Polly Barton

The Publisher Says: How do we talk about porn? Why it is that when we do talk about porn, we tend to retreat into the abstract? How do we have meaningful conversations about it with those closest to us? In Porn: An Oral History, her extraordinary second book, Polly Barton interrogates the absence of discussion around a topic that is ubiquitous and influences our daily lives. In her search for understanding, she spent a year initiating intimate conversations with twenty acquaintances of a range of ages, genders and sexualities about everything and anything related to porn: watching habits, emotions and feelings of guilt, embarrassment, disgust and shame, fantasy and desire. Soon, unfolding before her, was exactly the book that she had been longing to encounter - not a traditional history, but the raw, honest truth about what we aren't saying. A landmark work of oral history written in the spirit of Nell Dunn, Porn is a thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I really wanted a deeper experience of this read, something that didn't simply slip into my eyeholes frictionlessly, leaving behind a vaguely dirty, slightly disappointed emptiness.

Quite a part from the awful wordplay, that is my sincere opinion. Where the idea was a very interesting opportunity to dive into the deep end of a human obsession with porn with ample evidence that dates back to dynastic Egypt, five thousand years!, it left my old-man self instead with the skeevy sense of having eavesdropped on my grandchildrens' drunken dissection of what they and their friends thought about sex. I guess it would open up a young, or a sheltered, person's eyes, but for me the conversation I wanted to participate in was not here.… (mer)