But they wouldn’t be right, either.Ībout a year ago, the Pornhub analytics team decided to examine the viewing habits of their female viewers. The average person may envision a scene spotlighting intimacy, passion and connection, and they wouldn’t be wrong. But there’s a lot of debate surrounding what porn for women actually looks like. That’s not to say women aren’t watching porn some are. It’s no secret that most of the porn out there is filmed through a male lens. However, it is also true that the vast majority of porn has been made.This article originally appeared on AlterNet. Many explanations have been offered for the fact that many more men consume porn of all kinds than do women, including the commonplace observation (supported by research) that men are more strongly aroused by visual stimuli than are women. While women represent a significant slice of today's porn market, men continue to consume the lion's share of it. A traditional slang term for such movies was "stag films," because it was assumed they were watched by an all-male audience. Pornography has long been thought of as a man's domain. Reporting on women who consume pornography, Jessica Lindsay writes: "Pornhub stats show that women are 69 percent more likely to watch gay male porn than men, and it's the most watched category for women over 45." On the other hand, she adds: "It's more common for the 18-24 age group to watch gay porn, with over 40% of the women who do so falling into that bracket."
Writing about Neville's survey, Ariel Sobel reported that 68 percent of participants also watched straight porn, 53 percent watched lesbian porn, but "82 percent of participants preferred gay male pornography to other genres." She surveyed 275 women of varied sexual orientations, including heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual women. Neville, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, based her 2018 book Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys on the research she was motivated to conduct after that Pornhub finding in 2015.
"Back in 2015, the wildly popular online pornography site Pornhub-which boasts over 115 million daily views-published a finding that took sexuality researcher Lucy Neville by surprise: women are responsible for more than a third of the site's gay male porn views," reported journalist Tim Fitzsimmons in 2018.
That evidence is not just anecdotal but solidly statistical. Yet there is evidence that ladies are looking at erotica created for gay guys in unexpected numbers. While males enjoying lesbian action is a commonplace, its counterpart-women enjoying gay men's pornography-is not as widely recognized. Scenes that are female-only remove any possibility that the viewer could get turned on by another man. Another probable reason for the popularity of lesbianism in hetero men's material is somewhat more troubling: many straight men harbor homophobic feelings or insecurities about their own sexuality such that scenes involving another man can be off-putting or threatening. Straight men enjoy looking at women's bodies, and lesbian action means more women to gaze upon. "More female flesh," is how a man I once knew succinctly put it.
It is not difficult to understand why so many heterosexual men enjoy lesbian lovemaking. Mainstream porn films traditionally feature at least one scene of two ladies getting it on. Anyone who picks up Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, or any hetero men's sex magazine is apt to find pages of female-on-female action. That heterosexual MEN relish watching lesbian sex is a matter of common knowledge as well as social research.