Behind Closed Doors: One in Five Straight Men Watches Gay Porn

We are amidst a golden age right now - it's an age when porn is treated as legitimate media, and researchers approach and study it as so. This kind of real, scientific study shines a light on many of the things so many of us has been ashamed by: why we want to watch porn even if we lead satisfying sex lives with attractive partners, why we watch things that are "kinky," and perhaps most notably, why we watch porn that doesn't align with our sexualities. Do all straight women who love lesbian porn have a secret bi streak? Are straight men who watch gay porn actually gay somewhere deep now? 

No. No, no, and no. See, most of us who work in this industry have long understood that sex is far more complex than that, and that when it comes down to it, most sexual stimuli is going to arouse you, even if the activity isn't something you would elect to do in real life. Most of us, too, have been dismissed for thinking that way. But no more! 

A recent study cited in the Archives of Sexual Behavior examined 821 gay, bi, and straight men about their sexuality and their porn viewing habits. What they found was pretty interesting - 21 percent of self-identified straight men watch gay male porn, though they do not elect to have sex with men in real life. On the flip side, 55 percent of gay men watch straight porn, though they don't have sex with women. Bisexual men, on the other hand, have totally different viewing habits than their straight or gay counterparts: They watch just as much straight porn as gay men, and just as much gay porn as gay men. (This also finally legitimizes bisexuality, but that's for another article.) 

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When I was in college, there was a rumor about the ways a sorority hazed its pledges. It wasn't true, as far as I know, but rumor went that they had the girls pull down their panties and sit on paper towels while they watched lesbian porn. If the paper towels were wet when they stood up, they were secret lesbians and couldn't be initiated. Maybe it's my age, but it seems society is much kinder to women who like women these days, but it reflected a certain idea we'd all been told throughout our teen years: If it turns you on to see, it must align with your sexual preferences. I know most of us were terrified by that prospect; we'd all stumbled onto gay porn and BDSM porn and groping porn and role play porn and all sort of other content deemed deviant by our peers. We worried about the kind of people we'd turn out to be, if we were really the people we believed we were. 

Enter: Valid research, identity-discrepant viewing. Proof that perhaps sexuality was a little - nay, a lot - more convoluted. Go figure. When concepts are so complicated or so abstract that they at first seem contradictory, I like to turn to imagery. So consider a Venn diagram with me - the left bubble is labeled "visual stimuli" and the right bubble is "sexual interests." In the middle are the things that are both. On the exteriors, things that you'd watch but wouldn't do, or would do but wouldn't watch. That is your brain on sex.   

I imagine we're still far away from straight men being able to confidently claim they watch gay porn in this masculine culture, and I suppose that's fine. My hopes, however, is that we've finally broken ground on what why we might like to watch (or as is often true, fantasize) about things we wouldn't want to do. It doesn't make us corrupt, immoral, or unethical, and it doesn't mean we have to succumb to the idea that our sexuality has to fit inside a neat little box. At the end of the day, we can really only know one thing to be unequivocally true: 

Sex is very, very messy.