Porn E-Book

Polly Barton

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

How do we talk about porn? Why it is 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, 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 nineteen 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. 

Leseprobe

‘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.’

— Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Checkout 19

‘I wasn’t expecting nineteen conversations about porn to make me feel as I felt after reading this book: grateful and hopeful and wide-open. Porn is a generous, intimate commentary on how we relate to one another (or fail to) through the most unlikely of lenses.’

— Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes

‘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.’

— Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation

‘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.’

— Adrian Nathan West, author of My Father’s Diet

PORN AN ORAL HISTORY

POLLY BARTON

‘And I dreamed your dream for you, and now your dream is real

How can you look at me as if I was just another one of your deals?’

— Dire Straits, ‘Romeo and Juliet’

‘That brought a flush of shame. Which is what you will get, of course, if you behave as if things are other than they are.’

— Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms

CONTENTS

Title PageEpigraphZEROONETWOTHREEFOURFIVESIXSEVENEIGHTNINETENELEVENTWELVETHIRTEENFOURTEENFIFTEENSIXTEENSEVENTEENEIGHTEENNINETEENZERO AGAINAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright

ZERO

Back when I was living in rural Japan, one of my favourite pastimes was hanging out beside the porn section in the local video shop. The video shop was a sizeable place, its numerous racks labelled with all the different categories of film I would have expected to find there, and some more besides, which I wouldn’t. There was the ‘Sekushii’ [Sexy] section, for instance, sandwiched between the very standardly labelled ‘Romantic Comedies’ and ‘Suspense’ racks. This label afforded me great delight when I first managed to read it, and I immediately assumed that this must be the porn, but on further inspection, the rack turned out to contain the kinds of films that to my mind would be best described as ‘eighties erotic drama’. They might have been sexy by name, but they clearly weren’t sexy enough by nature to merit shielding from the eyes of the toddlers who would go thundering down the aisles in search of the newest animation DVD – that was a fate reserved for the porn proper, which had its own separate room, partitioned off from the main shop floor by a pink curtain. This section wasn’t labelled in any way, as far as I could see. I only became aware of its existence one day when I was perusing the box sets on the far wall, and witnessed someone else who was also perusing the box sets with me ostensibly disappear into thin air. Was I losing my mind? Like someone who has witnessed a miracle or a tragedy, I stood rooted to the spot, feigning fascination with the videos in front of me, and a couple of minutes later the disappearing man emerged, now with two see-through plastic cases in hand. As he trotted in the direction of the cashiers, I stood back from the shelves and examined the opening into which he had vanished and from which he had reappeared: sure enough there was a hole in the wall veiled by two pieces of thin pink satin fabric. I must have subconsciously registered it before, and assumed it was some kind of employee-only zone.

From that point on, I became fascinated by the pink curtain dance that the porn-renting men would perform. Now and then I would encounter someone who went swanning in directly, but these intrepid types were the anomaly; the protocol was that you had to stand and pretend to be looking at the box sets, and then, after a surreptitious head-turn or two, slip in sideways between the silky pink folds of the curtain. Almost unfailingly there was a graceful, nigh on ethereal quality to this movement that, held up alongside the array of sights they were no doubt going to see on the shelves of that room, brought me an obscure pleasure. I say ‘no doubt’, because I never myself entered the pink-curtain room. Perhaps subconsciously I wasn’t brave enough, and I feared the interaction if and when I encountered someone else in there. It seemed to me, though, that I just wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to see the rows of DVDs with pictures that would probably make me feel strange and uncomfortable. I just wanted to watch the men as they performed their clandestine ritual, and this I started doing as a matter of course whenever I visited the video shop. I’m fairly sure that my lingering presence by the box-set wall or the neighbouring shelves was perceived as an obstacle, something that made the curtain-slip harder and more embarrassing to execute, and that for me was a point of joy, even pride. I felt no animosity towards the porn-renting men, but neither did I understand why I should cooperate in making their quest any easier. Standing there brought me a faint sense of jubilation, that I think was something to do with feeling the tables had been turned: until that point in my life, I’d felt that porn was a mechanism used to make me feel embarrassed or somehow hemmed in both existentially and physically, or at least, which did make me embarrassed and hemmed in, for a host of reasons that I found it difficult to unravel. Now, I was in a position of inviolability. It was almost thrilling to feel that I was tied to these men’s crusade in some way, a witness to their act of transgression – which was not really a transgression at all. As I watched them heading towards the counter, their footsteps no longer remotely ethereal, I would feel a frisson of nerves as I pictured and vicariously experienced that mortifying interaction. Even I had felt embarrassed in the past when the cashiers had read out the names of the videos I was renting, as they were obliged to do, for no reason other than that they contained a lot of foreign words that I was making them pronounce. How, then, was a person to cope when the words they were enunciating were ‘Edward Penishands’ or ‘Super Hornio Brothers’? Who felt the more embarrassed: the renter or the cashier? Or did neither of them? Was this transaction so humdrum by now that there was no mortification left in it? What percentage of videos taken out here were porn? Did the pink-curtain cupboard actually account for eighty per cent of all rentals? Was it a cupboard, or was it deceptively huge? Was it actually as large as the video shop again? These were the kinds of questions I would ask myself as I stood smirking by the box sets.

I tell this story not because I think it reflects well on me but rather because, in a way, it feels inextricable from my reasons for writing this book. I suppose you could articulate my pink-curtain fixation as a species of childishness, a fascination for the clandestine, an inability to leave alone the things that one is not supposed to probe. Probably, into my thirties, I wouldn’t do the same thing. Yet if I’m a very different person in many ways to that twenty-one-year-old, I think that my feelings when it comes to porn aren’t that altered – or at least they weren’t when I began this project.

When I first conceived of this book, and started feeling some urgent need to work on it, the prospect of writing something with the word ‘porn’ in the title – or as the whole title – felt to me very worrying indeed. Certainly some of the worry came as a generalized knee-jerk reaction to the thought of being associated, professionally, with porn. I fretted that, in a similar way to how people who’ve worked as porn actors might struggle to find work in different industries, the affiliation might damage my ability to work ever again, especially as a translator. My concern took a more specific form, as well: I was worried, and pre-emptively ashamed, that writing a book about porn would mean people would assume that I was a porn connoisseur. If I was writing a book about porn, I must watch loads of it, and like it, and know a lot about it. That, I thought, was deeply embarrassing.

It was only as I started to delve further into the topic that I began to feel differently. If only I was a porn connoisseur, I thought – perhaps a little bashful but mostly forthright in my passion, my desire. If only I was strong in what felt like my right, all of our rights, to indulge in fantasy. Those sorts of positions started to seem to me very attractive by view of their firmness – and, indeed, less embarrassing than the reality. For in truth, my predominant feeling towards porn was not one of love, and nor was it the opposite, one of hate or virulent disapproval. What I had was rather a kind of nebulous, all-pervasive worry and discomfort. I worried about what porn stood for, I worried about what it has done to us, is doing to us and will do to us, and I worried that this worry made me a bad feminist. A stolid love of or belief in porn and a wish to defend it seemed to me, in comparison, an enviable place to write from – as did, in a way, a vehement anti-porn stance. Faced with such a polarizing topic with so many different strands and aspects to it, the worst possible position seemed to be the one I held: ambivalence. Or, to qualify that, a kind of tortured ambivalence. A calm, nuanced on-the-fence position I would have taken, but a mass of tortured, conflicting and mostly unexplored reactions was less than welcome.

Not only did I feel threatened by my own destabilizing, unresolved feelings on the topic, but I also felt uncomfortable about the way it seemed to be so impossible to talk about it in a way that might have helped me sort through those feelings. Thinking about it, I realized I could count the number of conversations I’d had about it on one hand; not a single one had felt exploratory or liberating, and instead the tone had ranged from fraught and perilous to downright confrontational. Outside of these discussions, the silence around the topic didn’t feel neutral or chosen, but oppressive, forced upon me, something I wanted to rip away – an urge not dissimilar, I guess, to the wish to stand beside the pink curtain and disrupt, in some minute sense, the tacit pact we all made to turn our heads from acknowledging it.

In a way, it feels bizarre to speak of silence around porn when porn is now so ubiquitous. I’m not exactly clear on when I began to become conscious of the topic coming up more in the things I listened to and read – it was a gradual shift, it seemed, and then before I knew it, it was everywhere. Certainly, around the time that I began brewing the idea for writing some kind of book on porn and my antennae were pricked, I noted I had a run of six months where every single book I read, fiction and non-fiction, included the word at least once. Because it was on the news, in podcasts, it began to wend its way into interactions too. People I barely knew would drop it into conversation, mostly as an example of some aspect of human experience that the internet had altered dramatically. Not knowing of my project, my dad told me on the phone that he had been invited to his son’s school to a parents’ talk about ‘pornography’ (I wish I could reproduce in writing his tone of voice when speaking this word, but there was a lot of separating of syllables). I opened up the Guardian webpage and there was Billie Eilish, declaring that ‘porn destroyed my brain’, detailing how she had begun watching at age eleven and as a result had felt unable to say no to many ‘not good’ things in her sexual encounters. Another day, the front page was filled with the news that a Tory MP had been reported watching porn on his phone in the House of Commons; another Tory MP came out to defend him, stating that finding your way onto a porn site after searching for tractors felt like an understandable mistake to have made. On the back of this, other MPs discussed and questioned the prevalence of a culture of misogyny in Parliament. More and more there was the sense that porn was becoming a part of The Conversation.

Yet, instead of sating my desire to talk about things honestly, to sort through the multiple strands of beliefs we seemed called upon to hold true simultaneously – everyone does it, it’s part of a wider culture of misogyny, it’s anti-social and offensive, it’s a fact of contemporary life, it’s something deeply private, it normalizes sexual degradation, it’s destroying our brains, it’s splashed all over the internet, it’s a corollary to masturbation, it’s an expression of the untrammelled sexual creativity of the contemporary psyche, it’s become more than simply an aid to masturbation, it’s an artform, it’s addictive, it’s a blight on people’s ability to create a satisfying sex life – the sudden explosion of porn within public discourse seemed to me to highlight the absence of what I thought of as genuine discussion. We could all, now, lip service it without blushing, yet I still hadn’t had a real conversation about it with someone I wasn’t going out with. I felt like I could predict most of my friends’ practices and opinions about myriad aspects of life – not with total accuracy, maybe, but with some degree of conviction – yet when it came to porn, I had no idea what they might think, or feel, or do, or watch. It didn’t fail to cross my mind that this absence of dialogue wasn’t universal, and that I had just somehow missed out. In a sense that’s true; I now think that there are people for whom porn is a topic of real discussion with others, in what seems to me a genuinely healthy way. Yet, not infrequently, I would spot flashes of discomfort in people’s eyes when the subject came up which made me think, Aha. I should say that, more and more, I believe that what I’m referring to as ‘discomfort’ is complex.

I should say here that, increasingly, I believe that what I’m referring to here as ‘discomfort’ is complex – that porn is the intersection point for a number of different kinds of discomfort, and that different people experience varying admixtures of these. Porn, and masturbation in general, are subjects about which people are taught to carry a lot of shame, and fear of others’ judgement. Even if we happen to have got away without feeling such shame, the question of what it is we desire is uncomfortable to talk about publicly, because it can feel so deeply personal and exposing. Then there is also, I think, a more outward-facing awareness at play: that the topic is a polarizing and controversial one, which elicits strong emotions, and discussion is therefore potentially incendiary. I think about a comment one of my friends made about porn being a ‘deeply uncool’ topic, which triggered a burst of recognition in me. I wonder if there’s some kind of society-wide mechanism whereby, having recognized that delving into our real thoughts on porn brings up too much inflammatory emotional content, we have conveniently deemed it unnecessary and therefore gauche to hash over it – particularly if the hashing over involves discussions of ethics. It’s more comfortable for everyone involved to act as though we have reached an acceptance of the reality, that we are at peace with all of the complexities of it, even if the truth is that many of us have not, really, gone through that peacemaking process in any substantive way.

In hindsight, I would say there was a specific trigger for turning to my burbling feelings about porn and resolving, at last, to give them my full attention. Objectively speaking, it was an extremely minor occurrence. Late one night I got a text message from a man, who shouldn’t, at least from my perspective, have been attempting to initiate sexual contact with me, in which he mentioned that he was watching porn. That was it, that was all it was, and yet quite unexpectedly it sent me into a tailspin. What shocked me was not the fact of the text – I’m not sure if this experience is unusual or not, but over the years I’ve received numerous emails, text messages and letters from men casually detailing their masturbatory habits – but rather that I felt, in that moment, that I had no idea how to read it. It was an alien-just-landed-from-outer-space-after-lots-of-preparatory-language-study kind of a feeling: I could, of course, understand the literal words of the message, but I was at a loss as to how to interpret its intended meaning. Was this a come-on, or at least a species of flirting? Was it intended to make me uncomfortable? Was it signalling his adherence to a moral code of radical honesty? Was it a move to make his viewing feel more transgressive and therefore more stimulating? Or did we now live in a world where I was supposed to parse this as I would ‘I’m watching the football’? I genuinely didn’t know the answer, and I didn’t know if he knew, either. It even struck me as possible that his intention was precisely to bring on this kind of alien feeling.

Adding to this reeling I felt was an unshakeable sense that it was somehow mind-boggling for this particular person to admit to watching porn. Pre-text, if someone had asked me to make a bet on whether he regularly watched porn, I suppose I would have put my money on yes, as I would for almost every man – and yet holding up that image alongside his life, its ethical commitments, and above all the position he held as an arbiter of superior taste somehow produced in me a sense of deep disjunct that I couldn’t categorize. I didn’t know if I was a prude, I didn’t know if this was just me being unstreetsmart, if I was just old and backward. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this same sense applied to the greater part of my friendship circle, when I floated the idea of them watching porn. The people I most trusted didn’t send me messages about watching porn – we knew it was safe not to talk about it, and so we didn’t – and yet I had no idea of what they were doing in that regard.

Clearly, a text message that seems impossible to decipher is hardly a rarity, and nor is that indecipherability exclusive to porn-related content. What felt instructive to me, though, was the sudden surge of turmoil this occurrence brought up. The turmoil felt old, and known, and also it felt static – as ever, I had no idea what to do to dispel it. My knowledge of what porn really meant wasn’t developing as I let it lie fallow, reading the odd article here and there, and my feelings around it weren’t maturing either. On the surface my attitude seemed calm enough, but all it took was a little bit of tumult to stir the whole thing up and make it bubble over again. It was time to do something about it. Rather than just letting this slip from awareness, I needed a scheme or a structure to keep me probing the issue until something in me shifted. I was coming to the end of my previous writing project, and the idea naturally suggested itself to me: how about writing something on porn?

Formulating this plan to myself felt peculiar, in part because I was painfully aware that whichever way I thought about it, I was not the best person to write about porn in any conventional manner. Not only was it not my academic specialism, or even close to that, but even within an amateurish, non-professional context, I knew very little about porn. If I was going to write about it, it would have to be in a way that at the very least didn’t preclude my being an ignoramus. Preferably, I would be able to harness that ignorance in some way that would be beneficial to the project. It occurred to me that I could attempt some permutation of the classic ‘journey of discovery’ where I narrated my journeys to various archives and libraries and San Fernando Valley studios, detailing my reactions and recording the revelations I had along the way, yet the prospect didn’t seem particularly appealing. My motivation for writing the book was, above all, a sense that the conversations I viewed as important around porn were not being had, at least not around me – this in connection with a realization that the things in my life that had really altered or deepened my positions on things were almost always conversations with friends or acquaintances. Thinking about what I myself would be interested in reading about porn, I acknowledged that, much as I wanted to patch up the horrendous gaps in my knowledge about it, I didn’t want to read a traditional history. I was far more interested in reading something that focused on people outside of the industry – with laypeople, and their experiences with and thoughts about porn. In this way I stumbled towards an idea – less a proposal for a finished book than a plan to lay the groundwork for whatever would come after it. I would talk to people about porn, and somehow find some way to write about that.

The next question was, what people? It seemed obvious to me from the start that this particular project was one I needed to do with acquaintances – that the conversations had to be with people I already had at least some kind of connection or relationship with (although, in the end, I came to speak with a couple of people who I was introduced to by friends, but whom I hadn’t met until our interviews). I understood that this would immediately deprive the book of any claim to being comprehensive, yet that had never seemed to me like a possibility anyway. A truly comprehensive survey would have to interview people of all sexualities, ethnicities, ages, genders, abilities, nationalities, social classes, political affiliations, family set-ups, home arrangements – not simply to have a claim to being truly diverse, but because these are all parameters that arguably influence consumption in significant ways. Such a study would also have to encompass people in all aspects of an industry that is sprawling in its size and scope. In other words, it would necessarily be a full-blown research project. That wasn’t something that I, as a single author, was equipped to do.

More than that, it wasn’t something I desperately wanted to do, either. Rather than provide something with a claim to objectivity, a representation of the full range of thoughts and opinions or, heaven forbid, which attempted to locate some kind of ‘standard’ or majority position, I wanted with this book to set my sights on what it looked like to talk about these things, amongst friends, almost regardless of the kind of views being expressed and where they lay on the complex map of different stances.

There was also a sense in which this methodology itself became my difficult learning curve – a training, if you will, in putting myself (and the people around me) through the experience of conversing about things that were awkward, difficult, potentially even excruciating. I wanted to see what happened when I waded right in there. I felt that if the book was going to reflect upon or record my own development in some way, the embarrassment couldn’t be circumvented. What I needed was not the magical fix of interviewing strangers, where I suddenly felt powerful and impervious to shame, but rather to struggle to have the conversations through that embarrassment. It needed to work itself through the system.

That said, I was still terrified. It was one thing to decide that I’d speak to people I already knew, but which ones, exactly? How well did I have to know somebody to invite them to talk to me about porn? I might have summoned up the determination to confront my embarrassment, but that didn’t make it shrink. I found I felt enthusiastic about the idea during the day, but would wake up in the middle of the night with stabs of fear and panic. I drafted an email to people inviting them to join me, but let my uncertainty about the precise list of people to send it to serve as an excuse for stalling; the late-night-terror part of me was pleased, as I dragged my feet and allowed myself to think that maybe it was a bad idea after all. The more I stalled, the more I cou1ld feel the late-night part digging in its heels, beginning to win out. So one night, falsely brave after a glass of wine, I sat down and filled in a list of email addresses into the bcc field of my draft titled ‘A Request’.

The email, which I won’t quote in full here for it was quite lengthy, started with the kind of tentative greeting that was very common in the early stages of the pandemic – ‘I hope you are well, or okay, or somehow moving towards something in the future that feels better’ – then went in for the kill: ‘This is going to be a strange email.’ In the strangeness that followed, I asked recipients to consider having ‘a conversation with me about your/our relationship to and feelings around porn, and how it impacts directly and indirectly on your life.’ I had initially conceived of renting an Airbnb, I wrote, and asking at least UK participants round for a bottle of wine or a meal, but in light of the COVID-19 situation I wasn’t sure whether or not that would come to pass; I was still prioritizing doing the talks in person, if at all possible. For the moment I was looking for some kind of show of hands: would they be, in theory, willing to do this with me?

The adrenaline rush of pressing send left me a little dizzy, and I was ready to think about something else, pretend it had never happened, but almost immediately, the replies began to come in. A few were just: ‘I’m in’, ‘yes’. Others were more hesitant: their senders were reluctant, or not sure, but they’d give it a go. Some people, not that evening, but later, wrote me longer emails, talking about some particular aspect of the topic they’d been musing on of late or, sometimes, mentioning a total lack of conversations in their life about it. Included in my group were some people I didn’t know all that well, a couple of whom I had encountered professionally, and I worried that they might find my sudden request strange, and crossing a boundary somehow. Yet nobody’s response suggested to me that they felt that way.

So, gradually, I shifted into the execution phase of these pornchats, as I was now calling them to myself. In the end I recorded nineteen, all of which have been included here. There were other people who kindly agreed and whom I planned to include, but at some point I realized that I had more than enough material, and needed to stop if I were to have any hope of assembling it. Some part of me still harbours the hope of continuing the project – looking back, I’d say I went from feeling terrified to starting to positively enjoy pornchatting as an activity. It wasn’t just that it was the pandemic, that I was living alone and often feeling bored and lonely, and it provided me with a reason to meet people, sometimes to take trains to go and see them. The main reason I liked it was that it increasingly struck me as a very generative thing to do: to push through the embarrassment, to change your feelings about doing something by exposure, to wilfully enter into conversational territory where both parties felt vulnerable and to allow yourselves to be in a space of experimentation. I felt for myself how freeing it was to talk about this stuff, and I liked watching my conversational partners having the same realization.

And genuinely, I started to observe changes taking place. At the outset of the project, I’d had to whisper the word ‘porn’, or squeal it. For a period of time around the beginning of recording the chats, I began seeing someone, and the idea of telling him about what I was working on felt difficult; a similar thing applied with my parents. It was amazing to me how quickly this started to shift: how I began to tell people what I was working on without blushing, and eventually drop into conversation with my mum that I’d done a pornchat today, with total casualness. Naturally, all of that could be chalked up to sheer desensitization to the word, and hardly anything to celebrate. Yet there were other, more profound effects too: I started to feel less as though I had a hysterical rat trapped inside my chest. I could entertain positions on the topic calmly, without feeling the kettle begin to steam inside. Of course that was always going to be easier with these people who, however much I knew and liked them, I was not in a sexual or romantic relationship with. It still seemed proof, though, that this hare-brained scheme of mine was having some kind of effect.

I wrote that when I first began this project, I didn’t really know what form it would take, but I suppose my default idea, what seemed the most likely outcome, was that I would write a book of thematic essays. I made lists of the kinds of things I might write these essays on: Aesthetics, Age, Being a ‘Pervert’, Bodies, Ethics, Ethnicity, First Encounters, Gender, Incest, Kink, Masturbation, Money, Misogyny, Objectification, Passivity, Racism, Sex Toys, Shame, Taboo. I collected up quotations from novels, non-fiction, critical theory by Roland Barthes, Eimear McBride, Andrea Long Chu, Virginie Despentes, Maggie Nelson.

Then I started to actually speak to people, and began, very quickly, to see that one of the things that makes porn such a rich topic is the way that all these things are impossible to separate out. I observed how, even when I began the discussions often with one of a few very standard questions – first experiences with porn, or the frequency of conversations on the subject, or else picking up on something the person mentioned in response to my first email – the direction that the conversations went in were unique, and though the same issues came up, they did so from varied angles. It started to feel like the way that these issues swirled around kaleidoscopically was somehow integral to the project.

And something more fundamental revealed itself to me. I began to feel that the voices in which these stories were being told were integral to the accounts themselves. I could attempt to condense the interviews down, to extract the pure essence of their content, but in doing so, I would lose a sense of the people behind them, and the more I went on, the more grievous I felt this loss to be. I also grew increasingly conscious that would mean putting my own slant on things – and that doing so, after being entrusted with all of this testimony, would be at best a missed opportunity, and at worst, an ethical violation. What’s interesting to note now is that having that line of thought before I began the project would have seemed to me overly precious, a sign that I was taking my own project too seriously. It’s only porn, the voice from inside me would have said. Never mind that it was a topic that had caused me a lot of anguish in the past, triggered major arguments, felt endlessly fraught – there was something that prevented me externally from acknowledging its weight. Ten minutes into the first chat, though, and I had already realized how wrong I was. Porn was as serious to other people as it was to me, because other people’s lives are serious, and porn rubs up against some of the most important aspects of them.

In a similar vein, there was something about the shape of the individual chats that I felt was instructive, and important to represent. What felt valuable within the conversations was not solely the points raised and the conclusions reached, but the chaotic and often contradictory process of reaching them in tandem with another person – perhaps this is true of any conversation, but it felt particularly so of these ones, which were often the first time for people to vocalize their thoughts on certain ideas or try out arguments outside of their own heads. The trajectories of the conversations varied – some had a definite arc, others seemed to go back and forth between two conflicting modes of thought, while still others bounced around energetically from here to there – but whatever the shape was, it seemed to bring something to my understanding of the wider resonance of the conversation, which I felt I wanted the reader to share in. Above all, I felt it was important to preserve a record of what it was like to speak for the first time about something awkward with someone – there was value in preserving the sloppiness of the process, not only in reproducing the mood of the chat, but also in offering a route of insight into the nature of conversation itself.

In what follows, then, I have decided to present the interviews more or less as I had them, but anonymized, and in mildly edited form. Now, I pass my eyes over my list of potential chapter topics and note with some astonishment that most are covered in the conversations. That is not to say that there aren’t aspects of the sprawling constellation of issues that fall under the header of porn left untouched, and there are certainly aspects that need more attention and thorough investigation than they are given here. Inevitably, actually speaking with people about porn threw up topics that I’d not thought about much before, and about which I now feel I would love to have further conversations on, after the chance to reflect on them – some of these seem to me areas of great fertility.

In fact, as I was coming towards the end of the project, I found myself thinking of My Unwritten Books by George Steiner, a book written towards the end of his life in which he outlines seven books that he had always been minded to write but didn’t manage to, for assorted reasons. I feel that there are seven books this book could have been and wasn’t, that there are seven or more offshoot books that it could have been. Porn and ethnicity deserves a far, far better exploration than I have been able to give it within this book, as does porn and socio-economic class, and body image. I would like to consider, as critical theorists have, the relationship between porn and eroticism within the contemporary landscape. I would like to write about porn and mimetic desire: training ourselves, wittingly or more often unwittingly, to want what it is that we see, or, as one article wonderfully put it, the question of ‘Do we fuck this way because of porn, or does porn look like this because it’s how we fuck?’ But ultimately, I suspect, we are back to the expertise issue again: these seven books would be better written by somebody else.

As I am sure the reader will have gathered by now, the agenda of this book is not to expound my beliefs about porn. I don’t think I entered this project with any such beliefs, certainly not well-formed or fixed ones, and, as my understanding of the topic has grown over the course of the project, I am increasingly unsure what a position or even an opinion on porn could look like for me. If anything, the agenda I’m pushing is rather the inherent value in conversations where one is allowed to try on ideas, say things that one may later regret, and contradict oneself. More particularly, that this is something that is desperately needed in the field of porn, where the opportunity to have these kinds of conversations is less than something lost along the wayside and more something that, for many people and for a complex web of reasons, has never been had in the first place. What follows is an attempt to build a first place.

Bristol, May 2022

ONE

One is a straight woman in her late thirties.

She is in a long-term relationship, and has children.

ONE — I’ve been so looking forward to this conversation, and only as I walked in the door did I suddenly feel exposed and vulnerable. My worry is not to come across as prudish but the opposite, which is probably saying a lot, because I’m probably so vanilla on the scale of consumption.

POLLY BARTON — It’s interesting you say consumption. I’m interested by the way that when some people hear the word porn – specifically women, actually – they immediately jump to talking about it from the perspective of their partner’s consumption, or the consumption of the world at large, or the sex they’ve had with men who watched a lot of porn. And then there’s other people who primarily talk about themselves as consumers. Do you feel like you fall definitively on either side?

I’m definitely the watcher of porn. I’ve tried to find out if my partner watches it, but I don’t think he does now. I think he’d probably be stunned to know how much I watch – although actually I’m currently watching less, because we’re back to sharing a bed. I watched it even right after the babies were born – which is why we were sleeping separately – and I’m conscious that’s not exactly a ‘new mother’ thing. There have been a couple of moments when I’m masturbating and the baby monitor goes off and it’s like: Oh for god’s sake, I just needed four minutes!

When I think about my ex-boyfriends, they’re all such good, upstanding men… My brain knows they couldn’t not watch porn, because doesn’t everybody? Especially guys. I’m sure they have seen it and enjoyed it, from the perspective of sheer probability, right? But I can’t picture it, and I never got the impression from them that they were trying things that they learned from porn. I feel really conscious, though, that my daughter is going to grow up in a world where that’s more of what’s happening. I was maybe lucky in that sense and she won’t be. But here I am still watching it, so I’m still contributing to that system.

Do you watch porn exclusively to masturbate or can you imagine just putting it on to —

Unwind or something? No, I can’t imagine that. It’s exclusively for masturbation. As soon as I’ve orgasmed, I’m done with porn. I feel like: Get it out of my sight.

I don’t watch that much porn, but whenever I do the contrast between before and after is so stark. Much more than with anything else that’s a turn-on. What seems just-about-bearably grimy suddenly seems intolerably grimy. Funnily enough, I associate that with a masculine way of being, somehow.

Now I’ve gotten off I’m not interested?

Yes. As if it’s tied into that trope you see portrayed in films of being led by your dick down some avenue you don’t really want to go down, and then as soon as the orgasm happens, it’s like, What the fuck was that? That’s how I feel about porn when I do watch it.

I hadn’t thought about it until I just said it out loud to you, but I do have this feeling of doing something icky… It’s funny, I’m not ashamed that I watch porn – though I don’t tell a lot of people about it, so does that mean I am ashamed? Or just that it doesn’t come up in conversation? Maybe there is shame in that slight feeling of: oh, that was repulsive. But I don’t truly believe that it was repulsive. I’m just done with it, I guess. It was a private itch I had to scratch. But now I’m trying to think about the experience of watching a movie that’s not porn but which I find erotic and how that’s different. I suppose I get titillated sitting in my seat, and then I just keep watching, because there’s an actual narrative.

Have you always watched porn?

Yes. I’ve been sexual from early on. I was telling someone about this the other day, actually, which is weird because it’s a really embarrassing story: when I was six, I would go round to a friend’s house after school to hang out, so that the parents could share the childcare. Anyway, one day I was masturbating while I was there, without realizing that was what I was doing. I was kneeling on myself in that way. So obviously the woman told my mom what was happening, and my mom was really great about it. She said to me, it’s normal to do that, but it’s private. It’s stuck in my head clearly, but she did it in a way I wouldn’t have felt shame about it. Especially considering I grew up in an evangelical don’t-have-sex-before-marriage church with books on the shelf by James Dobson saying masturbation was evil. But I think that was an extreme version of what my parents practised, if that makes sense.

Do you think you came to feel shame about it later?

I think I’m embarrassed about it only because I realize I was doing something that’s not publicly acceptable. I was only a kid, though. With religion stuff more generally, there were a lot of hangovers. I didn’t want to have sex before I was married, for example, long after I stopped believing in God or the Bible. That lingered for a long time. But anyway, about the porn, I did watch it growing up. I remember really clearly how, back on AOL dial-up, I used to use this website called Sublime Directory. I don’t know how I stumbled upon it. There was a list of different categories: ‘Erotic Fiction’, ‘Sex Toons’, ‘Lesbians’, and so on. It was just all hyperlinks you clicked on to open up. I don’t think it would have been videos, I think it was probably just pictures. I remember reading a lot of erotic stories, too, just about regular people having sex.

What kind of age were you?

Fifteen is probably a good guess. I felt younger than fifteen, but in hindsight… But then, no, actually, because at one point my parents found out somehow that porn was being watched on the computer, and they assumed it was my younger brother and I let them think that. And he’s six years younger, so I must’ve been older for that to be conceivable. So it was high school. I think I was really sexual from a relatively early age. At six I didn’t know it was sexual. I just knew it felt good.

These categories feel so fraught, anyway. What does it mean to be sexual when you’re a child? I was probably quite similar, quite early. It occupied quite a lot of my consciousness, but I felt I couldn’t speak about it with anybody. It was the biggest taboo. How was that for you?

Once I knew it wasn’t a shameful thing I was okay with it within myself. Obviously when I was watching porn online, I was masturbating. I would have been downstairs in the den touching myself. And yet when I picture masturbating, it’s always upstairs in bed, kneeling over a wad of my blankets. That’s how I did it. I wonder if I was just replaying things I had seen, because although I had had kisses with boys from about middle school, I was such a nerd, so it’s not as though I had a lot of experiences to draw from in real life. But I don’t remember telling any girlfriends that I was doing it or anything like that. I hung out with Christian girls until later in high school, too, so I’m sure we didn’t talk about it.

Was there a point at which you started talking to people about it?

I’m not ashamed to talk about masturbating. Although still not to my partner, because it feels like, when you’re in a long-term committed relationship, there’s a taboo there. It’s as if you’re cheating on them or something. I’m not ashamed, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings. Masturbating is more convenient, or less fraught, than sex sometimes.

But talking about porn… Now I hang out with progressive feminist women, in a culture where it feels like the gender politics of porn are so atrocious. That’s the taboo, more than anything else.

So much around this is built on assumptions, and because we don’t talk about this stuff, we can’t really test those assumptions. The question of whether or not you masturbate when you’re in a relationship, for example. I feel like people who think it’s normal approach the question with an ‘of course you do!’, and the others approach it with an ‘of course you don’t!’ But maybe that certainty is a cover for the fear of actually exploring that topic through conversation, rubbing up against someone who feels differently and having to fight your corner.

Do you know Esther Perel?

Yes, I used to listen to her couples therapy podcasts religiously when I was in Japan.

There’s one where she talks about the way some people define cheating as watching porn and others define it as actual intercourse, and there’s a whole spectrum in between. I should have known all this from the beginning, I suppose – that this is how it would turn out. But you know how sex lives are exciting at first for any relationship, and at the beginning with my partner it felt adventurous enough to me that I just assumed… we were more on the same page? We were so young that I don’t think I had fully explored what I wanted anyway. But we haven’t really talked about it, not for a long time, and we have our own complications.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve just been having this whole journey in my head with what I like and my interests. Not that I haven’t had sexual relationships I’ve enjoyed – and another part of porn, actually, is that it tends to mimic sex I’ve had that I’ve enjoyed with people other than my partner. Anyway, that’s my embarrassing confession, and it’s embarrassing because in an ideal relationship, we would discuss this freely. Set our own parameters and preferences. That should be part of it. And yet it’s just not something I’m interested in venturing into. It’s not that I’m shy about it. I think my partner knows I’ve watched porn, I’ve joke-mentioned it, but I get the impression from his reaction that I’m probably embarrassing him more than engaging with him.

It sounds like you’ve lost faith that he could excite you?

A little bit, yeah.

That’s really tough.

Yeah. But interestingly, I listened to another episode of Esther Perel’s podcast, featuring a guy who was watching a lot of porn and a woman who was really upset that he was watching a lot of porn. He would want to try things with her and she would feel, ‘But that’s not who I am.’ That didn’t make me think of my partner at all, at the time, but I see now that it should have. I realize now that that’s an alternate reality for us.

Can you imagine being in a long-term relationship and not watching porn? I mean, does it feel as though you’re doing it because you’re not sexually fulfilled? Or do you think that, even if you were, you would still watch porn because it’s a different thing altogether?

That’s a really good question and I don’t know the answer. My inkling is probably that if someone was meeting all of your sexual needs, you wouldn’t watch porn. Partly because, who has the time?

What kind of porn do you watch?

As I go to answer that question I realize that I don’t know all the terms for this stuff, and any knowledge I have obtained is just by dipping my toe in. There was this article in New York magazine about porn that you should read, if you haven’t, and it mentioned a few categories of porn where I was like: what is that? But for instance, Deeper is a channel on Pornhub that I tend to like, because it tends to be very ‘classy’, I suppose: people having sex that is dominating, but feels consensual, which is what I like.

The thing is, when my partner set up the internet, he somehow configured it to this security setting and because of everything I’ve just said, I don’t want to ask him to change it. Not that he would mind, I’m sure – but it feels very awkward to say to your spouse: ‘I’d like to watch porn, please can you turn the child safety lock off?’

Do you think he did that coincidentally?

Totally. He wouldn’t have thought about it: I’m sure it was a default and he left it. Maybe thinking of when our kids are eventually old enough for it to matter. That’s how he is. Anyway, I discovered that on Tumblr, you can follow porn blogs. I find it really interesting. Another website I used to like was just called sex.com and it’s GIFs, and Tumblr is kind of that, too. Though I will say it’s a really strange space to be watching porn in. I haven’t used Tumblr for anything else, so I don’t have any followers, and I feel safe and anonymous there. But you are watching actual people’s accounts of the porn they like. Some guy in Kansas or Istanbul, or a couple of swingers in Texas. And because I like dominating sex, there’s a real slippery line between consensual stuff and people just abusing a woman, and the woman looking like she’s not enjoying it, which I consider two very different things. So that’s scary, because it almost feels like someone’s guiding me through their porn. I’m scrolling down and then I get to something that will suddenly be a turn-off. Women with their mascara running, or they start being tied up, or they’re being abused and humiliated, there’s a lot of calling them ‘stupid bitch’. It’s awful. I’m aware there’s a thin line between that and my thing that I’m saying is okay. Mostly it’s fine and I have a very enjoyable evening, it’s a quick hit for me, but sometimes it’s wrapped up with other things. You’re watching the porn from an account of a guy who you later discover has said something vaguely racist and it’s like, Fuck! It makes you feel dirty.

I’ve had that feeling before of being turned on by the dominatey-type sex you’re describing, but realizing that it belongs on the continuum with something that I’m really uncomfortable with society-wise. And even with real sex that I’ve had in the past, there have been things that have turned me on but which I don’t feel comfortable endorsing… Consent has to be the dividing line, ultimately, but it is also overwhelmingly difficult to pin down.

Yes. In a way I want to say, Each to their own, where that doesn’t infringe on other people’s rights. There was this line quoted in a Rebecca Solnit essay about Covid and mask-wearing, something along the lines of: ‘My right to swing my arm ends where your nose begins.’ It’s a thin line, though.

In a past relationship where I had very sensual and really good sex, there was one time he started to choke me. He hadn’t done it before and afterwards he said, Actually, I’m never going to do that again. He was more freaked out than I was, thinking about what could have happened. I don’t think I want to be choked, but that’s part of whatever this is. It’s adjacent to it. I’m okay with you slapping me… sometimes. And sometimes I might not be. And not in the face.

Is it always the man who is dominating and the woman who’s submissive in the porn you watch?