Why Women Need To Talk About Porn

Hey Fleshbot fans! I’ve been pondering recently, during this Women’s History Month, the relationship of female fans to porn.

Some of us grew up shamed because of our gender when we were caught or admitted to looking at porn or even being naturally curious about sex as a general topic. It is expected, nay, almost encouraged, that men will want to look at porn, but we women, according to some people, are expected to keep sex as a big nebulous mystery until our wedding night. It’s assumed that we want to get married, to a man, and that sex is just this thing to procreate and we shouldn’t revel in it or really find it even pleasant. The very act of a woman having the same sexual desires and curiosity as a man is mind-boggling to some people. I’m a non-binary person, so I just confuse said types of people, but I am AFAB and was raised somewhat repressed so I am not talking out of my ass here.

Salt N’ Pepa sang it better than I can say it…… let’s talk abouuuuut sex….

The recent Financial Times piece I read on this topic talks about women having a “porn story” in their lives, the first time they saw porn, basically. In my early teens, I was obsessed with The X-Files and Quantum Leap among other shows in the genre. The male stars of these shows happened to have interviews in and be on the cover of Playgirl at the time. My mother diligently bought the magazines and separated the interviews from the rest of the magazine and stapled them to the cover so I could have them for my clippings/scrapbook. She thoughtfully colored over any stray dongs appearing in ads or other articles that happened to be on the pages with black Sharpie. Reader, I’d already been looking at dongs on good ol’ Usenet (that’s the proto Reddit, ya whippersnappers!) and since she didn’t throw out the rest of the magazines (wonder why?), I dug those up too and pored over them. I had all the basics, having had a decent science-based sex education curriculum in public school (not a given these days), I was madly curious about sex and all of the variants of the act that were out there. It was perfectly normal but I remember feeling very weird about wanting to know these things. Oh hey, embarrassment kink, that’s where you came from!

So, it’s okay to like porn as a woman. It’s great. But as with any media, looking at it with a critical eye and processing the way it makes us feel is encouraged. It will help to improve the quality of future offerings and help craft more porn that appeals to more people. A healthy discourse around the positive and negative aspects of the industry and of sex work is far more useful than denial or shame around the fact that these industries exist and that women and those beyond the binary are avid consumers as well as men.

Nowadays, many of the major players in porn both in talent and creatives are women. There are more women than ever in positions of leadership and female pornstars are no longer required to be dependent on bottom-feeder skeezy male agents who are just a few steps up from pimps.

It seems as though women are actually talking a lot about porn; three recent books on this subject are now on my never-ending To Be Read pile. Porn: An Oral History by Polly Barton, and Women On Porn by Dr. Fiona Vera-Gray are recent academic-style studies of smut. Also, Jane Kamensky has just written a new biography of feminist porn icon Candida Royalle which inspired Darklady's recent piece about her.

Porn is made for all genders, by all genders, so if you love it, watch it, buy it, discuss it! It’s subversive to do so! If you’re a female or non-binary porn fan, congrats, you keep right on enjoying things.