I’ve been visiting the front page of Pornhub since I was fifteen or sixteen. Aside from a few search adventures in which I went looking (usually with no luck) for a video I remembered seeing on some previous edition of the front page, I don’t venture far beyond the “most popular” category. The front page is governed by zealous group sex and various types of clichéd taboos: stepsiblings, stepmothers, best friends and roommates. It’s hardcore but basically vanilla; as in, the acts are familiar and the participants are enthusiastic. I’ve been disturbed much more frequently by trailers I’ve sat through in cinemas than by porn thumbnails from the front page, though I generally find porn impersonal and aesthetically bereft. It satisfies me in the way of takeout when I’m hungry. The primary shame I feel about all this is occasional regret that what is erotic to me can’t be uncoupled from a sociological fascination with what is erotic to “most people,” such as we can determine it, and a sort of envy toward those whose erotic centers are based in the very niche or aesthetically elaborate. Basically, because I’m so interested in what’s popular, this essay has to be about what normal porn actually is, rather than about the goings-on of some esoteric and richly suggestive kink community about which we would love some novel and detailed news. For better or worse, we’re going to stay on the front page.
I’m sure it’s my interest in knowing what’s normal as much as my interest in porn that led me, a few months ago, to pick up a copy of Porn, by Polly Barton. Subtitled “an oral history” and put out by the highbrow independent press Fitzcarraldo Editions, Porn is billed on the back cover as a “thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo.” It’s organized as a series of “chats” between the author and nineteen acquaintances, varied across age and gender and anonymized so that each subject is referred to with a number from one to nineteen. Barton is a translator who found herself surprised by the realization that she wanted to write about the ever-present but largely unspoken subject of porn, so much so that the idea kept her up at night. This preoccupation felt “deeply embarrassing” to her: “If only I was a porn connoisseur,” she writes regretfully. Her “predominant feeling towards porn,” she continues in the introduction,
was not one of love, and nor was it the opposite, one of hate or virulent disapproval. What I had was rather a kind of nebulous, all-pervasive worry and discomfort. I worried about what porn stood for, I worried about what it has done to us, is doing to us and will do to us, and I worried that this worry made me a bad feminist. A stolid love of or belief in porn and a wish to defend it seemed to me, in comparison, an enviable place to write from—as did, in a way, a vehement anti-porn stance. Faced with such a polarizing topic with so many different strands and aspects to it, the worst possible position seemed to be the one I held: ambivalence. Or, to qualify that, a kind of tortured ambivalence.
This skepticism and curiosity seemed to me a rich position to write from, and I couldn’t help paying special attention to Barton’s point of view as it shaped her conversations. In an early passage, she recalls a formative evening when she and an ex-boyfriend became embroiled in an excruciating argument after he admitted to watching porn. The shame her ex radiated, and her ensuing anger, were so extreme that she describes this as one of the worst evenings of her life. It was unsettling for her to imagine a man “getting off on something that I find really misogynist and degrading, and then coming back to me and playing the good feminist.” In retrospect, she posits that she wasn’t incensed by the fact that her ex watched porn so much as the reluctance he exhibited when she asked him about it, which forced her into the horrible position of a cop; yet despite her professed ambivalence and her desire to penetrate the aura of guilt and embarrassment about pornography, her characterizations of porn seem pretty much to compel shame as a matter of course. Later in the same conversation, Barton alleges that some “ninety-five percent of the straight, mainstream porn you find on Pornhub feels to some degree exploitative, or if not exploitative, then at least replicating this phallocentric, problematic [and] degrading” image of sex.
Many of the conversations in Porn repeat this impression of mainstream porn. Near the end of the book, Barton and subject Seventeen, a straight man, riffing on each other’s discomfort around porn, state this more overtly:
I’m totally okay with the idea that lots of people crave visual stimuli. What I’m not okay with is the inbuilt violence.
It’s not about the sex.
Exactly …
There’s a horrible, basic question in what you’re asking. Which is not to say that male sexuality is entirely violent—but is it somewhat violent? What’s striking about porn is that it’s all basically images of women being abused. That’s what’s fucked about it, right? And so then you get to thinking whether that is actually male sexual desire—or is it a desire for power? And are these things different? Men don’t want to fuck someone; they want to debase them.
Barton’s questions follow from a premise that is tentatively echoed by most of her interlocutors: that violence is built into porn, that mainstream porn is “all basically images of women being abused” and that the audience for this porn is male. Generalizations like these reveal Porn’s most glaring weakness. The book is genuinely open-minded—and genuinely interesting—about its participants’ encounters with porn: how they first came across it, what porn was available when they were teenagers and how people used it, what their specific consumption habits are and how these habits inform their intimate relationships. And yet undergirding this curiosity about how people have integrated porn into their lives is a total incuriosity about what the porn they’re watching represents.
Barton admits to watching porn very rarely and, near the end of the book, recalls that her first response to discovering porn, as a teenager, was to feel endangered by it. Porn encapsulated “everything unpleasant [she’d] experienced as a woman, from teenagehood on.” The more I read, the more I got the sense that, by locating her interest in porn in the shame and guilt it elicits, Barton had trapped—or, perhaps, cosseted—herself inside a necessarily foggy conception of her subject, in which it has no investigable character of its own, but merely serves as a stand-in for misogyny and patriarchy. It felt as though I was watching Barton force herself into a state of contrived doubt because her sense of herself as a feminist and a progressive wouldn’t allow her to own her true conviction that porn is inherently violent, degrading and socially corrosive.
This relentless fear of porn, coupled with the inability to admit this fear because it might prove backwards or conservative, felt so uncannily familiar that I began to think it represented a more general contemporary posture. Christine Emba recently gave a precis of this posture in the New York Times, describing the surprising refusal, “especially in progressive circles, to publicly admit disapproval of porn,” despite growing wariness about the effects of the porn industry. To condemn porn wholesale has the flavor of Christian censorship, and progressives are loath to do it; yet mainstream conversations constantly acknowledge porn in ominous terms, conjuring the specter of a maze full of terrors. While I was reading Porn I wandered around recording half-coherent voice messages to my friends in which I tried to articulate the discomfiting impression that this book was a covert manifesto about the shamefulness and perversion of porn, disguised as a book designed to contribute to our liberation from shame about porn. The questions that Barton refused to ask pressed me with escalating force: Why do we find porn so scary? What’s happening in the mainstream images that Barton is so quick to characterize as degradation and violence? What is degradation and violence, in sex and in porn?
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Among the women Barton interviews who consume porn, most of them admit to seeking out porn where women are dominated but not abused. Subject One, a straight woman, draws the line this way: when a woman is being dominated and it looks like she’s enjoying it, One likes to watch it, and when a woman looks like she’s not enjoying it, One feels she’s accidentally slipped into a scary part of the internet. Her preference speaks to the entire ethos of front-page porn. Popular porn is almost entirely made up of videos in which people are allegedly coerced into sex they very much desire and enjoy, but which they are not supposed to desire or enjoy. (There is plenty of violent nonconsent porn out there, but that isn’t the stuff of the front page.) Stepsisters seduce stepbrothers, daughters seduce fathers, roommates seduce each other’s girlfriends, and men and women find themselves reluctant and then elated participants in unexpected orgies; all of these situations are merely quick signifiers for “forbidden thing.” If it’s about anything, the most popular porn is about the experience of being witnessed saying, No, no, that’s not me, I would never, and then receiving gratification that is all the more intense because you’re blameless—the sex is something that just happened to you. This paradigm is gender-agnostic. There is enormous traffic on the front page in point-of-view videos of men being seduced by women with whom they have some taboo relation and succumbing to her desire “despite themselves,” only eventually admitting that they really wished for it. The vast majority of popular porn is playfully coercive. Desire must be hidden until it explodes into view. To consider these playfully coercive setups inherently nonconsensual or degrading is a deliberate misreading of this profound, ubiquitous desire, which must haunt every puritanical and sex-negative society: to disavow what we want and still get it.
This push-pull is epitomized in the ubiquitous cum shot, which very much concerns Barton. In one early conversation Barton admits that “for me the idea of someone being covered in cum is so far from what should be a turn-on between people who like each other, unless your thing is quite extreme power play. And yet it’s not acknowledged as a kink—or rather it’s so universalized that it’s a society-wide kink.” What does it mean for a “kink” to be universal? Traditionally, kink refers not to an act of power play but to nonnormative taste. The notion of society-wide deviance implies a natural human order from which we’ve been led astray, as if the pleasures and interests of hundreds of millions of people tell us, rather than something significant about human sexuality, merely that a historical purity of mind has been stolen from us. For bien-pensant progressives like Barton, “vanilla” doesn’t connote normative sexual behavior but rather tender, affectionate sex. Beneath her ostensible inquisitiveness about porn lies an abiding yet disavowed feeling that sex is for clean, loving communion and that cum is a distasteful biological necessity with which only a true freak would be interested in playing, not unlike urine or feces. No, Barton isn’t an avowed conservative, a homophobe or an anti-feminist; nevertheless, this is the inherited ideological basis—concealed even from herself—behind the instinct that the cum shot is degrading.
Why are sex acts like this seen to be inimical to intimacy between people who “like each other”? Barton herself is more turned on by erotic thrillers and romantic sex scenes in films than the sorts of hardcore videos you find online. “The first thing I used as porn,” she writes, “was books.” She attributes this preference less to the power of narrative erotica and more “the absence of the real turn-offs” like the cum shot. Given her discomfort with the language and visuals of porn, I gather that what strikes her as “kinky” about the cum shot is that it’s innately dirty and explicit, and that a man projects it onto a woman. It’s neither demure nor softly lit; it signifies an eruption almost outside a man’s control. Porn consumption is plagued by the vague awareness that what we’re seeing is performed, but the cum shot, in theory, can’t be faked. The buried claim in Barton’s judgment is that we don’t naturally revel in the explicitly dirty, the private made visible or the texture of sex; instead, men must like to see cum on a woman in order to assert that she is a piece of trash they can do with as they please, no matter how obscene, excessive or one-sided their behavior. From this perspective, the explicit portrayal of dirty sex is antithetical to any definition of tenderness and consideration—and therefore there is a fundamental fraudulence in portraying it as pleasurable on-screen, even if one has to concede that some people might find pleasure in it. As Nineteen puts it, “I’m sure there are people who like to have cum on their face, both men and women, but there’s no way of portraying that in a porn film without it looking like exploitation.”
Does the explicitly dirty always look like exploitation? Are we really that Victorian? The revelation of the totally private, undeniably real thing, elicited despite reluctance, has long constituted the mainstream erotic. The cum shot is the glimpse of the bra beneath a t-shirt, the first tentative and sensational disrobing, amplified for adult attention. A foundational joy of sex is pleasure in those bodily capacities and secretions (yes, those too!) that are usually private and therefore bear extraordinary excitement when made visible and shared. I’d stake my life that seeing cum outside the body is an immemorial pastime of men and women; yet in some sense it’s true that, now that so much is allowed sexually, a video has to “look like exploitation”—that is, to feel genuinely taboo—in order to carry that frisson of the forbidden and secretly glimpsed. The thrill of having a pleasurable experience we “shouldn’t” have and getting away with it is the essential thrill of porn. That’s not only what excites the actors in the mainstream videos full of stepfamily scenarios and playful coercion—it’s also part of what briefly excites us about watching them. We know it’s dirty, and we get away with it. Nothing is less sexy than trying to be virtuous. Porn is never about the drive toward equality, the wish to rise above ourselves and our relationship to power. When we watch porn, there’s no space for our aspirations to be good people, and this is what makes it fantastically exciting and terrifying in equal part.
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I don’t care to advocate for porn, or pretend that porn is a source of good in the world, or aesthetically compelling, or even generally satisfying. I’m not rejoicing about living in the golden age of internet porn. Barton and her subjects are disappointed in mainstream porn’s corny storylines, ugly sanitized aesthetics, extreme and often alienating body ideals, and general lack of creativity and raw passion—and I feel the same way. Perhaps the difference is how clear it seems to me that all these complaints are true of most products, especially products supported not by paying consumers but by advertising revenue. The emotional insistence that sex is a sacred thing that is more degraded by commerce and algorithms than, say, art or literature, is yet another legacy of that clean religious vision of sex that Barton so wishes to disclaim.
This underlying conservatism can’t but make me suspicious of the implication that porn reflects some violence specific to male sexuality. It’s common to gesture, when we talk about porn, to how disturbing it is that men are turned on by images of domination and women on their knees. Power shapes attraction. But—of course—power shapes attraction for everyone. I wouldn’t be the first person to comment on the reams of data, which Barton’s conversations only support, that being dominated is one of the primary fantasies for women. This painful reality is easy to understand in a social context that remains, despite feminist efforts and the hard-won opportunities of the last century, worshipful of male strength and protection; but it also interrupts the presumption that porn is the way it is wholly for the sake of male tastes. Rather than asking “Is male sexuality somewhat violent?” we might pose a different question: Why does porn seem to imply that pain, submission and being at someone’s mercy is intimately connected to sexuality?
Nonconsensual violence isn’t the language of front-page popular porn, but it would be obtuse to pretend that these videos eschew pain. Popular porn loves pain that gestures at the too-muchness of sex; porn scenarios are built on the notion of overwhelm, of the uncontrollable force of desire which trounces all taboos and morals, testing the limits of bodily discipline and physical comfort. Reluctance and submission are the emotional touchstones of overwhelm, and the pain of entrance—often the pain of the porn star’s enormous dick—is the physical one. When we talk about the violence of mainstream porn, we’re talking about choking, rough sex and this pain of the enormous dick, or what we might call vanilla size play—types of pain which are portrayed as pleasurable and consensual, and avoid blood or physical injury. Every era has its own sexual trends, as anyone who’s seen Sex and the City can tell you; in ours, choking and slapping seem to be the controversial styles of the moment. But, contrary to the anxious popular view, it’s impossible to know what to make of their popularity. Fewer than a hundred years ago, the blowjob was considered so lewd and degrading as to have no place in any loving relationship; now it’s such standard fare that marriages end for lack of them. Seventeen, as he muses about whether male sexuality is “somewhat violent,” proceeds to invoke Andrea Dworkin, the feminist battles of the Seventies and the tangled problem of whether truly consensual sex is possible under patriarchy; yet this worthwhile ideological musing is undercut by the invocation of extreme violence—“people being strangled until they’re blue in the face and then passing out”—and Seventeen’s personal belief that porn should be annulled from the world. Are these two categories of porn, porn in which a person is knocked unconscious and porn in which a person gets slapped while she’s being fucked, actually continuous? Is the word “violence” really appropriate for both? And don’t we in fact undermine the real extremity of porn so violent it requires an unconscious female participant when we group it with playful rough sex?
In mainstream porn the implication is that the actress who receives the pain of entrance, slapping, choking and so on is enjoying it. “Do you like that?” is critical to the rhetoric of popular porn. Yet whether we are actually seeing pleasure when we watch women get fucked understandably burdens Barton’s subjects. As Fifteen puts it:
There’s often lots of pain involved and as a straight woman watching it, I just think about how the porn actress is in pain. You can’t unsee it. Yet from a male point of view, they don’t see it as pain. They’re interpreting it constantly as pleasure, or as sexual stimulation, while I think it’s actually the opposite of that.
A great deal of popular porn trades on this ambiguity, which so many of the voices in this book—encouraged by Barton—consider a form of delusion or willful disbelief. The idea is not that most men who watch popular porn want to see women suffer, but rather that they’ve tricked themselves into believing that women enjoy painful sex. Fifteen draws a distinction between fetish porn, where the line between pain and pleasure is intentionally blurred, and mainstream porn, in which pain is “not really identifiably S and M” but “just part of the accepted sexual practice.” In these scenes, the woman isn’t saying, “Stop, that hurts,” but simply engaging in acts that look extreme or unpleasurable to a woman watching at home. Do women like Fifteen or Barton see the true affect of the actress, privately in pain beneath the pretense that she’s enjoying an experience of coercion or domination? Or is a woman like Fifteen or Barton, who has cause to fear being coerced or violated by men, unable to watch a scene in which an actress appears to enjoy coercion or domination without assuming it’s propaganda for men? Who is it that’s being deluded here about what sex really is—ethically anxious women, or horny men?
“Men don’t want to fuck someone; they want to debase them,” Seventeen muses; if we believe this, watching ostensibly consensual sex becomes an ideological offense, and watching a woman get slapped or receive a cum shot becomes undeniable evidence of violent masculinity. It strikes me as comically facile when people refer to porn, or to rape, as being not about sex but about power; where did we get the idea that sex is ever only about sex, or that the word sex should at base convey tender intimacy? Sex—like everything else—is about power, and porn (and rape) are about both. There are plenty of ways to debase someone that have nothing to do with fucking; men do, in fact, want to fuck people. The idea that dirty sex is dehumanizing is, to me, one of the most misogynist conceptions we apparently still have. This is not to deny that the porn industry is rife with actual exploitation, poor working conditions, inadequate wages and bad actors; it’s simply to acknowledge the quite significant community of sex workers who have repeatedly spoken out about the misogyny and the projection of female powerlessness baked into anti-porn feminisms. To insist that the sex we find in porn is nothing more than disguised nonconsensual pain is a politicized form of narcissism. As the sex writer Aella recently noted on her popular Substack, BDSM-oriented desire may be so distinct, innate, ancient and manifest in subtle ways across our culture as to constitute its own sexual preference, analogous to gay sexuality; those she calls “tendersexual”—women like Barton and some of her subjects—are horrified by power-driven sexual scenarios because they do not recognize the numbers of women who willingly seek out this kind of sex.
The conversations in Barton’s book—and in much of our contemporary discourse—premise that sex and pain don’t naturally go together, and that their pairing in porn is the result of a society-wide and wildly contemporary perversion. Yet this seems a deliberate, perhaps a hopeful, misunderstanding of the self-evident landscape of sexuality. It’s easy for us to imagine that sex and love naturally go together, but need not always; and this strikes me as equally true of sex and pain. To allow someone to hurt us, in an excruciatingly intimate setting, is not so different from allowing someone to love us. Emotionally, the two are so entangled that we enter love knowing it begets pain. In its best forms—which porn attempts to evoke—sex is a departure from any codified or accepted form of social routine. We eagerly contort ourselves in ways we’d be humiliated for the general public to witness. We stretch ourselves, emotionally and physically, in order to have great sex. We push against the boundaries of comfort; we fear getting hurt. It’s a commonplace that all the best things in life arrive at the edge of hurt, as a result of risk. Why do we think sex is the exception? Why are we going around supposing that the prerequisite to good sex is feeling safe? This necessity of risk to the real profundities is, to me, why pain and fear are routinized elements of porn. This necessity of risk to the real profundities is why sometimes it arouses me to glimpse pain and fear when I watch people having sex, and at other times makes me shudder and turn away.
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I wonder if it’s possible for any of us to be genuinely ambivalent and open-minded about porn. It scares me to write this, a bit, not unlike the way it scared Barton to write Porn. To bring our relationship with it into the open, as Barton wishes to, feels like an inconceivable project not because the outmoded scrim of shame around it is too thick to scrub off, but because it remains the ultimate site of the clash between pure desire and moral conscience, between the truly intimate and the social. Porn is one of the primary modes we have to see hidden parts of the world. A friend can tell us about her sex life, but this is like the difference between her telling us what she likes to eat and eating a meal in front of us. We’re desperate to observe, and we’re generally forced to let porn represent our observation of how our neighbors and friends have sex. How could we not compulsively seek out the medium that unites this curiosity with physical pleasure, and how could we fail to resent any way in which it rings untrue?
At its most rudimentary, porn is something we know we shouldn’t look at because it represents the most indecent, id-driven parts of our world, and we know everyone watches it anyway. It scares us; it makes us feel vaguely humiliated; the line between our pleasure and our shock and disturbance is narrow. But to my mind this is all essential not only to porn but to sex. We’re scared of porn because we must be just a little scared of what might happen to us for sex to approach the sublime, a little scared of the world to be really alive to it. The proportion of useful fear is delicate and variable. In life, in sex and in porn, too much fear shuts the whole thing down. The porn on the front page inspires roughly the amount of fear from which the average person almost wants to look away… and doesn’t. Our anxiety is that porn is a measure of socially normalized violence; yet almost by definition, mainstream porn is a measure not of what is normalized, but of what is still just taboo enough to turn us on.
Art credit: Max Maslansky, Preview (Queen bed), 2014. Acrylic on bedsheet, 80 × 60 in. Courtesy of the artist.
I’ve been visiting the front page of Pornhub since I was fifteen or sixteen. Aside from a few search adventures in which I went looking (usually with no luck) for a video I remembered seeing on some previous edition of the front page, I don’t venture far beyond the “most popular” category. The front page is governed by zealous group sex and various types of clichéd taboos: stepsiblings, stepmothers, best friends and roommates. It’s hardcore but basically vanilla; as in, the acts are familiar and the participants are enthusiastic. I’ve been disturbed much more frequently by trailers I’ve sat through in cinemas than by porn thumbnails from the front page, though I generally find porn impersonal and aesthetically bereft. It satisfies me in the way of takeout when I’m hungry. The primary shame I feel about all this is occasional regret that what is erotic to me can’t be uncoupled from a sociological fascination with what is erotic to “most people,” such as we can determine it, and a sort of envy toward those whose erotic centers are based in the very niche or aesthetically elaborate. Basically, because I’m so interested in what’s popular, this essay has to be about what normal porn actually is, rather than about the goings-on of some esoteric and richly suggestive kink community about which we would love some novel and detailed news. For better or worse, we’re going to stay on the front page.
I’m sure it’s my interest in knowing what’s normal as much as my interest in porn that led me, a few months ago, to pick up a copy of Porn, by Polly Barton. Subtitled “an oral history” and put out by the highbrow independent press Fitzcarraldo Editions, Porn is billed on the back cover as a “thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo.” It’s organized as a series of “chats” between the author and nineteen acquaintances, varied across age and gender and anonymized so that each subject is referred to with a number from one to nineteen. Barton is a translator who found herself surprised by the realization that she wanted to write about the ever-present but largely unspoken subject of porn, so much so that the idea kept her up at night. This preoccupation felt “deeply embarrassing” to her: “If only I was a porn connoisseur,” she writes regretfully. Her “predominant feeling towards porn,” she continues in the introduction,
This skepticism and curiosity seemed to me a rich position to write from, and I couldn’t help paying special attention to Barton’s point of view as it shaped her conversations. In an early passage, she recalls a formative evening when she and an ex-boyfriend became embroiled in an excruciating argument after he admitted to watching porn. The shame her ex radiated, and her ensuing anger, were so extreme that she describes this as one of the worst evenings of her life. It was unsettling for her to imagine a man “getting off on something that I find really misogynist and degrading, and then coming back to me and playing the good feminist.” In retrospect, she posits that she wasn’t incensed by the fact that her ex watched porn so much as the reluctance he exhibited when she asked him about it, which forced her into the horrible position of a cop; yet despite her professed ambivalence and her desire to penetrate the aura of guilt and embarrassment about pornography, her characterizations of porn seem pretty much to compel shame as a matter of course. Later in the same conversation, Barton alleges that some “ninety-five percent of the straight, mainstream porn you find on Pornhub feels to some degree exploitative, or if not exploitative, then at least replicating this phallocentric, problematic [and] degrading” image of sex.
Many of the conversations in Porn repeat this impression of mainstream porn. Near the end of the book, Barton and subject Seventeen, a straight man, riffing on each other’s discomfort around porn, state this more overtly:
Barton’s questions follow from a premise that is tentatively echoed by most of her interlocutors: that violence is built into porn, that mainstream porn is “all basically images of women being abused” and that the audience for this porn is male. Generalizations like these reveal Porn’s most glaring weakness. The book is genuinely open-minded—and genuinely interesting—about its participants’ encounters with porn: how they first came across it, what porn was available when they were teenagers and how people used it, what their specific consumption habits are and how these habits inform their intimate relationships. And yet undergirding this curiosity about how people have integrated porn into their lives is a total incuriosity about what the porn they’re watching represents.
Barton admits to watching porn very rarely and, near the end of the book, recalls that her first response to discovering porn, as a teenager, was to feel endangered by it. Porn encapsulated “everything unpleasant [she’d] experienced as a woman, from teenagehood on.” The more I read, the more I got the sense that, by locating her interest in porn in the shame and guilt it elicits, Barton had trapped—or, perhaps, cosseted—herself inside a necessarily foggy conception of her subject, in which it has no investigable character of its own, but merely serves as a stand-in for misogyny and patriarchy. It felt as though I was watching Barton force herself into a state of contrived doubt because her sense of herself as a feminist and a progressive wouldn’t allow her to own her true conviction that porn is inherently violent, degrading and socially corrosive.
This relentless fear of porn, coupled with the inability to admit this fear because it might prove backwards or conservative, felt so uncannily familiar that I began to think it represented a more general contemporary posture. Christine Emba recently gave a precis of this posture in the New York Times, describing the surprising refusal, “especially in progressive circles, to publicly admit disapproval of porn,” despite growing wariness about the effects of the porn industry. To condemn porn wholesale has the flavor of Christian censorship, and progressives are loath to do it; yet mainstream conversations constantly acknowledge porn in ominous terms, conjuring the specter of a maze full of terrors. While I was reading Porn I wandered around recording half-coherent voice messages to my friends in which I tried to articulate the discomfiting impression that this book was a covert manifesto about the shamefulness and perversion of porn, disguised as a book designed to contribute to our liberation from shame about porn. The questions that Barton refused to ask pressed me with escalating force: Why do we find porn so scary? What’s happening in the mainstream images that Barton is so quick to characterize as degradation and violence? What is degradation and violence, in sex and in porn?
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Among the women Barton interviews who consume porn, most of them admit to seeking out porn where women are dominated but not abused. Subject One, a straight woman, draws the line this way: when a woman is being dominated and it looks like she’s enjoying it, One likes to watch it, and when a woman looks like she’s not enjoying it, One feels she’s accidentally slipped into a scary part of the internet. Her preference speaks to the entire ethos of front-page porn. Popular porn is almost entirely made up of videos in which people are allegedly coerced into sex they very much desire and enjoy, but which they are not supposed to desire or enjoy. (There is plenty of violent nonconsent porn out there, but that isn’t the stuff of the front page.) Stepsisters seduce stepbrothers, daughters seduce fathers, roommates seduce each other’s girlfriends, and men and women find themselves reluctant and then elated participants in unexpected orgies; all of these situations are merely quick signifiers for “forbidden thing.” If it’s about anything, the most popular porn is about the experience of being witnessed saying, No, no, that’s not me, I would never, and then receiving gratification that is all the more intense because you’re blameless—the sex is something that just happened to you. This paradigm is gender-agnostic. There is enormous traffic on the front page in point-of-view videos of men being seduced by women with whom they have some taboo relation and succumbing to her desire “despite themselves,” only eventually admitting that they really wished for it. The vast majority of popular porn is playfully coercive. Desire must be hidden until it explodes into view. To consider these playfully coercive setups inherently nonconsensual or degrading is a deliberate misreading of this profound, ubiquitous desire, which must haunt every puritanical and sex-negative society: to disavow what we want and still get it.
This push-pull is epitomized in the ubiquitous cum shot, which very much concerns Barton. In one early conversation Barton admits that “for me the idea of someone being covered in cum is so far from what should be a turn-on between people who like each other, unless your thing is quite extreme power play. And yet it’s not acknowledged as a kink—or rather it’s so universalized that it’s a society-wide kink.” What does it mean for a “kink” to be universal? Traditionally, kink refers not to an act of power play but to nonnormative taste. The notion of society-wide deviance implies a natural human order from which we’ve been led astray, as if the pleasures and interests of hundreds of millions of people tell us, rather than something significant about human sexuality, merely that a historical purity of mind has been stolen from us. For bien-pensant progressives like Barton, “vanilla” doesn’t connote normative sexual behavior but rather tender, affectionate sex. Beneath her ostensible inquisitiveness about porn lies an abiding yet disavowed feeling that sex is for clean, loving communion and that cum is a distasteful biological necessity with which only a true freak would be interested in playing, not unlike urine or feces. No, Barton isn’t an avowed conservative, a homophobe or an anti-feminist; nevertheless, this is the inherited ideological basis—concealed even from herself—behind the instinct that the cum shot is degrading.
Why are sex acts like this seen to be inimical to intimacy between people who “like each other”? Barton herself is more turned on by erotic thrillers and romantic sex scenes in films than the sorts of hardcore videos you find online. “The first thing I used as porn,” she writes, “was books.” She attributes this preference less to the power of narrative erotica and more “the absence of the real turn-offs” like the cum shot. Given her discomfort with the language and visuals of porn, I gather that what strikes her as “kinky” about the cum shot is that it’s innately dirty and explicit, and that a man projects it onto a woman. It’s neither demure nor softly lit; it signifies an eruption almost outside a man’s control. Porn consumption is plagued by the vague awareness that what we’re seeing is performed, but the cum shot, in theory, can’t be faked. The buried claim in Barton’s judgment is that we don’t naturally revel in the explicitly dirty, the private made visible or the texture of sex; instead, men must like to see cum on a woman in order to assert that she is a piece of trash they can do with as they please, no matter how obscene, excessive or one-sided their behavior. From this perspective, the explicit portrayal of dirty sex is antithetical to any definition of tenderness and consideration—and therefore there is a fundamental fraudulence in portraying it as pleasurable on-screen, even if one has to concede that some people might find pleasure in it. As Nineteen puts it, “I’m sure there are people who like to have cum on their face, both men and women, but there’s no way of portraying that in a porn film without it looking like exploitation.”
Does the explicitly dirty always look like exploitation? Are we really that Victorian? The revelation of the totally private, undeniably real thing, elicited despite reluctance, has long constituted the mainstream erotic. The cum shot is the glimpse of the bra beneath a t-shirt, the first tentative and sensational disrobing, amplified for adult attention. A foundational joy of sex is pleasure in those bodily capacities and secretions (yes, those too!) that are usually private and therefore bear extraordinary excitement when made visible and shared. I’d stake my life that seeing cum outside the body is an immemorial pastime of men and women; yet in some sense it’s true that, now that so much is allowed sexually, a video has to “look like exploitation”—that is, to feel genuinely taboo—in order to carry that frisson of the forbidden and secretly glimpsed. The thrill of having a pleasurable experience we “shouldn’t” have and getting away with it is the essential thrill of porn. That’s not only what excites the actors in the mainstream videos full of stepfamily scenarios and playful coercion—it’s also part of what briefly excites us about watching them. We know it’s dirty, and we get away with it. Nothing is less sexy than trying to be virtuous. Porn is never about the drive toward equality, the wish to rise above ourselves and our relationship to power. When we watch porn, there’s no space for our aspirations to be good people, and this is what makes it fantastically exciting and terrifying in equal part.
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I don’t care to advocate for porn, or pretend that porn is a source of good in the world, or aesthetically compelling, or even generally satisfying. I’m not rejoicing about living in the golden age of internet porn. Barton and her subjects are disappointed in mainstream porn’s corny storylines, ugly sanitized aesthetics, extreme and often alienating body ideals, and general lack of creativity and raw passion—and I feel the same way. Perhaps the difference is how clear it seems to me that all these complaints are true of most products, especially products supported not by paying consumers but by advertising revenue. The emotional insistence that sex is a sacred thing that is more degraded by commerce and algorithms than, say, art or literature, is yet another legacy of that clean religious vision of sex that Barton so wishes to disclaim.
This underlying conservatism can’t but make me suspicious of the implication that porn reflects some violence specific to male sexuality. It’s common to gesture, when we talk about porn, to how disturbing it is that men are turned on by images of domination and women on their knees. Power shapes attraction. But—of course—power shapes attraction for everyone. I wouldn’t be the first person to comment on the reams of data, which Barton’s conversations only support, that being dominated is one of the primary fantasies for women. This painful reality is easy to understand in a social context that remains, despite feminist efforts and the hard-won opportunities of the last century, worshipful of male strength and protection; but it also interrupts the presumption that porn is the way it is wholly for the sake of male tastes. Rather than asking “Is male sexuality somewhat violent?” we might pose a different question: Why does porn seem to imply that pain, submission and being at someone’s mercy is intimately connected to sexuality?
Nonconsensual violence isn’t the language of front-page popular porn, but it would be obtuse to pretend that these videos eschew pain. Popular porn loves pain that gestures at the too-muchness of sex; porn scenarios are built on the notion of overwhelm, of the uncontrollable force of desire which trounces all taboos and morals, testing the limits of bodily discipline and physical comfort. Reluctance and submission are the emotional touchstones of overwhelm, and the pain of entrance—often the pain of the porn star’s enormous dick—is the physical one. When we talk about the violence of mainstream porn, we’re talking about choking, rough sex and this pain of the enormous dick, or what we might call vanilla size play—types of pain which are portrayed as pleasurable and consensual, and avoid blood or physical injury. Every era has its own sexual trends, as anyone who’s seen Sex and the City can tell you; in ours, choking and slapping seem to be the controversial styles of the moment. But, contrary to the anxious popular view, it’s impossible to know what to make of their popularity. Fewer than a hundred years ago, the blowjob was considered so lewd and degrading as to have no place in any loving relationship; now it’s such standard fare that marriages end for lack of them. Seventeen, as he muses about whether male sexuality is “somewhat violent,” proceeds to invoke Andrea Dworkin, the feminist battles of the Seventies and the tangled problem of whether truly consensual sex is possible under patriarchy; yet this worthwhile ideological musing is undercut by the invocation of extreme violence—“people being strangled until they’re blue in the face and then passing out”—and Seventeen’s personal belief that porn should be annulled from the world. Are these two categories of porn, porn in which a person is knocked unconscious and porn in which a person gets slapped while she’s being fucked, actually continuous? Is the word “violence” really appropriate for both? And don’t we in fact undermine the real extremity of porn so violent it requires an unconscious female participant when we group it with playful rough sex?
In mainstream porn the implication is that the actress who receives the pain of entrance, slapping, choking and so on is enjoying it. “Do you like that?” is critical to the rhetoric of popular porn. Yet whether we are actually seeing pleasure when we watch women get fucked understandably burdens Barton’s subjects. As Fifteen puts it:
A great deal of popular porn trades on this ambiguity, which so many of the voices in this book—encouraged by Barton—consider a form of delusion or willful disbelief. The idea is not that most men who watch popular porn want to see women suffer, but rather that they’ve tricked themselves into believing that women enjoy painful sex. Fifteen draws a distinction between fetish porn, where the line between pain and pleasure is intentionally blurred, and mainstream porn, in which pain is “not really identifiably S and M” but “just part of the accepted sexual practice.” In these scenes, the woman isn’t saying, “Stop, that hurts,” but simply engaging in acts that look extreme or unpleasurable to a woman watching at home. Do women like Fifteen or Barton see the true affect of the actress, privately in pain beneath the pretense that she’s enjoying an experience of coercion or domination? Or is a woman like Fifteen or Barton, who has cause to fear being coerced or violated by men, unable to watch a scene in which an actress appears to enjoy coercion or domination without assuming it’s propaganda for men? Who is it that’s being deluded here about what sex really is—ethically anxious women, or horny men?
“Men don’t want to fuck someone; they want to debase them,” Seventeen muses; if we believe this, watching ostensibly consensual sex becomes an ideological offense, and watching a woman get slapped or receive a cum shot becomes undeniable evidence of violent masculinity. It strikes me as comically facile when people refer to porn, or to rape, as being not about sex but about power; where did we get the idea that sex is ever only about sex, or that the word sex should at base convey tender intimacy? Sex—like everything else—is about power, and porn (and rape) are about both. There are plenty of ways to debase someone that have nothing to do with fucking; men do, in fact, want to fuck people. The idea that dirty sex is dehumanizing is, to me, one of the most misogynist conceptions we apparently still have. This is not to deny that the porn industry is rife with actual exploitation, poor working conditions, inadequate wages and bad actors; it’s simply to acknowledge the quite significant community of sex workers who have repeatedly spoken out about the misogyny and the projection of female powerlessness baked into anti-porn feminisms. To insist that the sex we find in porn is nothing more than disguised nonconsensual pain is a politicized form of narcissism. As the sex writer Aella recently noted on her popular Substack, BDSM-oriented desire may be so distinct, innate, ancient and manifest in subtle ways across our culture as to constitute its own sexual preference, analogous to gay sexuality; those she calls “tendersexual”—women like Barton and some of her subjects—are horrified by power-driven sexual scenarios because they do not recognize the numbers of women who willingly seek out this kind of sex.
The conversations in Barton’s book—and in much of our contemporary discourse—premise that sex and pain don’t naturally go together, and that their pairing in porn is the result of a society-wide and wildly contemporary perversion. Yet this seems a deliberate, perhaps a hopeful, misunderstanding of the self-evident landscape of sexuality. It’s easy for us to imagine that sex and love naturally go together, but need not always; and this strikes me as equally true of sex and pain. To allow someone to hurt us, in an excruciatingly intimate setting, is not so different from allowing someone to love us. Emotionally, the two are so entangled that we enter love knowing it begets pain. In its best forms—which porn attempts to evoke—sex is a departure from any codified or accepted form of social routine. We eagerly contort ourselves in ways we’d be humiliated for the general public to witness. We stretch ourselves, emotionally and physically, in order to have great sex. We push against the boundaries of comfort; we fear getting hurt. It’s a commonplace that all the best things in life arrive at the edge of hurt, as a result of risk. Why do we think sex is the exception? Why are we going around supposing that the prerequisite to good sex is feeling safe? This necessity of risk to the real profundities is, to me, why pain and fear are routinized elements of porn. This necessity of risk to the real profundities is why sometimes it arouses me to glimpse pain and fear when I watch people having sex, and at other times makes me shudder and turn away.
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I wonder if it’s possible for any of us to be genuinely ambivalent and open-minded about porn. It scares me to write this, a bit, not unlike the way it scared Barton to write Porn. To bring our relationship with it into the open, as Barton wishes to, feels like an inconceivable project not because the outmoded scrim of shame around it is too thick to scrub off, but because it remains the ultimate site of the clash between pure desire and moral conscience, between the truly intimate and the social. Porn is one of the primary modes we have to see hidden parts of the world. A friend can tell us about her sex life, but this is like the difference between her telling us what she likes to eat and eating a meal in front of us. We’re desperate to observe, and we’re generally forced to let porn represent our observation of how our neighbors and friends have sex. How could we not compulsively seek out the medium that unites this curiosity with physical pleasure, and how could we fail to resent any way in which it rings untrue?
At its most rudimentary, porn is something we know we shouldn’t look at because it represents the most indecent, id-driven parts of our world, and we know everyone watches it anyway. It scares us; it makes us feel vaguely humiliated; the line between our pleasure and our shock and disturbance is narrow. But to my mind this is all essential not only to porn but to sex. We’re scared of porn because we must be just a little scared of what might happen to us for sex to approach the sublime, a little scared of the world to be really alive to it. The proportion of useful fear is delicate and variable. In life, in sex and in porn, too much fear shuts the whole thing down. The porn on the front page inspires roughly the amount of fear from which the average person almost wants to look away… and doesn’t. Our anxiety is that porn is a measure of socially normalized violence; yet almost by definition, mainstream porn is a measure not of what is normalized, but of what is still just taboo enough to turn us on.
Art credit: Max Maslansky, Preview (Queen bed), 2014. Acrylic on bedsheet, 80 × 60 in. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.