A few years ago, Polly Barton sent out a mass email bcc’ing friends and acquaintances. The subject? “A request”. She might have played coy then, but what came out from that email is a book called Porn: An Oral History.

It’s a collection of nineteen conversations. Italian essayist Chiara Valerio dubs it “a taxonomy of sex”. It accomplishes something similar to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Comizi d’amore. “Not in structure”, but in the willingness “to leave the chaos in”, Barton suggests. Faced with the chaos, editors and interviewers have been quick to try and categorise the book - and Polly Barton loves this.

We could definitely say that Porn is about masturbation. And porn, of course: “I wouldn’t have associated porn with masturbation if not for this book!”, interrupts Chiara Valerio.

Porn wouldn’t work if it was polite conversation - which is “often neither” as Fran Lebowitz once wrote. “Ultimately, this book is about intimacy” according to Barton. The conversations in Porn are intimate not least because Polly Barton and her friends have all felt embarrassed by their porn consumption to some degree or another. Barton manages to unpack the shame. She does not put herself on a pedestal: She didn’t go into the book doing swathes of research, purposefully avoiding for a bit established theories around gender and sexuality.

By escaping theorisation, the book’s approach may feel incomplete to some, fresh and genuine to others. Barton’s only regret is having eschewed questions around class. What did it mean when some of her companions admitted searching for “classy porn” or dismissed Pornhub as “tacky porn”? “Porn is here to stay”, and so should be the conversation.