Ahead of her appearance at WORD Christchurch, author Polly Barton tells Alex Casey what she learnt from talking to the people in her life about pornography.
Of all the conversational gems that twinkle throughout Polly Barton’s Porn: An Oral History, one dazzles in its simple summary of the infinite uncertainties and contradictions within the topic. SEVEN, an anonymised woman in her mid-thirties, is musing over how the discussion around pornography so often ignores the wider forces of patriarchy that have created it. “We are all – not just men, but women too – a product of this,” she says.
“And I don’t know where I begin and end.”
That impossible tangle of what is innate and what is learned, what is liberation and what is exploitation, what is pleasure and what is performance, is at the heart of Barton’s new non-fiction book. Containing 19 bracingly honest conversations with people in her life about pornography, subjects of the “porn chats” include everyone from an 82-year-old man on Lady Chatterley’s Lover to a queer woman in her 20s on having porn marathons with her flat.
“I started the book because there was this really curious absence, this dearth of conversation, around porn in my life,” says Barton. Her stress of living with this “dreadful silence” is vividly conjured in the book, likened to everything from “a can of worms that feels too wormy to open” to a “hysterical rat trapped inside my chest.” In 2020, the rat burst through and the worms spilled forth, and she began Having the Talk.
Barton makes it very clear in both our interview and the book itself that she is not an academic or even an expert in pornography. Most of her literary work has been in Japanese translation and her first book, Fifty Sounds, is a collection of essays about life in Japan. And yet, she felt a sense of urgency to open up a dialogue, finding inherent value in conversations with real people who are “allowed to try on ideas and say things they might regret later.”
The barely edited interviews feel like the antithesis of the online discourse, where complex issues are squashed into character limits or pastel infographics, quotes are removed from context, and everyone logs on with what Barton describes as an “unforgiving attitude” seldom seen IRL. “The more that becomes the norm of how we express ourselves, the harder it is to say ‘I don’t really know’ or, worse still, admit that you got something wrong,” she says.
Given this, delving into something as complex and personal as pornography was a daunting task. “This is something I’d never spoken about, so I didn’t know how to do it,” Barton says. “I’d also never seen it modelled before and so there was this total terror of saying something politically incorrect.” She soon realised that offering herself up, with all her own contradictions and confessions, allowed both interviewees and readers alike to respond generously.
These responses aren’t necessarily jam-packed with raunch and shock (“one person told me they thought it would be much more explicit”, says Barton), but thoughtful reflections and casual yet extremely intimate revelations. You’ll hear from someone with a burping fetish, another who was first sent porn by their own father in a group chat, another who recalls “fish and chip Fridays” with the lads, where porn would blare on the TV in the background.
As Barton herself moved through these conversations, she also felt the rat in her chest getting slightly less hysterical with every question. When she was interviewing ELEVEN, an 82 year-old man, there was a moment that she knew her fortitude had strengthened. “I just asked him ‘what about female masturbation? Was that discussed?’” she recalls. “It wasn’t that I didn’t feel any embarrassment whatsoever, but I could move past it.”
Talking about porn against the post-apocalyptic pandemic background also helped. “Everything was so messed up, I thought I might as well just do this thing, because life doesn’t look like it used to and god knows what is going to happen next.” With the world in crisis, people seemed more open to talking about personal and difficult things. “It felt like we were stepping into this phase of throwing away some rules and social etiquettes, which really helped.”
The pandemic is a major character in the conversations themselves, as is the way that the internet has transformed porn. Barton herself opens the book remembering the porn section at her local video shop in rural Japan, and the sheepish men who would do “the pink curtain dance” clutching plastic cases. It’s a far cry from pornography in 2023, where at least 1.36 million hours of new and free pornographic content is uploaded to PornHub every year.
“The speed and the ease of the internet means that you don’t have to even leave the house and it’s so quick to access that you can better compartmentalise it,” Barton says. “Obviously, people are still conscious of what they’re doing, but I feel like it better enables an emotional disconnect that allows you to form habits without questioning them in a way that you might have had to do if it was somehow connected with the outside world.”
She is quick to add this feeling of disconnection is not unique to porn use. “It’s part of this wider system of things that are trying to get our attention constantly and keep us desiring and distracted,” she says. “I think social media and internet porn are very similar in that we are very much still the guinea pigs for it, and people are only just waking up to the fact that just because something is available, it doesn’t mean that it’s actually good for you.”
While she’s opened the can of worms and soothed her inner rat, Barton freely admits to still not having all the answers, but now feeling more OK about that. She has found the phrase “sex ambivalence” a useful one in describing some of her conflicting feelings towards some facets of porn. “The term gives you scope to still approach with a feminist sex positive attitude, while also accommodating the reality that it contains some negative elements and discomfort,” she says.
There remains so much to discuss on the topic of pornography, but Barton is pleased to have played even a small role in the conversation. “The feedback that makes me the happiest is when people tell me that they read the book and then started talking to people in their lives about porn” she says. “That really was the whole point for me: the importance of having those conversations yourself, even if it feels a little frightening.”
Polly Barton appears in WORD Christchurch on Saturday 26 August.
