The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
A glimpse behind the pink curtain
Fascinating but unsatisfying, this ‘oral history’ of pornography bites off more than it can chew
368pp, Fitzcarraldo, T £13.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£13.99, ebook £5.99
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Polly Barton writes that, as a young woman, she stood by the pornography area in a video store – it had a bright pink curtain – and was fascinated, and afraid. “There’s a dreadful secret at the heart of everything,” she writes, “and I know what that secret is, and yet it still remains there.”
Porn engulfs us wordlessly. Like any art form it has the potential for joy, but mostly it consumes us, not we it, and the structure of this book, consciously or not, is a metaphor for this dynamic. Porn is a function of the subconscious, and there is simply too much of it for Barton to tidy away into a book. As a result, Porn: An Oral History collapses under the weight of its material.
When she began, Barton wanted to be comprehensive. I had hoped for chapters on porn’s relationship to trauma, and technology – but instead she chose to publish transcripts of 19 long interviews. This gives the book atmosphere and voice – few things are more intimate than hearing what pornography people use, and how it makes them feel – but, weighted towards millennials and progressives (Barton’s cohort), it asks more questions than it answers.
A Manichean struggle emerges from these interviews: between good porn and bad porn. (Only a fool will argue for no porn. We have porn from the Palaeolithic Age. Porn will find a way.) The evidence for the triumph of the second is overwhelming: the BDSM circulating on TikTok; the trend for choking and spitting; the monstrous volume. It is an expression of masculine dominance, in which women have no agency, and seek none.
“It’s fine to talk about sex as long as you’re talking about the man’s pleasure,” says a female interviewee of her youthful sexual experiences, “but anything around a woman feeling anything other than ‘it’s so dreamy’ was super-embarrassing. That’s kind of how we were raised, I guess.” I grew up in the 1980s and that was my experience too. Porn magnifies this: perhaps this explains the over-representation of BDSM in mainstream porn. A woman says: “I think it’s an absolute atrocity that women have been denied pleasure and been demonised for it.”
But there is good porn too. People film themselves and sell it because it excites them. “Since it’s now easier to make pornography, and dirt cheap,” an interviewee says, “all of a sudden, it’s become commercially viable to make porn around fantasies and kinks and sexualities that weren’t served before. Kids these days, they don’t know how good they have it!” Ethical porn is expensive: an Erika Lust film, for example – stylish, consensual – might cost 30 euros, presumably because her performers are properly paid.
But even among “millennials and gen Z”, with their sex positivity and “backlash against sex being taboo, and against unhealthy beauty standards and all that” there is resistance to a porn glut. “The thing that I have an absolute loathing of is sex workshops,” says one woman. “I honestly think that’s unhinged. Sex is not a group activity! I feel like there’s this push for that to be the new normal. You know: let’s not make anything taboo anymore, let’s not make anything private anymore”.
The best material here, for me, is from men: I already know how women of my generation feel. A gay man says he watched porn “bloopers”: outtakes from scenes where it went wrong. “I’m just a human being!” one of the – what, actors? – shouts, when he is mocked for his inability to perform. Another man talks about how porn dehumanised his sex life: “Even in relationships, I think the ideas people have got from porn have shaped people. Not expecting me to have an emotional – anything, really. Even with sex, you’ve still got to be a person. A whole person.”
A male interviewee, a writer, rages about porn so compellingly I hope he will write the sequel. “I think porn is a mechanism for not touching each other,” he says. “Because having a good sex life… necessitates being vulnerable,” he adds, “[and] pornography is a total evasion of that for most men, for sure.” He believes “porn should be annulled from this world” because it “becomes not so much an experience of life as an a-experience, a chasm, a place in which life stops happening”. He tells Barton, almost fiercely: “You have to get some men really talking honestly about sex and that’s hard. Because they won’t even talk honestly about it to themselves.” Barton’s triumph is that she has done this, and it is the most luminous thing in the book.
A man in his 80s tells her: “One of the lovely things about sex is that you grow into these things. You find someone and you take a journey, and if that journey is leaping on to the fastest train possible, you wonder what else is left.”
I finished this book with the sense that we have done to pornography what we have done to any animal flesh: produced it cheaply and lazily and made something largely noxious, though it does not have to be. Here, human desire is tragically self-loathing. This book will stay with me, though it did not give me everything I wanted. It is an unfinished piece. The place beyond the pink curtain could not be made safe: not by a woman so mesmerised by it.