In Porn: An Oral History, the writer inspires us to think differently about porn by having those difficult conversations we’re too afraid to start
If you see Polly Barton at a party, chances are she’s been cornered by someone to talk about porn. Since writing her second book, the provocatively titled Porn: An Oral History, peripheral acquaintances see her as someone to expound their “big, unsolicited confessions”, as she puts it with a spirited laugh on our video call. It’s not something that particularly bothers Barton, though. “There are some days when I’m not in the mood for it, but I definitely prefer that to the silence.”
This “silence” is the idea that porn is ever-present yet rarely discussed, and was the impetus behind Barton’s work. “I felt threatened by my own destabilising, unresolved feelings on the topic,” the writer says in the book’s introduction, “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.” Barton wants to get people talking about porn – not only how it influences our sexual desires, but our cultural mores and societal expectations.
Rather than a conventional non-fiction narrative, Porn is made up of 19 conversations between Barton and acquaintances, all of varying degrees of familiarity. In the introduction, the writer recognises that the project needed to be done with people she at least tangentially knew if she were to really confront that “silence”. The exchanges that follow cover a range of complex topics from thrilling and illuminating angles – entire worlds exist inside that single word, and these conversations are a testament to that. Barton employs an expert level of journalistic rigour on a subject she is technically not an expert in, meaning that her perspective is both refreshing and accessible. In this way, Porn sidesteps stuffy lectures and bristles with feeling, disagreement and genuine connection. Maybe broaching the topic in our own lives won’t be so bad after all.
Below, we chat to Barton about generational porn divides, the ethics of desirability, and dismantling the dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ porn.
I found the book compulsively readable due to the fact that I’m not having discussions about porn with anyone in my life. To be privy to these kinds of conversations feels so compelling. Was this your intention in keeping the interview format?
Polly Barton: The main reason for me was to generate this sense of reciprocity which was there in the original conversations. The people I was speaking to were very open with me. That came, in part, because I was also open back. The book’s purpose is to encourage people to step into those kinds of conversations. It felt important to me that I didn’t just extract everything and clump it all together.
I’m really happy to hear that it’s compulsive reading, because that’s not something that people say very much about non-fiction. I wanted it to be not-a-slog – immersive and accessible.
Was there ever a fear of having your voice centred in the work? Like the book is charting your own feelings towards porn, and that journey itself is the purpose of the narrative?
Polly Barton: I did feel like that. I wanted there to be an element of that, but not the main story. You’re right, my voice appears far more than anyone else’s in aggregate. I didn’t want to just drone on, but at the same time, I wanted to have the honesty of me being in it. It was a balance that I had to strike. I feel like that journey format is used so often in non-fiction books these days, but the journey that I see usually is the accruing of knowledge. It’s quite a cerebral journey. If there was a journey in this one, I wanted it to be an emotional one, and to feel quite under the surface.
Person Five is a straight man in his early twenties who watches a lot of porn. The exchange feels, at least on the page, less conversational than others. Was that something you were aware of?
Polly Barton: Yes, I was aware of that. There are two conversations where I felt like that. With that one and the 80-year-old [Person Eleven]. That’s part of the diversity of the book, in a way.
I think Five and I were probably less on a wavelength. I like him, but he’s not a close friend of mine. There were a couple of times in that interview where I pushed back, but it didn’t quite... I don’t know. I was gauging his receptivity to having a full-on exchange, and that didn’t go exactly as I imagined that it could.
“‘Is porn good or bad?’ is not even a coherent question, let alone an answerable one. It would be like asking ‘Is sex good or bad?’”
It’s quite stark to see the habits of Five in comparison to Eleven, an octogenarian who sees porn as magazines and pulp fiction.
Polly Barton: There was a bit where I said to Eleven, ‘so, that was enough?’ He pushed back and said, ‘you can’t say it was enough because that was all we had.’ There was no conception of that being enough or not. I thought that was really well put from him. Thinking back to what I had growing up – he’s right. I didn’t think about whether that was enough or not, you just deal with what you’re given. In the same way that people growing up with internet porn don’t think ‘is this too much?’
That idea of ‘too much’ is connected to another topic in the book: what came first, the desire or the porn? Did people start doing specific sex acts and then porn followed, or do people do things because they’ve seen them in porn?
Polly Barton: I never felt like I drew closer to coming down on either side! But I did expand my understanding of that mechanism. We’re talking about the malleability of desire. When things like porn shape us, not just as individuals but the values and perceptions we’re steeped in, it’s so hard without some kind of paradigm shift to see beyond those and see what’s causing what, the porn or the desire.
Person Six refers to two pornstars as ‘this blonde Barbie doll-looking woman and this old, playboy-looking man’. While the man is defined by his active exploits, the woman is reduced to an inanimate object. Do you think we’re guilty of using dehumanising language when talking about women porn stars?
Polly Barton: There is so much dehumanisation that goes on in the language around porn. That’s one of the things that I find extraordinary about a site like Pornhub, going on to the homepage and seeing that flood of descriptions. As part of this project, I was trying to stay with those words and interrogate what is going on there. We see a lot of ‘Blonde Slut Gets Pummelled’. To come back to your original question, yes, there is an imbalance. Generally, it’s rarer to see nouns that apply to men as people. We see a lot of ‘slut’ and ‘Barbie’, whereas men are generally reduced to a penis.
Another thing that crops up is this Jekyll and Hyde analogy – that you’re this monster when you’re horny, and after you’ve orgasmed to porn you go back to normal. Is this almost an excuse for watching ethically questionable porn?
Polly Barton: I don’t know if it gives us an excuse. It’s definitely a mechanism to override the shame for a short amount of time. And then as soon as it’s happened, a lot of people report having a flood of shame, or tawdriness. Like, ‘what the hell am I doing?’ I’m interested in that socially. Where and what is that mechanism? Obviously, it’s slightly rooted in biology, but it feels like there is a socially generated element.
That reaction, the shame after watching porn, then begs the question: what makes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ porn? In some instances, it seems to be a matter of taste, but there are also ethical concerns.
Polly Barton: I think people use good porn and bad porn as these umbrella terms, and they contain so many different elements. I asked one guy, ‘what is good porn for you’ and he said ‘good porn is no longer than 20 minutes’. It’s purely subjective. Then there’s this taste element. One of the things I wish I’d explored more in this book is how porn interacts with ideas about class. I think there’s this essentially classist snobbery in the repulsion to the tacky aesthetics of porn.
Then the whole ethical side is quite multifaceted. You’ve got the treatment of the performers, but then you’ve also got the ethics [of desirability]. Another interviewee talks about how, through porn, we are instilling these scripts in ourselves – not just in our sex lives but in our love lives in terms of our choice of partner and who we think is desirable. All of these are hammered in by porn.
After writing the book, have your thoughts on porn changed in a meaningful way?
Polly Barton: I now feel like you can’t talk about porn in a single breath. Because porn is just so diverse. How you define it depends on who you’re talking to. Reducing it to ‘is porn good or bad?’ is not even a coherent question, let alone an answerable one. It would be like asking ‘is sex good or bad?’, ‘are relationships good or bad?’ There’s a reason that we don’t pose questions like that – it’s because we actually talk about those topics and have a nuanced understanding of what they contain.
Porn: An Oral History by Polly Barton is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and available now.
Join Dazed Club and be part of our world! You get exclusive access to events, parties, festivals and our editors, as well as a free subscription to Dazed for a year. Join for £5/month today.