Once we take into consideration porn right this moment, we nonetheless largely take into consideration males. Males because the producers and shoppers. Girls because the product, even when we’re promoting it ourselves.
Now, this will have been true a decade in the past when the web was nonetheless in its teenage years, however nowadays, 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 most important drivers and customers, ladies are steadily catching up.
Pornhub claims at the least a 3rd of its present person base are ladies, and a report from the Kids’s Commissioner in 2023 discovered a distinction of simply 16% between what number of women mentioned that they had 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 the way 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’d be fortunate to interview perhaps 30 ladies. I anticipated our conversations to be barely stilted and hoped I’d have sufficient materials to jot down a tutorial 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 following 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 right this moment. For some, it was a means that they had explored themselves, examined out their sexuality or discovered about their physique. For others, it had destroyed relationships or meant they’d spent years doing what they thought they had been presupposed to do in intercourse. A lot of the ladies I spoke to didn’t watch feminist porn regardless of supporting it in concept. 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 mentioned about ladies.
Like Makeda, who mentioned she had no disgrace about her porn use however felt the best way ladies had been proven in what she watched needs to be wiped off the face of the planet.
“I have a love/hate relationship with most of the porn I watch”, she mentioned “but that doesn’t stop me using it.” Ashley and Kush talked about feeling disgusted and turned on by what they’d seen. “I don’t like the fact that it brings me to those two places in equal force,” Kush mentioned. “I think if you push it too far, you can lose yourself.” 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 how to put it any other way”, she advised me, “But I almost need a hint of non-consensualness to make it sexy.”
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 girls, 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 utterly. It’s pleasurable or shameful, by no means this combination of the 2. It’s onerous 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 concept of feminist porn in precept, however in follow getting extra turned on by individuals who don’t seem like you, doing issues that you simply’re fairly positive could be painful. We’ve been inspired to bypass factors of discomfort and contradiction, requested to decide on narratives which might be easier, the place we’re much less implicated. Our silence has been comprehensible, however I don’t assume it’s been useful.
In one in all my final interviews, a younger lady, Vanessa, mentioned, “What are the conversations about porn that we need to be having that we don’t want to have.” I really feel like that’s the query we have to ask ourselves. After which we have to hear.
Girls on Porn by Fiona Vera-Grey is out now.
