by
Polly Barton
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[...] The main reason I liked it was that it increasingly struck me as a very generative thing to do: to push through the embarrassment, to change your feelings about doing something by exposure, to wilfully enter into conversational territory where both parties felt vulnerable and to allow yourselves to be in a space of experimentation. I felt for myself how freeing it was to talk about this stuff, and I liked watching my conversational partners having the same realization.
This is more of a general observation that extends wider than just porn, but I feel that in the queer community – or maybe I should say among millennials and gen Z, because it’s just as much of a generational thing – the backlash against sex being taboo, and against unhealthy beauty standards and all that, has been to make it this friendly, approachable thing, and I don’t really like that either. The thing that I have an absolute loathing of is sex workshops. People go to fisting workshops! I honestly think that’s unhinged. Sex is not a group activity! It’s not recreational, you can’t learn fisting the way you learn to play volleyball, you know what I mean? I just think it’s crazy. But yes, I feel like there’s this push for that to be the new normal. You know: let’s not make anything taboo anymore, let’s not make anything private anymore. It’s now this social thing, and that doesn’t sit right with me either because sex is still something intimate.
lol
[...] A friend of mine, my cousin, stopped drinking alcohol, but he didn’t tell me that. We went out to a bar in Soho and he ordered a bottle of vodka. I didn’t know he was in AA at that time. He made me drink a bottle of vodka in front of him so that he could get a kind of thrill from it.
[...] I asked him why he was doing it and he said, I want to tell my sponsor at AA that I watched my cousin drink a bottle of vodka and I didn’t do it. I said, So what do you do now that you don’t drink or smoke? How do you get your kicks? To which he replied, I have my white noise. For three hours before I go to bed, I watch the most violent pornography I can find. I don’t masturbate. I don’t even feel anything. I just watch it, and I don’t think about anything. Hearing that, I thought: My God, man. Have a vodka. Which is all to say, there’s something numbing about it. It numbs relations. That’s what got me about those young women or old women that I slept with in America. I know I sound ridiculous when I say this, but I’ll say it anyway: I felt like I was not a person – I was a function. They weren’t relating to me as a person. They had their set of tricks that they want performed and then that’s it, and it just felt totally anonymous. I’ve never seen non-anonymous pornography. That’s my basic objection. Maybe there is some amazing feminist pornography somewhere.
lmao
The issue has to be: what lies beyond the current relationship our society has with it, and how does one get there? Can pornography be singular – can it escape cliché and script? One of the terrible things about pornography is that it’s so anonymous. It’s my cousin watching three hours of white noise – as he calls it – of people being tortured. What is that? But take it seriously, he literally doesn’t remember shit: pornography becomes not so much an experience of life as an a-experience, a chasm, a place in which life stops happening… I’m used to telling stories and they’re about human beings who have experiences, and they change, and the same is true of you and what you write. Yet so much of porn for me feels like it’s about – it’s not necessarily what it needs to focus on – nullity and boredom and forgetfulness and tiredness. How do you tell a story about that? How does one get at that? It’s not even the worst part of human beings. It is evil, but it’s not the evil of death or murder or something Dostoyevsky would write about. It’s the forgetfulness of someone who can’t even get a hard-on masturbating. How do you write about their boredom looking at the scene they used to masturbate to three weeks ago, their compulsive desire for new content, and their nagging realization that they have to go to the office tomorrow? That’s a strange scene to write.
The first time for me was maybe watching Boogie Nights? And like you with Rachel Ryan RR, the standout memory from that was seeing someone with an erection. Full-frontal images of women were incredibly common, and I’d seen people fucking in TV series, but seeing a man with an erection I thought: Oh wow, this is the real shit. I think I found it – again, like you – really arousing, but also a dangerous feeling and somehow unpleasant at the same time. I remember I had this tiny little TV with an integral VHS player, and for some reason I had the Boogie Nights video, and I remember watching it on that, and feeling this real sense of darkness and seediness. Being turned on by it and not really wanting to be turned on by it, the way that complemented the whole experience of watching that film.