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...