exploitation and harm. That tension is colourfully summarized by one interviewee, a queer woman in her 40s, who says she feels answerable to ‘the 1990s Women’s Studies dyke still in there somewhere’. 

The aesthetic cheapness of most heteronormative porn is a recurring concern. As one woman explains: ‘I need a scenario that feels lived-in and plausible [so that] the person feels like a person by the time the sex happens.’ Several express a preference for written porn over visual material. There’s a good deal of chicken-and-egg philosophizing as to whether porn shapes people’s proclivities or merely reflects them. A Japanese woman and a Black man tell similar tales of being pigeonholed by white people: the former for her presumed passivity, the latter for his presumed aggressiveness. These tropes long predate the internet, but their prevalence in online porn probably isn’t helping matters. 

Barton’s friends tie themselves in knots over what constitutes ‘good’ porn. One laments what she sees as an overcorrection: ‘I don’t necessarily want realism in my porn. I want some archetypal thing [not] this friendly, approachable thing.’ One interviewee’s suggestion that porn should be ‘less about cum, more about intimacy’ seems wishful, given its inherently transactional nature. Ditto another’s assertion that ‘people have a responsibility towards their desires’: what would that entail in practice? Some of the most intriguing exchanges explore the pitfalls of learning about your partner’s porn tastes: one woman fears she’ll ‘find out something that fundamentally changes my perception of him’; for another, that anxiety is connected to an anticipatory sense of rejection: ‘I just want to know what you’re wanking to, probably so I can then beat myself up that I’m not that.’

The thing with talking (and writing) about sex is that each person has their own comfort level, and what strikes one reader as a revelatory insight may strike another as utterly banal. The entry point here is relatively tentative, and there’s a strain of infantilism in linguistic ticks such as Barton’s sheepish reference to ‘the dominatey-type sex’. The book’s nuanced exploration of revulsion – the idea of a ‘turn-on brake’ that kicks in when something has crossed the line – tips into run-of-the-mill prudery when one interviewee muses that porn ‘reminds me of how biological and dirty sex is [...] All the juicy stuff is gross.’ 

Talking therapy is predicated on a meandering languor that allows the participant to feel their way at their own pace. This is its great strength, but it can be a weakness on the page: the material is only intermittently engrossing and, perhaps inevitably, a little repetitious. That said, the book’s format is singularly well-suited to its subject matter, precisely because the issue of pornography is so complex, and our feelings about it so riddled with contradictions. In a terrain where polemic seems to lead inexorably to moralism, discursive dialogue is not just an artistic choice but almost an ethical imperative. In Porn: An Oral History, the medium is quite literally the message. 

Polly Barton’s Porn: An Oral History is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions

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