My Year of Talking About Porn

“And did the topic of female masturbation ever come up, in those conversations with your friends?”

I was talking to an 82-yearold man, a friend of a friend, whom I had emailed to ask if he would meet me to talk about porn. As I spoke, I observed how smoothly the words left my lips. I did not even blush. “Wow,” I thought, “you’ve changed.”

How did I end up in the living room of an octogenarian, talking about the Kama Sutra? Let me begin a little farther back.

Late one night in 2020 I got a text message from a man who should not, at least from my perspective, have been attempting to initiate sexual contact with me. The message read, “I’m watching porn.”

That was all that it said, but those three words sent me into a state of confusion. I had no idea how to read the text. Was this flirting? Or was it intended to make me uncomfortable? Or was it signaling his adherence to a moral code of radical honesty? Did we now live in a world where this was like saying “I’m watching football”?

The more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that I did not know how to read that text because I did not know what I thought about porn or how other people perceived it. Growing up in Britain, I received wildly different messages about it: Porn served a fundamental human need; porn glorified and glamorized sexual violence toward women; porn encouraged sexual experimentation and creativity; porn was tacky; porn was racist, ableist and misogynist. I knew that there was, ostensibly, good porn and bad porn, but I was not really sure where the difference between the two lay, and I had never really had a proper, frank conversation about any of it. With anyone.

I brought it up in previous relationships in an attempt to bridge a gulf I thought I sensed, but discussions often descended into arguments or silence. The truth was, I would very soon be visited by a feeling that I might not be able to handle knowing about my partner’s porn usage, and then I would want to shut the whole thing down.

I know that there are people who will happily talk about porn and masturbation in any forum, but from the glimmers of discomfort I spied in the eyes of those around me when the subject came up even cursorily during bookish conversations with colleagues or drinks with friends, most people I encountered did not fall into that category. Rather than just let this realization slip from my awareness, I became obsessed.

The silence around the topic felt oppressive. I wanted to understand the role that porn occupies in normal people’s lives, and to do that, I would need to talk to people — I would have to ask them if and how they consumed it and what they thought about it.

Over one year, I talked to 19 people about porn — some over Zoom during lockdown, others after the restrictions lifted. The group was small — just people who responded to an email I sent out widely to friends and acquaintances canvassing for participants. As it happened, my interlocutors comprised a variety of ages, sexualities, genders and ethnicities.

Before my early porn chats, I felt sick with nerves. Words were hard to get out, and I could feel myself blush. And there were agonizing moments when I ran up against a silence that I had no idea how to fill. But with the agony came a sort of euphoria: The conversations felt like being teenagers again and speaking for the first time about things that really mattered to you but you did not know how to talk about.

And once the momentum was established, the fascinating details of people’s lives began to spill out: There was the new mother who watched porn and prayed that the baby monitor wouldn’t go off — a habit she kept from her husband; the man who had not watched porn until he was 37, then baptized himself with a 24-hour marathon; the man who narrated tales about the people watching porn on the computers in the public library where he worked; the woman who regularly attended a virtual strip club with her housemates; the man who used to identify as a former porn addict but now questioned the usefulness of the term.

We talked about what “good porn” and “bad porn” meant for us. Most of my conversation partners could easily articulate what “good porn” meant for them in the sense of arousal, but many gestured toward “good” in some more general sense, too. Like porn that did not simply drag out the same tropes, that included a diversity of bodies and afforded them agency. Porn that showed genuine rather than feigned arousal or that at least felt that way. Porn that the viewer could be sure had been uploaded consensually. And we discussed the ways that we felt porn entered our relationships. Sometimes positively, by helping us to identify what we want, but sometimes it made us feel we had to follow the same tired scripts and inhabit the same old roles.

I imagined that talking so much about it might leave me knowing exactly what I thought, but by the time I was done, I was left with more uncertainty, but less torment. There was a big reduction in my embarrassment levels, already obvious by the time I recorded my 19th and final chat, with the 82-year-old man. But I also felt newly confident that I could have a discussion about porn in a future relationship that would not have to end in explosions or silence — and I was not the only one.

Several participants got in touch afterward to tell me that the experience of getting through the both-of-us-are uncomfortable stage with me had allowed them to broach the subject with their partners.

The thing I came to realize very clearly is that not speaking about something over time can foster a defensive stance in which shame is liable to blossom. Even if we have little to be ashamed of. We should, most of us, be talking about porn more than we are.

Chatting with an octogenarian about the Kama Sutra.