Solo sexual exploration is like a sweet-ass party that adolescent girls just aren’t invited to. We receive the message that it is just not for us and if you’re doing it, then keep that sh*t under wraps because it just isn’t ladylike.
Things are finally changing, but the stigmatisation of women masturbating has left many of us relatively in the dark on a lot of things.
Like porn. ‘Do women watch porn?’, and ‘what kind of porn do women watch?’ are questions it would have been comforting to know the answers to while growing up. Because if you’re not having open discussions with other women, it’s easy to mistake a healthy appetite for porn and masturbation, for some kind perversion.
But thanks to the insights shared regularly by the world’s most popular porn site, Pornhub, everyone’s freak flags are on display. And women watch porn too! Recognise it. Accept it. Embrace it. In 2017, 26% of PornHub’s worldwide viewers were women. In Australia we were 28%.
And you wanna know what women are watching? According to the data breakdowns, we are watching a whole lot of lesbian porn.
Pornhub’s 2015 ‘What Women Want’ report revealed that ‘lesbian’ was the term most searched by women globally, and that continues to be the #1 most popular category with female users.
So any women out there who have ever felt confused about preferring to watch lesbian porn to heterosexual porn, rest assured that it’s very normal.
Of course for some people it might be an indication of a genuine sexual orientation, and something worth exploring in real life, but based on these numbers it’s clear that the popularity of lesbian porn transcends the queer audience.
It would be far too easy to argue that the women of the world are all secretly harbouring lesbian tendencies, waiting for the right time to rise up in revolution, overthrowing heterosexuality and rendering the male gender obsolete for good. Though it’s not a terrible idea. (Kidding!)
Really, a lot of the women watching lesbian porn have minimal desire for lesbian sexual interaction outside of the context of their erotic fantasies (just as incest, rape and kidnapping fantasies do not all translate to a real life desire). There are certain appeals of lesbian porn that make it preferable to currently available mainstream hetero-porn, so plenty of women who identify as heterosexual seek it out.
Let’s take a look at why that might be.
#1. Mainstream porn is made for a male viewer.
In most porn videos, the sex is choreographed so that the man’s pleasure is centre stage hogging the spotlight, while stimulation of female arousal gets very little airtime. Meanwhile, in lesbian porn, it’s all girls all the time. With female pleasure as the main event, women’s desires are incidentally catered to over those of the male audience.
What is it that women could possibly want to see? Hmm…
Basically if you want to see women getting head and clitoral stimulation, most mainstream heterosexual porn is just not delivering the goods. Women opt for lesbian porn without many other options catering to their wants.
(Sidenote: try searching ‘massage’. You’re welcome.)
#2. The male presence in porn can be pretty f**king scary.
Women are often put off by the domineering male actor and end up feeling perturbed by the idea that the female actor is potentially in an intimidating environment. The concern can really kill arousal. It tends to feel like a much less threatening situation if it’s only females on screen, although this does not actually guarantee a non-threatening environment on set.
Outside of concern for the actors’ safety, a lot of women are turned off by the visual of an overbearing man dominating the woman in sex, or the age disparity between actors.
Lesbian porn is popular because it is more accessible than the comparatively male-dominated sexism of mainstream heterosexual porn. But it’s important to recognise that unfortunately, most lesbian porn is still saturated by the male gaze and caters to male fantasies. That means that what we see is the inauthentic fetishisation of lesbian sex. We see sex that has been styled, performed and packaged to fulfil the desires of the male audience.
It’s homosexual women who are probably most aware of how inauthentic most mainstream lesbian porn is. This video of actual lesbians reacting to lesbian porn made for men pretty much says it all.
The problem is, there is insufficient porn and erotica that caters to women’s needs because women’s pleasure is still stigmatised. Men are not the only sexual beings and they are not the only audience to consider.
That’s why feminist porn is on the rise, to address the need for change and give a more balanced depiction of sex.
That’s also why in December last year, Pornhub launched a new ‘Popular With Women’ category, which aggregates content catered to women’s specific interests based on our views and preferences. It replaced the ‘Female Friendly’ category, which housed content marketed towards women as opposed to content women have actually enjoyed.
This is the kind of cultural change we need to see, along with a more open and supportive discussion about women’s pleasure.
Though to be clear, breaking down the stigma around female masturbation and erotic fantasy DOES NOT mean asking probing questions or pushing someone to be open about their desires if they’re clearly not comfortable talking about it with you.
You shouldn’t feel like you can’t talk about it, but you also shouldn’t feel like you have to. No one is entitled to know your personal sexual practices and we should respect each other’s boundaries.
Breaking down the stigma is about dispelling the sense of embarrassment and associated perversion that is attached to women’s solo sexual experience. Female masturbation should be part of the greater conversation on sex and progress relies on society embracing women’s right to experience themselves sexually.
Anyway, thanks for staying with me until the end, now go f**k yourselves. ?