Once we take into consideration porn as we speak, we nonetheless principally take into consideration males. Males because the producers and shoppers. Girls because the product, even when we’re promoting it ourselves.
Now, this may increasingly have been true a decade in the past when the web was nonetheless in its teenage years, however lately, with the web in our pockets, expertise has opened entry to pornography like by no means earlier than. It signifies that whereas males are nonetheless its predominant drivers and customers, ladies are steadily catching up.
Pornhub claims not less than a 3rd of its present consumer base are ladies, and a report from the Youngsters’s Commissioner in 2023 discovered a distinction of simply 16% between what number of women stated they’d sought out porn – 42% – in comparison with 58% of boys. However regardless of this, we nonetheless don’t know that a lot about ladies and porn.
We don’t know what most of us search for or how we really feel about what we discover. We don’t know what it means for how we relate to our our bodies, or to our companions, or to ourselves. At a time when ladies are extra vocal than ever, there’s an elephant within the room on the subject of porn. Most of us aren’t speaking to one another about what we do and don’t do with it, and it signifies that nobody is asking the questions that many people are asking ourselves.
So again in 2017, I got down to discuss to ladies about porn. I began off pondering I might be fortunate to interview perhaps 30 ladies. I anticipated our conversations to be barely stilted and hoped I’d have sufficient materials to write down an instructional article or two. When the decision went out over social media, over 200 ladies responded. It turned out ladies weren’t silent as a result of we had nothing to say. We had been silent as a result of nobody had requested us.
Over the subsequent two years, I spoke to at least one hundred ladies. Throughout racial and sophistication backgrounds, ladies from eighteen to seventy spoke out in frank element about what porn has meant of their lives and the way they really feel about it as we speak. For some, it was a manner they’d explored themselves, examined out their sexuality or realized about their physique. For others, it had destroyed relationships or meant they’d spent years doing what they thought they had been imagined to do in intercourse. Many of the ladies I spoke to didn’t watch feminist porn regardless of supporting it in idea. They used the identical free mainstream websites as males, with the identical free mainstream porn on it. And for a lot of, that meant they felt a battle between what they watched and what it stated about ladies.
Like Makeda, who stated she had no disgrace about her porn use however felt the way in which ladies had been proven in what she watched must be wiped off the face of the planet.
“I’ve a love/hate relationship with a lot of the porn I watch”, she stated “however that doesn’t cease me utilizing it.” Ashley and Kush talked about feeling disgusted and turned on by what they’d seen. “I don’t like the truth that it brings me to these two locations in equal power,” Kush stated. “I believe in the event you push it too far, you may lose your self.” Or Prena who felt that although she’d watched feminist porn, there was a facet of her that wanted one thing extra vulgar. “I don’t know methods to put it some other manner”, she advised me, “However I nearly want a touch of non-consensualness to make it horny.”
This battle that so many ladies talked about between their pleasure and their rules is the factor that stood out to me greater than the rest. And I believe that’s as a result of I’d by no means heard it earlier than.
For ladies, there’s actually been simply two permitted positions: both you’re the cool woman who loves porn or the one who thinks it is violent. You’re both utilizing it and having a good time or avoiding it fully. It’s pleasurable or shameful, by no means this combination of the 2. It’s laborious to speak about watching mainstream porn and feeling anxious in regards to the wellbeing of performers, however not anxious sufficient to cease watching. Or about supporting the thought of feminist porn in precept, however in apply getting extra turned on by individuals who don’t appear like you, doing issues that you simply’re fairly positive can be painful. We’ve been inspired to bypass factors of discomfort and contradiction, requested to decide on narratives which might be simpler, the place we’re much less implicated. Our silence has been comprehensible, however I don’t assume it’s been useful.
In one in every of my final interviews, a younger girl, Vanessa, stated, “What are the conversations about porn that we must be having that we don’t wish to have.” I really feel like that’s the query we have to ask ourselves. After which we have to hear.