I thought the premise for this book was quite interesting as put forth in the introduction. However, I found myself almost constantly wishing that this book was put together by someone else. Not necessarily someone more knowledgeable, because that's part of the project, but rather someone less...basic and cringe? Polly Barton is a god awful interlocutor for this project-- her own opinions come up so much and steer the conversations so completely. When someone is expressing a quite different opinion that hers, the mode shifts, palpably, into the interoggotive rather than conversational. I think she would have made a great interviewee but her presence was overwhelming and there are only so many times I want to hear variations of, "I feel weird about porn, and I have judged others quite harshly about it in the past. Essentially, I think its mostly bad. Do you guys think that's bad??" Maybe she could have just spoken to a therapist. Or, I think this could have been an amazing blog, with one interview a week as an ongoing project and commitment to continuous investigation. 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. What that guy was getting at does seem true in the sense that Porn is a book about, and perhaps for, a social stratum of people so good at tying themselves in ideological knots that it comes to seem like its own form of kink. It’s impressive that anyone still desires anything at all amid so much fastidiousness and anxious self-surveillance.

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.” 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? Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshopsBarton’s publisher bills this book as “a landmark work of oral history written in the spirit of Nell Dunn”. Nell Dunn’s work Talking to Women also relied on the testimony of friends – ranging from heiresses to factory workers to Edna O’Brien. But no one calls that book an oral history. Oral history is still history – and that entails the study of the past, often through the voices of those excluded from traditional, written resources. The discipline of history requires “full-blown research”, burdensome as Barton may find it. William Margold, a heavy-hitter male performer from his entrance into the industry in 1972 onward: I did my first money shot on October 1, 1972. I was lying on a rug in a garage in Venice, California, being blown for a movie called Love Sandwich and I remember going off into the girl's face—copiously. How do we talk about porn? Why is it that when we do talk about porn, we tend to retreat into the abstract? How do we have meaningful conversations about it with those closest to us? In Porn: An Oral History, her extraordinary second book, Polly Barton interrogates the absence of discussion around a topic that is ubiquitous and influences our daily lives. In her search for understanding, she spent a year initiating intimate conversations with twenty acquaintances of a range of ages, genders and sexualities about everything and anything related to porn: watching habits, emotions and feelings of guilt, embarrassment, disgust and shame, fantasy and desire. Soon, unfolding before her, was exactly the book that she had been longing to encounter – not a traditional history, but the raw, honest truth about what we aren’t saying. A landmark work of oral history written in the spirit of Nell Dunn, Porn is a thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo.

the one non-meta insight which I thought was interesting/useful was the continual revisiting of the theme of a gulf between men and women, between porn consumers and non-porn consumers, perhaps even between any two given consumers. I think the text made a decent case - just by demonstrating the catharsis of talking - that talking will be the first step to bridging that gulf 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.’ Image courtesy of Four Chambers, an ethical porn production company. Read an interview with the co-founder, Vex Ashley, over on Vice . 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.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.’ 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.’

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. 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. Barton’s book carves out a space to hear a multitude of experiences, from interviewees of different genders and sexualities, who look at a range of porn from mainstream, queer, feminist or amateur. This kaleidoscopic approach allows us to understand many things about porn beyond if it is good or bad, empowering or exploitative, feminist or misogynistic. Activist or academic voices are the ones most commonly heard in conversations about porn. Barton instead gives the consumer a space to add their voices and knowledge to this ever-changing debate, and as a result they offer valuable and engaging insight into the everyday nature of porn consumption.’

Porn: An Oral History

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. Where are the good books about sex? In her brief bibliography, Barton cites recent titles by Katherine Angel ( Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again) and Amia Srinivasan ( The Right to Sex). Like these works, Porn is too timid to offer a bold thesis. Angel and Srinivasan’s books offer provocative, well-researched thinking: Angel’s is rich in psycho-biological studies on female sexuality; Srinivasan’s is rich in political history. But both writers hesitate at their final conclusions: Angel’s compelling thoughts on desire steer away from specifics on how “sex will be good again”; Srinivasan’s riveting discussions of porn, age gaps and race preferences peter out into lukewarm ecumenicalism. I think because I felt as though porn was more of a taboo. I very, very much from the outset did not want this to be a book that came down on either side of the Is Porn Good or Bad debate. My sense was that the debate itself and how incendiary it can get is a key part in shaping people’s feelings around porn and the discomfort and the shame we feel feeds into that. A lot of what we covered could definitely have been covered under the title of masturbation, but I felt like by making it about porn, I was getting all that and more.