Porn Shows What People Still Won’t Say About Sex

This secrecy, coupled with the assumed ubiquity of porn, is the subject that animates Porn. Barton is a writer and translator who has translated numerous Japanese novels to English. She won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for her first nonfiction book, Fifty Sounds, a personal account of her interest in the Japanese language and her time living in Japan in her twenties. Around the time of the pandemic, she writes in her introduction, she found herself drawn to thinking about porn and the veil of secrecy that sits over it. “I worried about what porn stood for, I worried about what it has done to us, is doing to us and will do to us, and I worried that this worry made me a bad feminist,” she writes. She started thinking about how she might embark on a book to investigate how we really use and think about porn.

She felt ill equipped to conduct a comprehensive academic survey, which would necessitate asking a large number of subjects formulaic questions. Instead she came to the idea of interviewing a group of her friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Intimate, honest conversations about porn were what she felt she was missing, and what she thought other people might be missing too. This idea of secrecy, and the related shame, comes up again and again in the conversations in Porn, and is often much more entrenched than I would have anticipated. One of the things that surprised me most is that several of the subjects say they have never discussed porn (and sometimes even masturbation) with anyone, even with their own partners when in long-term relationships. Porn, though widespread and widely accepted, even celebrated, in the abstract, appears to have remained unspeakable for some (maybe even many) people.

Barton emailed a number of her contacts to see who might be willing to take part, and the resulting book consists of the transcripts of 19 conversations, which feel frank, refreshing, and often surprising. Each of Barton’s subjects is anonymous, which I believe is essential for the conversations to be basically honest. They are described only by skeleton information about their race, age, sexual orientation, and relationship status. (Although their life experience and the kind of work they do comes up in the conversations.) There are nine men (including one transgender man), nine women, and one nonbinary person. Some interviews are quite similar in their scope and perspective, and the type of person interviewed is reflective of Barton’s milieu (academics and people who have lived in Japan and work in teaching or translation are very well represented). But I found that, even when certain conversations covered similar ground, the overlap was actually instructive.