Review: Porn by Polly Barton

Is porn a tool of women’s oppression? Is free porn unethical? What’s its place in relationships? Is there such a thing as too much? Why don’t we talk more openly about it?

Those are the sorts of questions Polly Barton sets out to ask in this eye-opening “oral history” (that’s the only wink-wink to be found in this book, the rest is delightfully to-the-point). She was struck by a “nebulous, all-pervasive worry and discomfort” about porn, an “absence of what I thought of as genuine discussion”. So, during the pandemic, she set out to interview 19 friends and acquaintances about it. These are everyday people, with a variety of genders, sexualities, ages and relationship statuses. None of them are participants in porn production, all are “consumers”. The book directly records these “pornchats” as transcripts, including Barton’s questions.

The result is joyful, exuberant and moving, a demonstration of “conversing about things that [are] awkward, difficult, potentially even excruciating”. I came away with a more complicated, ambivalent feeling that placed my own relationship to porn under scrutiny. It may be superficially about porn, but it’s really about the most complex and irresolvable questions about being human.

None of those questions can or perhaps even should be resolved. Porn is so many things to so many different people, “an intersection point” of shame and desire, public and private, personal and political, and all sorts of other lines that cross through society, particularly in its existence as a commodity. I was drawn to Barton’s quoting of Italian psychologist Giorgio Tricarico that porn may attract all the heat and criticism, but it lives in an “invisible supermarket” of “anything that seduces us to behave as consumers in certain ways”.

Barton interviews people who are cheerfully open about their porn use; others who feel profoundly ashamed. Some avoid it for political and ethical reasons; many express personal distaste at particular kinds of porn. I liked the frankness of the 20-something straight guy who for him the distinction between sex and porn is that porn is something “you watch … that you’re not going to do yourself”. I was challenged by interviewee 16’s (straight woman in her early 30s) articulation of porn’s role as a tool for that “dependable, repeatable, containable thrill … the opposite of how I think about encountering another person, where there’s an inherent unpredictability and weirdness to it”:

the fact that it’s entirely possible to masturbate and orgasm without engaging with yourself in any meaningful way or being kind to yourself or trying to bring yourself to pleasure on any other level than a strictly utilitarian one is bizarre

I felt the joy the queer person in their 40s who describes the joy of finding “right-on” porn, porn that hits the spot. Along with several interviewees, they describe a different feeling that comes with watching gay porn, which feels to them more like “play-acting”, as opposed to the violence in porn featuring men and women. Because porn quickly leads to bigger questions, and Barton follows the flow of conversation as those questions come up, they also articulate powerfully the affirmative power of words on hearing the word cisgender spoken for the first time:

In a field, I almost cried. Those words that you’ve read, that are important to you, but nobody ever says them out loud, it’s a special kind of loneliness.

An 80-something man provides an remarkable perspective, discovering softcore porn in pulpy novels, and witnessing the transition to hardcore internet porn in his 40s. Numerous women and men describe their feeling that mainstream porn debases women and is a tool of patriarchy, that porn is inherently violent and that men copy that violence into their sexual interactions with women after being exposed to porn during their youth. Barton and the interviewees ruminate on this theme throughout, but I was struck by a small but revealing interaction:

[Polly:] I think if someone asked to come on my face I would freak out.

[Interviewee:] If they asked?

Hah. If they asked, or if they did.

I’d be like, Oh, that’s very polite.

I think Barton has succeeded in what she set out to do, to start conversations. Pornchats for everyone!

Gay rating: 4/5 for numerous interviews with queer folk and discussions about queer porn.