276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Porn: An Oral History

£6.995£13.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

I'm not about to set rules for how other women should make porn, but I do think this is one area in which an adult filmmaker would be making a mistake by not departing from the norm a bit. More than any other single aspect of typical, male fantasy-focused porn, the money shot is something our female fans and members say they'd like to see handled differently. Witty, exuberant, also melancholy, and crowded with intelligence – Fifty Soundsis so much fun to read. Barton has written an essay that is also an argument that is also a prose poem. Let’s call it an oblique adventure story, whose hero is equipped only with high spirits, and a ragtag band of phonemes.’– Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors

Your support changes lives. Find out how you can help us help more people by signing up for a subscription 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.’ I think because I felt as though porn was more of a taboo. I very, very much from the outset did not want this to be a book that came down on either side of the Is Porn Good or Bad debate. My sense was that the debate itself and how incendiary it can get is a key part in shaping people’s feelings around porn and the discomfort and the shame we feel feeds into that. A lot of what we covered could definitely have been covered under the title of masturbation, but I felt like by making it about porn, I was getting all that and more.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. You have to be when you aspire to break into the porn business. There’s the specter of AIDS. Family rejection. An unavoidable scarlet letter that is forever branded onto those individuals who are brazen— or disturbed, or adventurous—enough to be paid to perform sexual acts on camera. Shine-Louise Houston: The mainstream is always going to be the mainstream. They've been branching out a little bit. But it's harder for them to change. It's the tiny companies that can do radical things. Now, where technology has radicalized filmmaking, you have a multitude of new voices telling stories. There're a lot of young filmmakers who are pushing the boundaries of what porn is and what sex is, and I think that's amazing. My hope is that there will be a young underground filmmaker takeover. It's kind of happening now.

This book explores a random sampling of peoples experiences and relationships with porn, and the conversations they have about it, from an entirely unresearched position-- ostensibly to maintain the everyday-ness and everyman-ness of our interactions with porn. 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. Polly Barton is well aware that a world in which the great majority of people are exposed to sex in their teens or childhood via pornography – which often portrays the subjugation of women – is troubling. She is aware that this status quo has emerged suddenly and inescapably, with little regulation or study of its effects. She is aware that the question of whether politically “incorrect” desires are innate or exacerbated by this state of affairs is one of urgent importance. To explore this question, and others, is the promise of her book. Sadly, it is a promise unfulfilled. None of this is enough. We desperately need a book to go deeper: how do our desires come about? What should we do about them? Is it wrong to feel alienated from one’s sexuality? How can we treat others ethically? When is a “power imbalance” too much? What are the conditions for consent? There are paradoxes in the world of sex, and new norms are being violently hashed out. In the face of this, is there any unifying principle of sexual ethics whatsoever? As it is, it seems that sex is an arena in which no moral or philosophical progress can be made, even by those who bill themselves as its most astute observers. I thought the premise for this book was quite interesting as put forth in the introduction. However, I found myself almost constantly wishing that this book was put together by someone else. Not necessarily someone more knowledgeable, because that's part of the project, but rather someone less...basic and cringe? Polly Barton is a god awful interlocutor for this project-- her own opinions come up so much and steer the conversations so completely. When someone is expressing a quite different opinion that hers, the mode shifts, palpably, into the interoggotive rather than conversational. I think she would have made a great interviewee but her presence was overwhelming and there are only so many times I want to hear variations of, "I feel weird about porn, and I have judged others quite harshly about it in the past. Essentially, I think its mostly bad. Do you guys think that's bad??" Maybe she could have just spoken to a therapist. Or, I think this could have been an amazing blog, with one interview a week as an ongoing project and commitment to continuous investigation.I think the title of 'An Oral HIstory' (however punning) is misleading and set up expectations for me that the book doesn't fulfil. This isn't a 'history' at all and doesn't have any intellectual or scholarly underpinning, and doesn't explore the topic of porn historically. 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.’

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment