Wednesday, May 11, 2011

The Porn I Like, part 1: What the Pundits Say

A recent Wall Street Journal article, The Online World of Female Desire, goes through a lot of stereotypes about men getting off on two-minute video clips and women soaking up long romance novels (even if they did study a large number of web searches), before it finally gets to this:

Some female readers might be thinking, "This doesn't describe me at all!" And, in fact, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the visitors to the major pornography sites are women. Our data suggest that these women probably have a higher sex drive than other women and that they are more socially aggressive and more comfortable taking risks.


There. That's more like it. And, it seems to me, I've got a lot of female company if "between a quarter and a third of the visitors to the major pornography sites are women."

Maybe we just need to make our own erotica, argues Porn made for women, by women in the Guardian. (Tip of the dildo to the Sex Secrets blog.)

"It is a prejudice to say that women don't like porn," says Erika Lust, another fem porn director. "Sex images make you hot, but pornography has been made by and for men. In mainstream porn everything is about male pleasure and women are objects. Oral sex for men can last forever, but when women's turn comes it lasts 10 seconds. Female orgasms are not an issue in most of the films. And women are shown mostly as prostitutes, which is sad."

[...]

Lust adds: "To get excited women want to see something that looks like us. We want to see independent women exploring their sexuality, who are not afraid, but are not sex heroines either. We want to see attractive men who share our lifestyles, our ideas."

[...]

[Verena Chiara Kuckenberger:] "For women to admit to experiencing pleasure in watching pornography means overcoming stereotypes about female sexuality. There are women who do not want to consume pornography, but at the same time there is a potential female audience for porn and I would say it is bigger than it has been assumed so far and it is increasing as our society overcomes gendered stereotypes in general."


(Another Guardian article says enough women are watching enough porn that female porn addiction is not uncommon.)

In future posts, I'll write about the kinds of porn I like to see.

3 comments:

  1. Hello. I'm working my way through Beatrice Faust's 'Women Sex and Pornography' right now which touches on some of these issues. Although she agrees that women tend to be more situationally (perhaps a nicer way to say 'emotionally') aroused and men are much more visually aroused she punches some holes in the old 'women don't like' porn stereotype. The book was first published in 1980, well before the internet... which has made it much easier for everyone (men and women) to find pornographic content, subverting social stigmas that are still at large. I imagine the pornographic awakening (dare I say renaissance) induced by the internet has perhaps been more profound for women. Great blog by the way!

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  2. Hello, Johnny cum,

    Glad to see I'm attracting some intellectual porn fans to this blog and glad you like it. Thank you for the information. The internet has certainly helped me find what I like.

    Watch for more posts in the "Porn I Like" series.

    Yours,
    Vickie P.

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  3. It sort of surprises me that 25 to 33 percent of porn site visitors are women.

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