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.
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. Porn: An Oral History is her second book. She lives in Bristol.
Matt Rowland Hill is a journalist, critic, and author.
Paywalled but a great piece here by Rob Doyle — one of the best critics around for my money — on Porn: An Oral History by Polly Barton. https://t.co/y5VfPU6K16 https://t.co/Uh1wOXJPRb
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“The conversations felt raw and different, a bit like being teenagers again and speaking for the first time about things that really mattered to you but you didn’t know how to talk about,” says Polly Barton of her year of talking to people about porn. https://t.co/R34rdq4JK7
'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