Porn: An Oral History

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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.’

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.’

Porn: An Oral History

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. He believes “porn should be annulled from this world” because it “becomes not so much an experience of life as an a-experience, a chasm, a place in which life stops happening”. He tells Barton, almost fiercely: “You have to get some men really talking honestly about sex and that’s hard. Because they won’t even talk honestly about it to themselves.” Barton’s triumph is that she has done this, and it is the most luminous thing in the book. 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. 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.

Barton spoke to 19 participants for this project, all anonymised and thus willing to be candid about their sexual history, attitudes to porn, and the twain between those things. Having her name on the cover appears no deterrent to the author in that regard, though, and so matters are invariably conversational and more absorbing for it. Some interviewees are clearly people Barton, who lives in Bristol, knows personally; quite a few are lucid and erudite enough that they could have made a decent fist of writing the book themselves, and in a couple of cases give the impression they’d like to.

John Stagliano: When you do a cumshot, you should do it on the most beautiful part of a woman's body. If a girl has a pretty face, cumming on that emphasizes it. The face is the most communicative thing we have. It's the most interesting thing to look at in general on a woman's body—unless she does not have a pretty face. This is somewhere between Nancy Friday's 'My Secret Garden' but without the reach of people who contributed to that and Lisa Taddeo's 'Three Women' revealing the secrets of other people's sex lives. Sadly, though, this feels quite repetitive and doesn't say anything that we don't already know. 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.

The author’s self awareness of, and reflection on, her contradictory beliefs, ambiguity, and counterintuitive feelings was refreshing and fun to watch unfold across the interviews. 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? 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’. I found my time with Porn: An Oral History unexpectedly moving. Barton’s candid, generous style as an interlocutor allows her subjects to move fluidly between their sometimes contradictory instincts and intellectual approaches in a way which feels revelatory and totally honest and human. A pleasure to read, and a vital new work for anyone interested in sex and its representation.’LEXINGTON STEELE, 42: Veteran porn performer and director and owner of the mainstream adult fi lm company Mercenary Pictures