Yes, I think it’s hard to be really clinical and removed when someone’s sharing something they’ve maybe never verbalized to anyone before. It’s weird to be like, “Ok, next question.”
Absolutely, yes! Which is part of the reason I was really sure I wanted to do this with people I knew already—to avoid that. For this, I felt like reciprocity was so important, and I didn’t want to use that clinical persona as a way of hiding.
Obviously the two are very intertwined, but why porn and not masturbating?
I think because I felt as though porn was more of a taboo. I very, very much from the outset did not want this to be a book that came down on either side of the Is Porn Good or Bad debate. My sense was that the debate itself and how incendiary it can get is a key part in shaping people’s feelings around porn and the discomfort and the shame we feel feeds into that. A lot of what we covered could definitely have been covered under the title of masturbation, but I felt like by making it about porn, I was getting all that and more.
In the conclusion you interrogate the idea that perhaps you should have come out with a point of view. Without spoiling the beautiful world of the book where you don’t come down on one side or the other, have you reached any conclusions about porn?
I think what I’ve come to is a more—and it feels strange to admit this in a way because I feel like if I had had this at the beginning, I probably wouldn’t have the done the project in the same way—I just have so much more of a nuanced understanding of the diversity of porn and what it means to different people. I’ve almost gotten to the stage where it’s hard to say anything about porn in general. You know we all use that word as if we’re referring to the same thing, and I think sometimes that’s true. Often when we’re referring to porn without specifying, we’re referring to this top-page cis-het stuff on PornHub. But now when people ask me general questions about porn, my instant reaction is, “What porn?” There’s just so much and there’s so much diversity and it’s quite hard to talk about in a blanket way.
Yeah, I mean, it’s a little bit like literature. If somebody was like, “Can you draw conclusions about literature?” You’d be like… “Well, would you like a book report on a specific book? What are you looking for?”
It’s really helpful to make those comparisons when we consider that the question that’s most often being asked is literally “Is porn good or bad?” So then it’s like, is literature good or bad? Is sex good or bad? How can you possibly even start to answer that question?
Speaking to the diversity of what’s out there, I feel like at this point, it’s pretty hard to shock me sex-talk wise. What more often surprises me is the similarities between people, usually the sense of shame about certain things, but really the overarching eagerness people have to talk about these topics. Did you find the same thing?