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.
‘[Barton's] uncertainty is key to the success of her project, opening it up for discussion rather than narrowing around polemic. After finishing the book I found myself talking to friends about porn in a way I never had before… Much of our contemporary economy is constructed to hook us to online platforms on which porn makes up a vast amount of content, accessible to anyone old enough to work a phone. To avoid thinking about the cultural significance of that is not just absurd, but a denial of both responsibility and reality. Barton wants to restore our ability to deal with this stuff, and the first step, as she puts it, is to talk about it.’
— Sophie Elmhirst, Sunday Times ‘Book of the Week’
‘Barton’s triumph is that she has [talked honestly about porn] and it is the most luminous thing in the book…This book will stay with me…’
— Tanya Gold, Telegraph
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘Polly Barton is a brilliant, learned and daring writer.’
— Joanna Kavenna, author of ZED
‘The book’s format is singularly well-suited to its subject matter, precisely because the issue of pornography is so complex, and our feelings about it so riddled with contradictions. In a terrain where polemic seems to lead inexorably to moralism, discursive dialogue is not just an artistic choice but almost an ethical imperative. In Porn: An Oral History, the medium is quite literally the message.’
— Houman Barekat, Frieze
‘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.’
— Caroline West, Irish Independent
‘The format and the interviewees’ vivid personalities ensure a welcome conversational lightness, while the interrogatory style is more appealing than the prescriptive tone that abounds in contemporary non-fiction. At their best, the conversations display a healthy willingness to acknowledge that one’s prejudices may be arbitrary, one’s moral self-image shot through with hypocrisy.’
— Rob Doyle, Literary Review
‘The subjects are honest in their anonymity, measured and pensive. They act as small slices of time and conversation extracted by Barton through curiosity and carried forward onto the page with an unobtrusive delicacy. It invites reflection and will hopefully start the ball rolling at home on more than a few conversations about porn.’
— Josephine Jay, The Skinny
Polly Barton is a Japanese literary translator. Her translations include Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, and Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki. She won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Fifty Sounds. She lives in Bristol.
