Book Review: Porn — An Oral History by Polly Barton
What do we want? What do we need?
People don't read websites, they scan them. Tracking tools reveal our eyes make tiny movements—saccades—as we search for something relevant. For instance, when I'm looking at a site I often find my eyes alighting on words like 'Nicola Sturgeon' or 'New Statesman' or ‘Neville Southall’ and it seems clear that my brain is alert for the appearance of my own name. Perhaps this is why Polly Barton is obsessed with porn. She sees a phrase like ‘Porn Baron’ and momentarily thinks it is to do with her.
The point I'm trying to make is that we are not fully intentional beings. Like all species, we are the product of millions of years of evolution and one of our main evolutionary concerns is mating. It should be no surprise that such instincts can be hijacked by things like online porn.
Alas, the concept of evolution is entirely absent from Porn: An Oral History, which transcribes nineteen conversations with a variety of Barton's acquaintances.1 Her ostensible motivation is to understand what goes on in the private realm of the erotic imagination. For Barton, porn is political and like many young women, she is deeply confused about the mixed messages she has received as a feminist.
Reading this book, it feels like the fundamental law of contemporary feminism is that you must, at all times, be sex-positive. You must never kink shame, sex-worker shame, or judge someone by their fetishes; as long what you're doing is consensual, it's fine. This law is, however, in conflict with her view that the majority of porn is a result of a heteronormative misogynist patriarchal society that has perverted our desires.
Watching Barton attempt to reconcile these two ideas is the most illuminating part of the book. She and her interviewees say things like:
"I don’t want to be a prude and I want to be sex-positive"
"I don't want to condemn porn because I think people should watch things they want to watch."
"I’m conscious of trying to be sex-work positive, and pro-advocating for sex workers, to the point that I can get myself tied in knots."
"I don’t want to be too gender essentialist"
"I worry this is a boomer attitude, but I really do fear for a lack of boundaries and regulation."
"Everyone knows that really everyone is consuming it. Or do we? I don't know."
Barton is neurotic about how the secrecy of porn affects her relationship with her boyfriend. She can't seem to bear the idea that a partner of hers might have a fantasy that she doesn't approve of and which isn't politically correct. There is a constant battle between her instinctual discomfort and her sex-positive politics. Again and again, she and her participants feel the need to emphasise that liking brutal videos is fine as long as everyone consents.
I would love to see Barton in dialogue with someone like
, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, who makes the point that consent doesn’t exist in a vacuum. What we consent to is determined by societal norms and the norms of online porn are pretty gross.Even using the word ‘gross’ might make some people accuse me of being a prude. For pro-porn advocates, it is as if pornography is a force of nature, like Wilhelm Reich's orgone, that must flow freely to avoid disease. How is that working out for us? We've had twenty years of hardcore porn streaming to every human with a computer. Are people happier now? Or are they increasingly impotent and sexless?
There is a certain psychological interest in reading about people's porn habits, but the book soon becomes repetitive and tiresome, much like pornography itself, though in this case there is no pay-off.2 It is fun to read conversations, with all their evasions, uncertainties and lack of jargon. By far the worst section of the book is the concluding chapter, after the conversations, where you get sentences that no one would ever speak out loud:
"In our present-day society, the productive apparatus endeavours not only to sell us products but to create needs, and ultimately, induce addictive behaviour in us."
Rather than see the book as an attempt to wrestle with contemporary pornography, perhaps it is better to see it as part of the rationalistic Enlightenment tradition, the very tradition that Barton wants to reject.
As
wrote on Twitter:"Baudrillard saw porn as another example of the Western obsession with tearing away all veils—he thus linked it to both science and the media. For the West, nothing can remain hidden: there must be total transparency."
Both Barton's desire to talk openly about porn habits and the ubiquity of porn itself is unerotic. It appears we need taboos and mystery to make sex sexy. The sexual revolution said let go of all your repressions and we'll all be free, but letting go has brought us to a point where we're having less sex than ever before, where people are imprisoned in their individualised desires. Perhaps the most instructive conversation in the book was with an eighty-year-old man who hadn't seen any hardcore porn until he was in his forties. Previously, he had to read pulp novels that contained mild innuendo, yet seemed to get no less pleasure than he did when he finally watched porn—with the additional pleasure of using the imagination. This seems far more erotic than the toxic cornucopia we experience online.
In the book, this never feels like a box-ticking exercise, however, a range of modern identity groups are present: gay, straight, queer, cis, trans, old, young, married, single, black, Asian, Latinx etc.
Barton mentions in the introduction that she could, instead, have written 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 really wish that she had, it would have been much less repetitive.
The problem I see with pornography-discourse is that people are unable to point to the problem as anything other than quantitative or binary—the problem is described as it being 'that it exists' rather than what the pornography is *like*. I suspect this is influenced by the discourse of 'objectification' which ignores the content of such works and sees them all as essentially identical. It then deals with them as a logical/linguistic phenomenon rather than something like literature—to be critically analysed by how it looks, what it says, and how it says it. In my view, our inability to grow up and acknowledge the existence of pornography and cultivate better pornographic tastes, stems from the fact that the sexual revolution was an abandoned revolution—more like the 1840s than Red October. I think the sexual revolution faded away and gave way to fragments of liberalism in a sea of prudishness, whether left-coded or right-coded. In my secondary schooling we were not shown images or diagrams of the external female genetalia. We were told to avoid pornography. The former omission is a disgrace born of prudishness and sexism. The latter dictat is a laughably unrealistic folly to preach to a room full of adolescents. Why on earth did they not teach us to look at pornography critically? Because that would acknowledge the existence of pornography. It would be a liberal response—and liberalism is always frightening, especially for a state-fuelled education system. I don't think we should be 'sex-positive' or 'sex-negative' because of the dissonance you describe. Instead, we should be sex-intelligent. We should think about pornography in the same way we think about any artistic production. No doubt the majority of pornographic works will be found wanting by such an analysis. The key is to understand what exactly is wrong about them, and not resort to the crutches of 'obscenity' or of 'objectification'.
Have you read 'How to do things with Pornography' by Nancy Bauer by the way? Peter McLaughlin recommended it to me and if you haven't already I will pass that on. I suspect it's a much better and more insightful account than the one you've reviewed—I thoroughly enjoyed it.