Let’s talk about porn! Or, otherwise put, let’s talk about why we don’t often talk about porn; let’s turn our attention to, as Barton puts it, ‘the tacit pact we all made to turn our heads from acknowledging it’. Hence, Porn: An Oral History.
When’s the last time you turned to your neighbour or colleague or even your absolute bestie and asked, in a spirit of genuine reciprocal enquiry, do they or don’t they watch porn? What assumptions do we make about porn and its consumers and its effects? Do we blithely suppose that everybody’s at it, but by everybody, maybe we really mean men, and so where do women fit in? Who pays for porn? What’s everyone’s relationship with the algorithm in terms of finding appealing content? Do couples watch porn together or apart, or is it, should it, be at all compatible with a vibrant interpersonal sex life? What do you do when your thing isn’t their thing? What’s the deal with masturbating with porn vs without it? Where do we all go for our fix, and what about the ethics of it all? Where do, for example, the Marxist feminist queer folx go for kicks, or is everything really geared towards the white cis-het-normative male gaze? When is an on-screen performance of a fetish legitimately meeting the relevant kink community and when is it sliding into non-consensual objectification? What’s more fun: homemade or studio-produced? How is porn experienced by people who grew up on Pornhub or those who came ‘of age’ in the time of dial-up, or VHS, or Playboy? Does the porn we watch shape the sex we have or vice versa, and how do we tell and what can we do about this and does it matter? How can we confront any of these issues if we can’t even talk about it?
Barton’s book takes the form of a series of anonymised interviews with nineteen friends and acquaintances of different ages, orientations, genders, racial backgrounds and global locations. These are bookended by her own thoughts, not on porn per se, but on her own discomfort and ambivalence in discussing it. It’s hard to start these conversations, she says, never mind have productive discussions, without a space to have had these conversations being offered in the first place – and so she conceived of this book as an attempt to get that ball rolling: ‘to build a first place’. The context then, isn’t a straight up talk about porn in terms of likes and dislikes, though that’s a significant factor, but also an interrogation of this silence and discomfort. She asks her subjects variations of the types of questions I’ve cited above, but each conversation unfolds organically and specifically to that individual’s circumstances and interests, and so they’re all different, giving answers that are sometimes harmonious and sometimes contradictory – which is testament to the vast and contested territory that the topic suggests (one recurrent issue is the undecidability of what actually counts as porn). Barton notes early in that she doesn’t have a clearly articulable opinion on pornography, and this doesn’t change to any notable extent by the end, but what has developed, she says, is her comfort level in having these conversations at all. This is a book, then, about communication as much as it is about pornography, and how a lack of communication about our pornographic habits (or lack thereof) reinforces sexual shame, both within and without relationship contexts; both this book and, it argues, sex itself, is about talking and sharing and understanding, and allowing for nuance and difference and privacy within the parameters of expanding a space of greater openness. This is, then, as you might imagine, a big and difficult conversation, but it’s also fresh and thought-provoking, and – for me, anyway – rather emancipatory. Why don’t we talk about this?
One of the factors that makes it such an enormously compelling and convincing text is that the tone is so conversational throughout; the interviews talk about their own experiences – with videos, with partners and exes, and on their own – in such a way that grounds the conversation in lived reality, or, more specifically, in a series of lived realities that differ hugely from each other but that might, collectively, elicit recognition from a wide readership. The tone veers from in-depth discussions of Andrea Dworkin’s problematic conflation of pornography and violence and the links between this late-seventies negativity to today’s TERF movement (which we can link, too, to the carceral feminism so popular amongst middle-class white liberals) to comedic personal anecdotes to summaries of Jon Ronson’s exploration of the genesis of Pornhub in his podcast The Butterfly Effect (hard recommend there: it’s excellent). It’s a book that’s erudite but chatty, incisive but funny, and – above all – daringly honest in a societal context within which these conversations are still very difficult.
Any Cop?: Refreshing, captivating, fascinating. I’d say don’t give it to your gran, but actually, do give it to your gran. Porn all round!
Valerie O’Riordan
Bookmunch 