Published By: Torva
Pages: 320
Released On: 08/02/2024
At a time when women are more vocal than ever about our lives, there’s one last taboo. We need to talk about porn.
When we think about porn today, we still mostly think about men. Men as the producers and the consumers. Women as the product. Most women aren’t talking to each other about what they do and don’t do with porn – not really. And when we do talk about it, we are divided into unhelpful binaries: for or against? Liberation or coercion? Too sexual or not sexual enough? But in a world where porn sites get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon plus Twitter combined, and one of the leading sites claims a third of its users are women, isn’t it time to change that?
In this book, interviews with 100 women result in an extraordinary and powerful conversation on pornography. How they first encountered it. How they consume it. How it has affected their sex lives. What they like and what they don’t. And what it means for their relationships.
*****
Thanks to Hannah Winter and Torva for the gifted proof of this title in return for an honest review.
As bizarre a topic as it is, I actually wrote an essay in my third year of University on porn and how it affects women, and so this book really peeked my interest. I wrote my essay in 2013/14 and even back then it was difficult to write about such a ‘taboo’ subject without it sounding seedy. I know things have moved on in the decade since, but Fiona has done a really great job at balancing honesty and natural-ness, with respecting the still quiet judgements we (especially in the UK) unconsciously may still have.
Even now, in 2024, when I’d finished reading it, I hid it, especially if people were coming round. It’s not a book to be ashamed of, but it still seems to be a topic I am not eager to talk to people about, even if it’s just the title of a book. And I found that subconscious shyness fascinating.
Given how open we are as a race, and the freedom to speak – which can often be a grey area – porn is still not a conversation we talk about in polite society, and neither, to a certain degree, is sex. It all seems very dirty, and so to release a mainstream book on the topic seems – unnecessarily so – brave. [I don’t mean that it is unnecessary to release the book, I mean that it feels unnecessary that something so familiar in our day-to-day life has to be considered brave or taboo.]
It was also fascinating to read about porn from a female point of view. If porn is ever discussed it is usually regarding male viewers, so this gave it a new perspective, as well as including women up to the age of 70, which is also a demographic that isn’t considered when talking about sex.
It’s intense, let’s not beat around the bush here (pun very much intended). It gets to the heart of the matter, looking at a handful of topics in more detail – desire, bodies, sex, relationships, violence, and the future. What I found to be so overwhelming is how much porn and violence seem to go hand-in-hand. This idea that women don’t like it, that we shouldn’t be watching it because it is derogatory to women, that men shouldn’t watch it because they’ll grow up to be violent towards women. It was fascinating, but quite scary how prevalent that thought was.
I know this is Fiona’s field, but the sheer amount of research she probably had to do over the years is very impressive, and it really shows how deep this topic goes.
If I had to be super critical, I did find it a bit repetitive at times, and didn’t have a great flow. It seemed more to be a list of things rather than a conversation. It isn’t a huge issue and didn’t spoil the reading of it, but at times it felt more like an essay than a book, but that’s my own personal view.
Not one to gift to your mother-in-law I would say, and one that you may want to keep out of the hands of little ones, but it is an interesting topic, is well written, and will spark a much needed and much overdue conversation.
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