Tag Archives: porn for women

Porn For Women: What Do Women Really Watch?

The idea of creating porn specifically for women has been around for some time. The “need” for female porn has always been justified by the fact that the majority of porn consumers have historically been male, and therefore (the assumption goes) the needs of women are not being served by the industry.

My first encounter with the genre came in the late 1990s when I met a woman who thought she had the idea for the perfect female porn site, and wanted me to develop it for her. She created a site called The Hotel which was altogether more artistic than the average porn site. The site worked around the concept of a dirty weekend in an upmarket hotel. The user could check in, flirt with the bell boy and buy toys and shoes as well as – naturally – look at porn.

Unsurprisingly, the site bombed. It was based on the idea that women have fundamentally different porn tastes to men, and require a more tasteful/romantic/gentle approach to smut. This idea has proven to be largely false.

When I ran Strictly Broadband, the UK’s largest pay-per-view site (prior to the rise of free tube sites), I was able to access, for the first time, large amounts of data on female vs male porn tastes. I created a top 10 movies list for each sex and wrote an article on the subject for the (now defunct) Scarlet Magazine. The findings were surprising, and overturned much of the “porn for women” and “feminist porn” narrative that I had heard. In particular:

  1. Women and men did show some differences in taste, but not the differences predicted by porn for women “experts”.
  2. Women showed no more interest in porn created for women than men did. In fact, titles by producers such as Anna Span and Petra Joy were viewed by men and women in roughly the same proportions as all other titles. While some women may have viewed these titles because they were marketed at women, so did some men, curious to see what women were watching.
  3. Women – including straight women – are often more interested in watching other women than watching men.
  4. But some women enjoy gay male porn, where the men are typically better looking and fitter than their straight porn equivalents.
  5. The most marked difference was that women were interested in watching a gang bang title, while men were not.

The last point came initially as a surprise, though in hindsight should not have done. Anyone who has watched a gang bang will know that these titles are not great for the average straight male viewer. They generally consist of long lines of naked men queueing (and trying to maintain hard-ons) for a couple of minutes of sex each with one or two women. Although the gang bang is often presented by anti-porn feminists as the worst possible example of mistreatment of women in porn, it is easy to understand why women, rather than men, would want to watch these titles.

In a gang bang, the action revolves completely around the woman. Her sexual satisfaction, not the satisfaction of the males, is the objective. In porn, the men are often anonymous studs; pieces of flesh who are simply required to fuck the star, not to add their personalities to the scene. In a gang bang, this becomes even more so. The men worship the star, but she is in control. Whether or not each man manages to come in his allotted time slot, he is turfed out to make way for the next one. The star of a gang bang is in the ultimate position of power, using and discarding countless anonymous males in an attempt to sate her apparently endless lust.

More recently, Pornhub have confirmed, based on far bigger datasets than I had available, that female tastes are very different to the soft-and-gentle ones previously assumed.

In their list of categories that are accessed by women more than men, “for women” is understandably at the top of the list: many porn viewers have little idea what they are initially searching for, so will be guided by other people’s recommendations. “Lesbian” comes second, followed by “solo male”. But these are followed by the categories that are often listed by anti-sex feminists as examples of why porn is abusive towards women: “gang bang”, “rough sex”, “double penetration”, “fisting” and “orgy” are all listed in the top 15 female-preferred categories.

The myth of the demure female is blown away by the realities of porn viewing. By and large, women watch the same content that men do, but err towards rougher sex rather than away from it.

However, men still watch a lot more porn than women do, and probably will continue to do so. Erotic fiction however is read more by women than by men, but this does not reveal a more prudish attitude towards sex – on the contrary, the subjects tackled by much erotica are far more taboo than the porn industry can deal with, for censorship reasons. Erotic literature, much of it written by women and mostly read by women, deals with fantasies including kidnap and rape by monsters and aliens.

It turns out that men, not women, are the ones with the more predictable, gentle and dull sexual fantasies. Whatever “porn for women” might be, it isn’t what many experts in the genre seem to think.

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