Porn

'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.' - Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation 'I wasn't expecting nineteen conversations about porn to make me feel as I felt after reading this book: grateful and hopeful and wide-open. Porn is a generous, intimate commentary on how we relate to one another (or fail to) through the most unlikely of lenses.' - Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes 'Porn is a fascinating, timely and humane testament to the value of uninhibited conversation between grown-ups. It's 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.' - Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Checkout 19 'A writer of alarming talent.' - Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction '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.' - Adrian Nathan West, author of My Father's Diet 'Polly Barton is a brilliant, learned and daring writer.' - Joanna Kavenna, author of ZED