Porn: An Oral History

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There have been visible, important changes in sexual life over the last few years: internet porn, “sugar babying”, amateur porn and online dating (which has in a decade gone from obscure to totally ubiquitous). How, if at all, have they actually impacted the average person’s life? Rather than drawing on friends and pop-culture headlines, why not some actual history? Polly Barton is well aware that a world in which the great majority of people are exposed to sex in their teens or childhood via pornography – which often portrays the subjugation of women – is troubling. She is aware that this status quo has emerged suddenly and inescapably, with little regulation or study of its effects. She is aware that the question of whether politically “incorrect” desires are innate or exacerbated by this state of affairs is one of urgent importance. To explore this question, and others, is the promise of her book. Sadly, it is a promise unfulfilled. 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. 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.

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. Throughout these 19 conversations it was really interesting to see the same themes come up repeatedly, across ages and genders and identities. There was A LOT of discussion on ethical porn and what that even means and what it looks like. I really appreciated that so many of the interviewees were concerned with working conditions for the actors and were questioning their own ideas about what equitable working conditions look like. 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.’ So, after writing this book—and maybe your position hasn’t changed—how do you hope people talk about porn?

Porn: An Oral History

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’. Barton’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.

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. Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops sad too. As if there was nothing left to discover, almost. I remember thinking, this is the limit of what you can see in a movie, there’s nothing beyond this.’ This might have worked really well if it was a podcast. Or an online feature in a lifestyle magazine. To sum up - I just don't see the point of this book. Polly Barton writes that, as a young woman, she stood by the pornography area in a video store – it had a bright pink curtain – and was fascinated, and afraid. “There’s a dreadful secret at the heart of everything,” she writes, “and I know what that secret is, and yet it still remains there.”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.’ Relief from the infinite problematic comes in Barton’s conversation with a man in his eighties who discusses the changing technological basis of pornography down the decades. Elsewhere, we meet an endearingly embarrassed burp fetishist, consider the question of whether Japanese child-porn manga offers a real solution to paedophilia and imbibe lots of lively, granular details about other people’s porn habits. Only in the book’s final stretch do the dialogues start to feel repetitive, the interviewees’ quandaries as generic as porn itself. Witty, exuberant, also melancholy, and crowded with intelligence – Fifty Soundsis so much fun to read. Barton has written an essay that is also an argument that is also a prose poem. Let’s call it an oblique adventure story, whose hero is equipped only with high spirits, and a ragtag band of phonemes.’– Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors 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. 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?’