Below find an excerpt from Porn: An Oral History by Polly Barton.
There is also a great Conversations piece in the Paris Review with Polly Barton that was printed on March 20, 2023. Find that here.
“Back when I was living in rural Japan, one of my favourite pastimes was hanging out beside the porn section in the local video shop. The video shop was a sizeable place, its numerous racks labelled with all the different categories of film I would have expected to find there, and some more besides, which I wouldn’t. There was the ‘Sekushii’ [Sexy] section, for instance, sandwiched between the very standardly labelled ‘Romantic Comedies’ and ‘Suspense’ racks. This label afforded me great delight when I first managed to read it, and I immediately assumed that this must be the porn, but on further inspection, the rack turned out to contain the kinds of films that to my mind would be best described as ‘eighties erotic drama’. They might have been sexy by name, but they clearly weren’t sexy enough by nature to merit shielding from the eyes of the toddlers who would go thundering down the aisles in search of the newest animation DVD – that was a fate reserved for the porn proper, which had its own separate room, partitioned off from the main shop floor by a pink curtain. This section wasn’t labelled in any way, as far as I could see. I only became aware of its existence one day when I was perusing the box sets on the far wall, and witnessed someone else who was also perusing the box sets with me ostensibly disappear into thin air. Was I losing my mind? Like someone who has witnessed a miracle or a tragedy, I stood rooted to the spot, feigning fascination with the videos in front of me, and a couple of minutes later the disappearing man emerged, now with two see-through plastic cases in hand. As he trotted in the direction of the cashiers, I stood back from the shelves and examined the opening into which he had vanished and from which he had reappeared: sure enough there was a hole in the wall veiled by two pieces of thin pink satin fabric. I must have subconsciously registered it before, and assumed it was some kind of employee-only zone.
From that point on, I became fascinated by the pink curtain dance that the porn-renting men would perform. Now and then I would encounter someone who went swanning in directly, but these intrepid types were the anomaly; the protocol was that you had to stand and pretend to be looking at the box sets, and then, after a surreptitious head-turn or two, slip in sideways between the silky pink folds of the curtain. Almost unfailingly there was a graceful, nigh on ethereal quality to this movement that, held up alongside the array of sights they were no doubt going to see on the shelves of that room, brought me an obscure pleasure. I say ‘no doubt’, because I never myself entered the pink-curtain room. Perhaps subconsciously I wasn’t brave enough, and I feared the interaction if and when I encountered someone else in there. It seemed to me, though, that I just wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to see the rows of DVDs with pictures that would probably make me feel strange and uncomfortable. I just wanted to watch the men as they performed their clandestine ritual, and this I started doing as a matter of course whenever I visited the video shop. I’m fairly sure that my lingering presence by the box-set wall or the neighbouring shelves was perceived as an obstacle, something that made the curtain-slip harder and more embarrassing to execute, and that for me was a point of joy, even pride. I felt no animosity towards the porn-renting men, but neither did I understand why I should cooperate in making their quest any easier. Standing there brought me a faint sense of jubilation, that I think was something to do with feeling the tables had been turned: until that point in my life, I’d felt that porn was a mechanism used to make me feel embarrassed or somehow hemmed in both existentially and physically, or at least, which did make me embarrassed and hemmed in, for a host of reasons that I found it difficult to unravel. Now, I was in a position of inviolability. It was almost thrilling to feel that I was tied to these men’s crusade in some way, a witness to their act of transgression – which was not really a transgression at all. As I watched them heading towards the counter, their footsteps no longer remotely ethereal, I would feel a frisson of nerves as I pictured and vicariously experienced that mortifying interaction. Even I had felt embarrassed in the past when the cashiers had read out the names of the videos I was renting, as they were obliged to do, for no reason other than that they contained a lot of foreign words that I was making them pronounce. How, then, was a person to cope when the words they were enunciating were ‘Edward Penishands’ or ‘Super Hornio Brothers’? Who felt the more embarrassed: the renter or the cashier? Or did neither of them? Was this transaction so humdrum by now that there was no mortification left in it? What percentage of videos taken out here were porn? Did the pink-curtain cupboard actually account for eighty per cent of all rentals? Was it a cupboard, or was it deceptively huge? Was it actually as large as the video shop again? These were the kinds of questions I would ask myself as I stood smirking by the box sets.”
