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 likeably earnest interlocutor, in her introduction Barton comes across as a semi-naif, candid about her squeamishness and ignorance around her chosen subject. None of this disqualifies her from undertaking the project, which is one of ethical and emotional enquiry. She owns up to an array of worries and meta-worries around writing about porn, including the seemingly widespread and surely exhausting one of being a ‘bad feminist’. We learn that Barton, who is in her thirties and is a translator of Japanese literature, has never really discussed pornography before, even with her friends – a faintly surprising admission that, it transpires, is echoed by a number of her subjects, both male and female. I was molested by my father, who is now deceased. That experience definitely messed up my mind. From that I went into the falling path of being a porn star. You start with being with a pimp to being a stripper. And after the dancing I went into the porn business. At first it was only for money, but now I feel like this is where I belong, because I am controlling my own destiny. I love being on camera… I’m a total attention whore. It’s a screwed-up situation how I got here, but I’m now very happy where I am. Deep Throat entrenched money shots in the industry, but it didn't establish where they ought to be shot. Experimentation with the location of the money shot continued into the 1980s.

MR. MARCUS: I would get asked if I did gay movies. And I think that’s something that is in people’s minds when it comes to guys in the industry. But it’s not something that you have to do. There are bisexual men out there… And there are gay men out there. I don’t cross that line because I’m not interested in that type of sexuality. But if that’s your thing, that’s cool. John Stagliano: When you do a cumshot, you should do it on the most beautiful part of a woman's body. If a girl has a pretty face, cumming on that emphasizes it. The face is the most communicative thing we have. It's the most interesting thing to look at in general on a woman's body—unless she does not have a pretty face.

Porn: An Oral History

the one non-meta insight which I thought was interesting/useful was the continual revisiting of the theme of a gulf between men and women, between porn consumers and non-porn consumers, perhaps even between any two given consumers. I think the text made a decent case - just by demonstrating the catharsis of talking - that talking will be the first step to bridging that gulf 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.’ The book’s format is singularly well-suited to its subject matter, precisely because the issue of pornography is so complex, and our feelings about it so riddled with contradictions. In a terrain where polemic seems to lead inexorably to moralism, discursive dialogue is not just an artistic choice but almost an ethical imperative. In Porn: An Oral History, the medium is quite literally the message.’ One thing I found really interesting about this book is the parallels I saw between the discussions in the book and discussions I’ve had with friends and acquaintances about romance novels. Who’s writing them, who’s reading them, who are they for? Also the discussions that inevitably come up around the fine, yet sometimes arbitrary-feeling line between representation and fetishization. And while I don’t think it’s to the same extent, there is also the shame that is associated with both watching porn and reading romance. I think things are changing when it comes to reading romance, but it’s still generally viewed as something shameful, a guilty pleasure, much as porn is. Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops

Mostly, I was absorbed by the outliers, like the straight man who, from the age of fifteen to the age of thirty-seven, simply did not watch porn: ‘I just found it so banal and objectifying and I couldn't inhabit any of those positions – I didn’t want to be the headless horseman.’ Such perspectives felt relatively novel. The interviewees who were aware of their outlier status also seemed more empathetic than those who opted for the ‘of course I masturbate to porn like anyone else’ line. Such rote defences makes a person sound insincere. And Barton identifies this insincerity in more social contexts:Darren Kerr: If you look at cumshots in film, where it's not happening, it becomes focused around "couple's porn" and what's been crudely classified as "women's porn" today… [But as better data on consumer desires come out of digital porn,] I think there's going to be fewer men than anticipated who enjoy facials. I could see a shift toward naturalistic sex. You'll see the end being more than just drowning a woman in cum or squirting her in the face with your ejaculate. An interviewee sums up the anxiety on this topic as he remembers his own teenaged discovery of porn: ‘There aren’t many things that teenage boys consume on such a regular basis during that critical period of identity formation. It’s like learning a language. That’s what I was doing: I was learning a language of sex.’ Rather than provide something with a claim to objectivity,” she writes, “a representation of the full range of thoughts and opinions or, heaven forbid, which attempted to locate some kind of ‘standard’ or majority position, I wanted with this book to set my sights on what it looked like to talk about these things.” This book: a portrait of a young woman as language-learner, as becoming-translator, as becoming-writer, in restless search of her life. It is about non-understanding, not-knowing, vulnerability, harming and hurt; it is also about reaching for others, transformative encounters, unexpected intimacies, and testing forms of love. It is a whole education. It is extraordinary. I was completely bowled over by it.’– Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art