Pornography and the Men and Women Who Watch It

One of the essays in my private canon of great essays that no one else seems to have read is philosopher Nancy Bauer’s essay “Pornutopia,” which first ran in the winter 2007 issue of N+1 and then was included in Bauer’s 2015 book How to Do Things With Pornography.

I don’t talk much about my enthusiasm for this essay because it’s embarrassing. You can’t really get into this topic without owning, in some fashion, your own relationship to pornography, and perhaps without forcing your conversation partners to visualize some aspect of that relationship.

Precisely because this is an area where the experience is so widely shared but real discussion is so rare, however, the potential literary charge is great. I (and I suspect you) really want the private, rather embarrassing and under-analyzed experience to be illuminated and universalized by someone smart and articulate. Bauer did it exceptionally well, as has my guest on the show today, novelist and critic Lillian Fishman.

Fishman is author o…