A dive into the oldest form of human expression. Although severely distorted by capitalistic, sexist exploitation which uses human (often womens') bodies as fodder to feed a seemingly-insatiable desire for MORE, this book elucidates the history and cultural significance of pornography outside of this paradigm.

I really wanted to like this book. A non-fiction book about porn published by Fitzcarraldo Editions? And written by a great literary translator (and a very good writer - I loved her "Fifty Sounds")... I was sure I would be blown away by it.

And then I wasn't. The thing is - there are so many great topics mentioned, but are just skimmed through. It's not an essay collection or a non-fiction book that one could expect; it's basically a transcript of 10+ conversations with anonymous people about porn. And sex. And masturbation. And other random topics that come up.

There is so much to unpack in regards to our attitude towards porn, sex work and sex in general and "Porn: An Oral History" just barely scraped the surface. The conversations are random and chaotic, often they are more about masturbation and sex in general than porn. There is almost no deeper context, nothing that would make me want to explore the topic further. Especially if it's for example a a confession of an anonymous person about their niche fetish or someone's recollections of the first time they saw porn with friends when they were teens.

I wish I had the mental strength to abandon it after few conversations, but somehow I kept hoping there would be *something*, so I kept forcing myself to read further.

This might have worked really well if it was a podcast. Or an online feature in a lifestyle magazine. To sum up - I just don't see the point of this book.

2 stars rounded up.

2.5 rounded up

After reading the brilliant Fifty Sounds I was really excited to see what Polly Barton would write next. Whilst I found this mildly diverting, the title is misleading (at least it was for me) and the format - conversations between the author and various individuals about porn and their relationship with it/feelings about it - ended up feeling incredibly repetitive. Maybe one to dip in to if you have an interest in the topic, but if you come in expecting an actual history or any in-depth analysis you'll likely leave somewhat disappointed.

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 academic underpinning, and doesn't explore the topic of porn historically.

What it is is Barton chatting to a group of people (16, I think) and transcribing their conversations: there's no analysis, no specialist knowledge - this is sort of what you'd get if you collected a group of mates and everyone opened up about their porn habits. Everyone sounds urban, intelligent, sophisticated; there is diversity in terms of genders and sexuality but not obviously so in terms of age or class - and lots of commonalities in how they think of porn: everyone's read the broadsheets, is worried about the lack of representation, the misogyny, the persistence of male fantasising even in porn 'for women'.

This is somewhere between Nancy Friday's 'My Secret Garden' but without the reach of people who contributed to that and Lisa Taddeo's 'Three Women' revealing the secrets of other people's sex lives. Sadly, though, this feels quite repetitive and doesn't say anything that we don't already know.

It's a shame that when there is so much academic interest in issues of 'pornography' and how it exists historically, what cultural work the 'erotic' and 'sexual' is doing both in the past and now, that this book doesn't engage with any of that. There are a couple of mentions of Judith Butler's performative theorising and Audrey Lorde on the erotic - but this is essentially what your bright postgrad mates would say after a few cocktails: interesting but disappointingly uncontextualised.