Well into my thirties, I was lucky enough to have friends with whom I could talk about anything. Anything—except the subjects of porn and masturbation. It had always been that way for me, outside of a few explosive arguments with ex-partners. The rest of the time we didn’t talk about it because we didn’t need to, because everyone was cool with it—or so our silence seemed to be saying. Except I was fairly clear that beneath this facade, I wasn’t cool with it—I’d almost never had conversations about porn, and because I hadn’t worked out my feelings and thoughts, I felt terrified to even begin. This seemed to indicate that I needed to bite the bullet and talk about it, and I imagined that other people probably did too.

So, over the course of 2020, when many of us were at home, I began to speak with friends and acquaintances on the topic of porn, recording and transcribing our conversations. Initially, I thought that if I published the chats at all, I would somehow incorporate them into essays—a safer and more literary and urbane strategy. Over time, I came to understand that these were conversations that needed to be presented as they were—in part to convince other people of the benefits of speaking about porn, and to give an insight into what those conversations could actually look like in practice. What follows are extracts from three of the nineteen porn chats I had.

 

ONE

A gay man in his early thirties. He lives in the United States, and is currently single.

What is good porn for you?

Good porn is no longer than twenty minutes long. Not to be overly virtuous, but I think that a lot of the porn I watched in the past—and probably the porn a lot of people consume—is pretty crappy and unethical. I’ve been interested in the idea of finding more ethical porn, less problematic porn. There’s more ethical stuff for straight people, a few sites. I’ve found a lot fewer for queer stuff, weirdly. 

What would ethical porn look like?

Porn that’s less about cum, more about intimacy. Less about these “sexual scripts” that seem to be a really tried-and-tested formula for what sex looks like when visualized. I’m less comfortable watching some of the stuff I used to watch because I feel like it’s programming me or it has programmed me and will continue to program me if I continue to consume it.

Reinforcing scripts about what sex should be like?

Absolutely, and about what bodies are attractive. The only way for me to really move beyond some of that generic shit that a lot of us assume is normal is to stop consuming it on a daily basis. Anything that I’m engaging with on a daily basis is going to mark me in some way. I’m not sure that watching problematic porn, even with a critical lens, is the answer for me.

Have you observed the way these scripts impact you?

Definitely. The annoying thing is, I’m aware of the scripts but there’s still something that draws me to certain formulas, because I’ve watched thousands of porn videos where you can guess what’s going to happen, step by step by step. You can guess who’s going to be in it, the types of bodies that they’ll have. I was going to say that’s definitely changing, but I don’t even know if it is. Go on Pornhub and it just still seems to be the same stuff. If anything, there’s a bit more aggressive stuff on mainstream sites than ever. 

Do you know what the part of you that’s drawn to the scripts wants?

Familiarity. The predictable is comfortable. It gives people a blueprint. It gives me a blueprint. It’s useful knowing how other people see the world, what other people expect in sex, what other people enjoy in sex. I think a lot of my ideas about what my hypothetical partner might enjoy used to come from seeing how people in porn react to people doing certain things. Like, Oh, that person in the video seems to really enjoy a finger up their arse. Then it becomes, Do I even like fingering or do I just think my partner might enjoy it?

And then, Do I know that they are actually enjoying it or are they performing this enjoyment because they also watch porn and think they should be enjoying it?

Are we just acting out porn every time we have sex? Are we just watching porn and then recreating it? Where’s the enjoyment? Where’s the actual pleasure? It’s so easy to go into autopilot and forget how fun sex can and should be.

Do you feel like the stage at which you start watching porn and the way in which you watch it is important in this? Does it matter whether your first encounters with sex are IRL or through porn?

Is anyone having sex before they’ve watched porn?! I’ve got this really vivid memory of being a young teenager—me and my friends at this particular train station with a news kiosk on the platform. You’d wait for a train to pull up to the station, and you’d time it right so that you could grab the porn magazines from the kiosk and run for the train. Some weeks we might do it more than once. That was where my consumption of sex began, because that was my first interaction with porn. It was theft and it was on a train platform and it was part of this heist.

Would you then take the magazines home?

I would and I’d be confused by all these boobs. So many boobs. Being a gay boy but still thinking to myself, I’m meant to like this, all of my friends like this, why don’t I like this?

As a gay boy looking at those straight porn magazines, was there enough male presence in there to be stimulating or was it all women?

It was basically all women. On some level, I was always searching through the pages to see stuff where women were interacting with men, and I don’t think I often found what I was looking for. Most of the people reading them don’t really want to be confronted by a dick. I preferred the images where there were men and women, but I never got into straight porn—it never made much sense to me, so I had a big period in my teens where I just didn’t watch porn. When I realized what homosexuality was, I didn’t switch to gay porn—that felt too scary. I just had no porn.

It felt too scary?

Being unsure about who I was then, consuming gay porn at that point might have tipped me over the edge. A gateway drug. Catholic schooling, through and through.

So what was it like when you eventually started watching gay porn?

It felt right and wrong at the same time. It felt right because I could tell I was more excited about what was going on, but it felt wrong in that it was so tied up with feeling uncomfortable in that identity and in my skin at the time. Once I started watching it, I couldn’t stop. It’d be daily consumption, in secret, with headphones on, blinds closed, when nobody else was home. It was a real shame cycle. Instant feelings of real aversion after I’d finished—clear browsing data, clear cookies, clear cache, whatever that even is. And my relationship with porn was really marked by that almost immediate feeling of discomfort after. I don’t know what motivated me to continue to watch porn, but I wouldn’t say it was pleasant.

At that time, all the bodies seemed identical—masculine-appearing men, having sex with what looked like their siblings. They were mainly white, everyone had abs, and all the bedrooms were the same. It was as if every studio had one bedroom and they just went in and used that one space.

Did you have a clear sense of what was missing or was it a sense of, This is what porn is?

I went as far as saying, This is what sex is. Sex is intercourse between models. I didn’t even start to think about what other people who didn’t look like that would be doing—maybe reading, or watching TV, but not having sex. Sex was for skinny, attractive, masculine men, at least in my consumption of gay stuff. That was partly because I probably wasn’t doing that much looking around. I went to the mainstream sites for gay porn because I didn’t really want to be online searching through lots of different stuff. I had it in my head that if I got too exploratory, that would be how I got caught, and I couldn’t get caught.

That sounds like a very powerful script to be going into sex with. Did it make your first real sexual encounters quite difficult?

It didn’t, because it made me very selective about whom I would have sex with. I went on to perpetuate those ideals in my sexual partners. The first few guys I slept with were all tall, built, and more masculine. It took a while to unlearn all of that. I’m still unlearning it.

Would you say that unlearning process was conscious?

More recently, it’s been conscious, to do away with the ends of that. I still have to regularly remind myself of basic shit that I’ve got to learn. I realized that being with someone conventionally attractive doesn’t have anything to do with their personality. It doesn’t mean they’ll be nice. It doesn’t mean they’ll be funny. I was dating people because I thought they were “hot” and realizing, Hold on a second, we have nothing in common. I don’t even think I realized I was unlearning it. I was just connecting dots and realizing that whatever gauge I was using to pick people whom I thought I was interested in just wasn’t working. It’s not easy looking back on my behaviour.

When I started learning how to date in my twenties, I’d gravitate toward masculinity.

I appreciate the scare quotes around “hot.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to find your partner attractive, and potentially that is something that you have to weigh up against them being a nice person. But I’m fascinated by “hotness” as received message, as social capital—how much do you think they’re hot because you think they’re hot, and how much do you think they’re hot because society has told you to think they’re hot? It’s easy to stand on your high horse and say, No, no, no, this is my personal taste, it’s nothing to do with social pressures, but it’s only once you start that process of unlearning, intentional or not, that you realize, Okay, no, I’m much more affected by these standards than I thought I was.

If the porn I was watching when I first found gay porn featured people with size 38 jeans, then the people I would’ve been drawn to when I first started dating would’ve looked different. Obviously, it’s not just porn—a lot of industries are to blame for how skinniness is so prioritized across genders. But fuck me, there aren’t many things that teenage boys consume on such a regular basis during that critical period of identity formation. It’s like learning a language. That’s what I was doing—I was learning a language of sex. I do want to watch more porn, I’ve realized. I just don’t know where to find it anymore. Of course this is not practical at all, but sometimes I think that the type of porn that I want to watch, I’d have to make or direct myself.

Have you ever felt that prospective sexual partners’ expectations of you are shaped by the porn that they’re watching? Are there special expectations that attach to you as a Black man?

Yeah, absolutely. Before I came out, whenever I interacted with women, there was an expectation that I’d be very masculine, very dominant and aggressive, and in fact, that’s pretty similar with men. That’s been my experience navigating the world through heterosexuality and navigating the world through homosexuality. A lot of people expect what they see in porn to be recreated in person, though that’s rarely explicitly verbalized. Even in relationships, I think the ideas people have gotten from porn have shaped people. Not expecting me to have an emotional anything, really. I can’t see a better candidate for what has shaped this other than porn.

That’s heartbreaking. It’s also illuminating, if not surprising, to think that what lies on the flip side of the “aggressive” stereotype is a total denial of someone’s emotional reality.

It’s not that I don’t want to be dominant sometimes. It’s just that that’s not how I always want to have sex. The expectation is that that’s where my preference has to begin and end whereas I’m like, Well, sometimes I want to be thrown around too. Being boxed in like that pretty much ended one of my earlier relationships. I’d initially accepted how fixed his views of me were, and it transferred outside of the bedroom, where he didn’t expect me to have feelings. It made me feel like a piece of meat. I’m a whole person! He wasn’t a bad person, it was just a bad fit.

Have you felt in the past like you’re being fetishized?

Definitely. There have been times where I’ve been talking to a white guy on an app and they’ve used the N-word. People have asked me if I’m into race play. There’ve been times where I’ve felt ignored. Obviously it’d be problematic to demand I get a response from everybody, but my experience and the experience of other friends of color who have navigated apps is one of being second-class citizens in that context.

For dating, or for sex as well?

I find there are more people who want to have sex with me than want to date me. For some people it can be about fulfilling a sexual fantasy, whether they say so or not, but it’s not meeting a potential partner. People are allowed not to be looking for anything serious, of course, but I’ve had the thing where someone’s not looking for something serious, so we just have sex, and then maybe a week or so later they’re in a committed, exclusive relationship with someone who looks like their sibling. I’m like, Okay, cool.

Are people ever vocal about the fact that you’re their sexual fantasy?

Oh, they’re not just vocal, they expect you to be grateful. I chatted with a guy on Tinder about it once. It was a debate more so than a conversation. It went on for hours until I realized it wasn’t my job to shift his understanding. Pouring energy into those debates is a trap for sure. If I’m just a thumbnail for someone, that person isn’t necessarily going to care about my comfort and safety during sex. So, not having certain conversations has implications for my welfare and health. I also have to remember that I’ve been watching porn for a really, really long time as well. What am I doing to people?

 

TWO

A queer person in their late forties. They live in Japan and are in a long-term relationship.

Is porn something you talk about with people around you?

Well, leading up to chatting with you, I went off in all kinds of directions thinking about it. I made a Venn diagram, I was all over it. One of the things that really interested me was a presumption that I’m part of a community that’s all about sex positivity and body positivity, where we happily and freely talk about various sexual things at the drop of a hat, nobody’s shy at all, et cetera. It’s not necessarily true. I’ve got these random memories of porn-related incidents or conversations in my various queer circles, and aside from those related to my partners, none of them feel really deep-down. So I was thinking, Maybe I don’t really have a relationship with porn, fuck, what kind of a queer am I? That sense of disconnect goes way back. When I graduated from university, all the cool lesbians went on a camping trip. They went in their cars up into the mountains, and for some reason I got to go with them. There was a hailstorm, it was really atmospheric. The cool liberal studies graduates were talking about sex, and one girl, whose cool mechanic girlfriend Dusty was right there with her, was saying, I just got Dusty to let me touch her perineum for the first time the other day, and everybody was having this conversation. I was there thinking, Ah, that sucks for Dusty. If she hadn’t had her perineum touched before, maybe she didn’t really want to talk about it either. There’s a coolness that doesn’t always go with checking everyone’s comfort level. I’ve seen that a lot over the years—people are happy to talk about sex while also not talking about it.

I often sense that when we’re talking about things that are hard to talk about initially, such as sex and porn and intimacy, that need to be “cool” can present a barrier. There’s an echo of the way people worry about political correctness in this pressure to be pro everything.

“Well, of course we’re fine with all of this”—that becomes a given. As you say, in most circles we haven’t really got the language. That’s why those sex toy videos I emailed you about are so great: “I’m just sitting here talking in a very normal salesperson voice with a little bit of extra softness about something I’m suggesting that you’ll really enjoy putting in your anus.” The disconnect that’s there is fantastic.

When you haven’t got a language around something, how do you go about developing one? At the start of this project, I didn’t feel comfortable talking about porn or masturbation. It was absent from my life.

From your spoken life.

Exactly, from my spoken life. The distance between the discourse and what’s actually going on is odd. When we’re forming a new language, does it have to be a kind of “fake it till you make it” thing? Do you and your current partner talk about porn?

My partner is just getting over a bout of the dreaded virus. It’s been really rough, and he went away for a while to quarantine. We’ve been talking on Skype like we did back when it was a long-distance relationship, when I was still in the sheep field. Yesterday I told him, I get to do the porn chat tomorrow, and I asked him what he would say his relationship is with porn. He said that, right now, the virus has killed his libido, he has no energy for anything. The idea of sexual things right now is still up there with, um, what was it? Chilies and caffeine: things he’s not quite ready for yet. Back in the day when I was in the countryside and he was here, we would read porn to each other. Send each other little videos of readings, or read to each other live until my laptop battery ran out in the horse box. I don’t remember what came first, but there were also wanking videos sent back and forth, on memory sticks. We had our own little poor-relation Pornhub going on. I’d forgotten about it until I was thinking, Let’s see, porn, porn, porn … oh yeah, there was all of that.

Actually, we made a little video, using the videos we’d sent back and forth to each other during that time, and sent it in for an online screening of pandemic porn. I don’t know if we made it in, because it was three o’clock in the morning here when it was playing in the UK and we couldn’t get the link to work. I’ll probably die not knowing. Or maybe someone will come up to me one day on the street and say, Oh my God, was that you in the sheep field?

Do you have any anxiety around that? I’m incapable of sending people videos or nudes or anything of me, because the idea of them getting out is terrifying in quite a nonspecific way. It’s not a particular scenario based in my head. It’s just a sense that I need to not do that for fear of … something.

With unknown fears, it’s not “what if this happens”—it’s “something could happen.” But, people on the street, maybe not so much. When I was living in the city a long time ago, whoring, often I’d be thinking, What if I’m walking down the street and one of my johns sees me and says hello? How funny would that be? How weird would that be? What if someone who’s only ever seen me naked sees me now? But that wouldn’t really be any different in terms from one of my clients at the English conversation company I work at now seeing me in my not-work clothes. There are so many ways in which that work—selling my full attention and all of my words for forty-minute sessions one after another—feels more distasteful and more dishonest than selling my body for money. I’m pretty sure I think that, anyway.

Obviously the way porn and misogyny and patriarchy interact is massively tangled and anything but unidirectional, but I do find myself wondering about how porn radiates outward, in terms of shaping sexual practices and the things that people—particularly men, I suppose—want to enact in the bedroom. In your experience of doing sex work, did you see that play out, or see things that were clearly from porn?

You can’t not go there, though. That’s the dark side, right? That’s the not sex-positive or person-positive side. The truly sinful side. I was only doing sex work for maybe four or five months. It wasn’t legal, I didn’t have a visa for it. It was how I was making a living, but it was also something I had chosen to do out of interest, something I wanted to know the experience of. When I thought about it in terms of temple priestesses, say, when I went all ancient Greece fantasy with it and was like, This thing that I’m doing and this service that I’m providing for this person is holy, and if I was with someone from whom I could get that sense of gratitude for the profundity of what was going on—because some people were like that, and that was amazing—that was pretty right on. Others were very clearly not like that—some people were doing things that they wanted to try out because they’d seen them on TV, and they weren’t nice things. Or they saw it that way. You can feel it. You can feel it in any situation when somebody is not seeing you as a human being. And that really sucks when you’re naked and you’re sucking their dick.

Did you have a sense before you got to the being naked and sucking their dick part—would you know which way the interaction was going to go?

There are probably a lot of people in the world who have better risk antennae than I do, but even I sometimes would walk into a room and think, Oh, this is going to be one of those. Sometimes I’d be wrong, and it would turn into something everybody could get something good out of. Other times it was just ugliness and abuse and it’s a real shame that that’s what people are capable of equating sex with. I’m sorry that I didn’t have the temple goddess strength to bring those people around. But how can anyone, really? All the ugliness is so deeply ingrained in us and so much of it is connected to not having a way to talk in a healthy way about it.

Do you think there was more ugliness because at that time you were in the bracket of sex worker in their heads? And therefore on the slut side of the slut/virgin dichotomy?

Absolutely. The commodification bit, right? If money is what I value and I can get it for money, then sure, the person doesn’t matter. That’s gross. Even if I was telling myself that it was just a job, the experience of commodification in sex work was still physical, it was going into my body, and there were unscheduled long, weepy baths on the bad days, soaking that stuff out. And that was without any of the truly bad stuff having happened. I don’t know how we fix porn, but it feels important.

It’s not just porn, though, is it? Porn has emerged from and plays into this enormous patriarchal capitalist system. And it’s so hard to imagine fixing just one part without fixing the thing in its entirety.

It’d be fine if we could fix everything.

 

THREE

A straight man in his early twenties. He is recently single.

Can you describe your current porn-watching habits?

It’s not something that’s set in stone. I probably watch it more in the morning than I do at night. I find that if I do it in the morning then I can just get on with my day. If I gave an estimate of how often, it varies on how I’m feeling, but say two to three times a week.

Would you ever masturbate without using porn?

I have done, but if porn’s available, then I’d probably use that. It’s more stimulating than my imagination. I’m fine with pictures, but if we’re talking videos, then these days I just use Pornhub.

What would you be watching on there? Do you go for the top-page stuff?

I’ll look through the top page first, and if there’s anything there that catches my eye, I’ll click on it. If I was going in looking and searching, I don’t search for anything too crazy, to be honest—maybe anal or orgies or something like that. Something maybe that I wouldn’t do in my own life. I don’t go out of my way too much. If there are things on the first page that aren’t too bad, I’ll watch them.

You said you tend to watch things that are things that you wouldn’t do in real life. Can you talk me through that?

Yeah, not as much with anal, because obviously I’ve done that quite a bit, but it’s not something that you do all the time. With orgies and threesomes and all that kind of vibe, it’s not that it’s taboo, but that it’s something that you don’t normally experience. So it’s living vicariously through that lens.

The full fantasy experience?

I don’t know if it’s my fantasy. I’d probably be down for a threesome, but with the orgies, I don’t think I’d actually want to do that in real life. It’s more that the chaos on screen of everything happening is quite stimulating. I wouldn’t choose to watch a porn of myself, basically, because I’ve got lived experience of that. Not that it wouldn’t necessarily be stimulating, but I think if you’re going to go to that effort, you watch something that you’re not going to do yourself.

Where do you stand on violence and rough sex—that whole aspect of porn?

Some people are into being a bit more rough, and I am as well, both watching and in my own life, but at the same time, there’s got to be limits to that. I’m not into people getting slapped in the face, or pinned down by the neck, or kicked. I get that maybe some people are, but to me that doesn’t seem enjoyable. A bit of choking and a bit of slapping is fine as long as both parties are in agreement. Whenever that is happening in real life, you talk about it first and have safe words so you know that that’s what you want. In regards to porn, even the taglines are worded in a way that fantasizes violence: “small white girl getting brutally destroyed” and stuff. I do think that porn has created a fantasized ideal in people’s heads about sex, and the physicality can bleed into people’s lives. If you’ve seen James Bond jump onto a fucking train in a film, you wouldn’t then think, I can go and do that. But with porn, even though it’s all scripted and specially cultivated in such a way that that’s what the end result is, people take it too literally, and I don’t agree with that.

How old were you when you first saw porn, and how did it happen?

My first experience of watching porn was when I was in first year, so I would’ve been about twelve. It was my dad who showed it to me. He was in this group chat and one of his pals had sent these two videos. One was just normal sex and the other was called “Super Squirter”—you can guess what happened in that. They were both short—one was maybe two minutes and the other thirty or forty seconds. He showed me them on his phone, and I was like, This is great shit, so I asked him to send them to me. Then I took them into school, showed all my pals. From there I just started searching myself—the thing with my dad is the part I vividly remember. As much as I probably wouldn’t send porn to my kids, I also think that when you do that, it opens up a dialogue. It makes a difference when you’re able to talk about the same things and you laugh and enjoy it.

Regardless of the kind of relationship you are in and how good the sex is, would you continue to use porn on the side?

It’s totally separate. It’s a means to an end, almost. Masturbating lets off steam. It’s not as if I’m choosing to not speak to you in order to go and do this. It’s when nobody’s around. But moderation’s a big thing. If I were doing it every day and it became not so much a habit as an addiction, then that’s dangerous.

Has the moderation come naturally, or is it something that you’ve achieved?

When I was younger, when I first started getting into it and falling down the rabbit hole, I was masturbating a few times a day for the full week, just thinking, Oh my God, this is amazing. Once I started having sex, though, the realization came that it’s a really different ball game. Between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, when I started having sex and understanding more what sex actually is and what’s involved, my porn usage really died down. It became more like I’m describing it now—a wee external thing for yourself. I would hate to rely on it. I’d hate it to be an end in and of itself, to think it’s better than the real thing. Maybe the first few times you have sex, it probably is. But then that brings up the question, How can I have better sex? That’s more of a task, it’s more interesting.

Do you feel that porn has helped you to know what you like in bed, and to talk about it with people?

I don’t want to give it the credit but I’m going to say yeah, I do think so. If anything, it gives you the language to explain and verbalize things. You see things in videos that make you think, That seems quite interesting, maybe I’d like that. It all comes down to doing it, but porn did help in giving me the vocabulary to be able to express it. Take how vocal people are in porn. I can’t speak for all guys, but I know that there are quite a lot of girls that aren’t that vocal in real life. I’m not talking about screaming in my ears, but just something, anything at all. That’s what gets people off sometimes, that’s what people really like. Even just moaning in somebody’s ear can go a long way. Let’s say you do see something and think, That looks good, I’d like to try that, I have the vocabulary to express that, you’ve still got to approach it with the understanding that, one, your partner’s got to be into it, and two, that it’s not going to be what you’ve seen on-screen. Even talking about it is difficult, especially when you’re younger and you’re just starting out. When I was younger, I was in bed with girls who wouldn’t take their tops off because they felt insecure. You can even go as far as having sex with somebody, and there’s still that stigma, especially when you’re in your late teens. To be able to talk about things, you have to feel comfortable. Everyone wants to talk about things deep down, but they find it difficult. Especially if it’s a newer relationship or if you’re sober, people really struggle. If you’re in a committed relationship, it becomes second nature to discuss things. If you don’t then your sex is doomed anyway. The more you do it, the more comfortable you are with talking, and if you’re comfortable then other people are comfortable. That’s the main thing: having a really good space to speak and to be judgment-free and to be like, I want you to feel pleasure, the same way I feel pleasure.

 

Polly Barton is a translator and writer. Her nonfiction debut, Fifty Sounds, won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize. This piece is adapted from Porn: An Oral History, which was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions on March 16, 2023.