More women looking at porn.

[MarquisDeCarabas]

Victory for female empowerment or treasonous complicity in the sex industry? What think you?

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/15/porn-women-web-searches-female-sexuality-50-shaphy-women-desire-exploitation-powerful-role-sexuality

I'm starting to come to the conclusion that it's unethical to pay someone to do anything sexual / reproductive with their body at all.

It is not a stretch to imagine people being all 'sex-positive', fun fem, 'liberated' etc at a particular period in their life, perhaps to do with the circle they move in, the person they are in love with or the past the are trying to reconcile or rebel against.

There's a possibility that people get swept along by a culture of normalisation and make 'ethical porn'... only to bitterly regret the permanent compromise of their sexual privacy for the rest of their lives, when they move onto a new phase.

Few thoughts

Normalisation and mainstreaming of porn, along with accessibility, means that many more young women and girls will be searching it. It's "normal" to watch porn and so girls and women will go looking. And also to find out what it's all about.

Searching "porn for women" certainly implies that standard porn is not made for women which is kind of obvious. The different category is needed because not everyone wants to watch women being treated as they often are in porn aimed at men. However, not all men like seeing women abused either. How do they know that the people searching"porn for women" are women?

The porn industry has a STRONG interest in saying women do it to, as it's mainly women who are against the porn industry.

Tallulah "I'm starting to come to the conclusion that it's unethical to pay someone to do anything sexual / reproductive with their body at all." Yes I came to this view over the last decade or so, maybe in some kind of different utopian world it would be OK, but I would think in a utopia there wouldn't be a demand. In this world - I agree with you.

I agree Tallulah; but even if people are doing porn for free (apparently there are lots of people putting their own material online just for exhibitionistic kicks these days), then there are still big problems. No one really knows the context of the material's production and distribution. We can never know for certain who put it on there or why. Furthermore, money is still being made. The likes of Pornhub are not charities. Every time someone clicks on anything on there more money accrues to the billionaires who own parent companies like MindGeek. Even with the 'amateur' material, people's bodies are being turned into a source of capital.

Gay porn (men&men) is popular with women.

Because they get to watch the sex, but not have to relate to the person who is on the receiving end of whatever is going on, and also, having seen some gay porn, the standard output (that I've seen) is very different to standard het porn. The men are not so violent with each other. There is more caressing and even kissing. It's completely different. In my admittedly limited experience.

I went on one of the sites a few years back and on the welcome screen, most of the featured content featured women who were or seemed to be unconscious in home type situations. ie rape, probably real let's be honest.

A couple of years back one of the services said they were going to take down such content. And acted as if this was really big of them and weren't they ethical and marvellous. For removing content that was probably (let's be honest) actual drugged / drunk women being raped.

I agree - I didn't mention the fact that there is no ethical way to exchange sex for money.

And when people talk about amateurs (no money involved) - how do you know it's not revenge porn or even something done when they were a bit drunk - perhaps with one person being more into the idea than the other? Or even a different power dynamic in the relationship?

X posted

Find it sad if it is true - women participating in their own degradation. Do wonder how much porn is consensual, suspect hardly any. Women who says it is empowering, sceptical about their life history.

I know someone who did gay porn when he was younger, but he is bi-polar and I suggested to him that he had been exploited during manic episodes and he hadn't thought about that and was clearly creeped out by it.

Surprised that no one in 36 posts has wondered what definition of "women" they are using. Given the recent increase in "women" sex offenders who aren't female.

I am sure the exploitation is across the board.

Men don't seem to understand, or pretend not to understand, what most women do seem to understand, around having unwanted sex for money.

When you mention straight men who do gay porn - "gay for pay" - all of a sudden they understand completely.

I think it's a combination of not seeing women as full 3D people, this weird thing they have where they care about "their women" but not about others, their enjoyment of porn / using prostitutes / whatever being such that it's easier not to think about it. The distressing thing is that men who use prostitutes hardly ever report when they suspect trafficking. The p*ntersnet "reviews" where they say they thought she didn't want to / it obviously hurt / she was crying and so on but do it anyway. With porn even the standard stuff as viewed by a woman looks uncomfortable / painful / degrading and while sure some women like that stuff, it's not niche, it's the norm. And then of course there is a lot of porn where the whole point is that the woman is being brutalised, degraded, hurt.

Ah sorry irk, I missed your post!

4th post BeyondWW

Beyond
Irk said in post 4 How many of the people that search for 'porn for women' are trans women?

I am so slow!

I think it's far more likely to be men who don't want to watch women being degraded/hurt than being skewed by trans women.
But as I said upthread I don't believe anything pornhub say.

Also I think we need to confront the taboo that women are sexual beings and do respond to sexual stimuli. A friend of mine confided in me that she was very concerned about her porn addiction. I'm not for a second saying porn isn't largely misogynist, but a binary narrative which purely casts men as consumers of porn and women only as the passive victims of it won't do - least of all because it reinforces the patriarchal assumption that women are not sexually active beings. While some of the data might be suspect, it is is undoubtedly the case that more and more women are living their sex lives online as well as off - and that will mean looking at porn. There is lots of data - quite rightly - on the effect porn is having on male sexuality, but virtually nothing on how its' impacting on the sexual personalities of women. That's because, in spite of the work of Nancy Friday and others, the idea of women as sexual beings with diverse and sometimes dark fantasy lives is very much a taboo.

Quentin I agree 100%

There is plenty about how porn is affecting the sex lives of young women.

I also think that horrified fascination is part of the reason women and girls watch it - and because it's all that's available.

The fact is that mainstream porn is made by men for men with a very male oriented view of sex, what constitutes sex, who does what to who, who is active and who is passive. It represents female sexuality in no way at all. What it can do though is shape it, same as it does for men.

Both male and female sexual desire are altered by this.

UpABitLate your comment seems to apply that a porn for women (however hard it might be to imagine such a thing) would not be morally erosive, addictive, dehumanising, violent, nihilistic and all the things we associate with male produced porn. What basis have you got for believing such a thing?

I suppose the question I'm asking is this: Is it just porn (defined as commercial visual sexual stimuli) produced by and for men that is unethical/damaging - or is porn inherently so, regardless of who it is created by and for?

The further question implied by this question is this: If women were fully sexually empowered, would their porn and sexual culture be humane and empathetic? Or would there exist women, independent of patriarchy, aroused by violence/children/animals (and we know they exist already, however few in number they might be)?

If it's the latter then the project of giving more power to women to create and consume their own porn would be doomed to failure, because it would end up just as corrupt as the patriarchal version. Maybe women would become aroused by women degrading other women - or by men being degraded. New sexual scripts of power could emerge.

I think porn is inherently immoral. Even if patriarchy collapsed tomorrow, the porn that would emerge would still come with big moral problems, because it always transfers sex from a human context to a commercial one whereby people are abstracted into one-dimensional features of an individual's sexual fantasy.

I think it's impossible to know what male or female sexuality, or pornography (if it existed) would look like in a non misogynist, non capitalist, non exploitative utopia where no-one had to want for anything.

Anything fundamental I mean - food, shelter, education.

Not implying that utopia would mean that anyone had sexual access to whatever and whoever they wanted.

Yes - acting out fantasies...

Fantasies are fantasies for a reason, in the main - because the reality does not live up to it and they are by nature solipsistic so actually unachievable without unfairly imposing them on other people with free wills and wishes of their own.

It's male entitlement that leads to porn and prostitution - that their sexual fantasy, their "right" to act it out or see it acted out with real people, is way more important than the wellbeing or consequences to the people on the other side of the equation.

Women can be terribly pervy but we are far less likely to take it out on others, whether that's by sexual abuse, paying to sexually abuse, paying to watch etc. We COULD if we wanted pay for sex with men, drug and sexually assault men, churn out loads of video content. But this is all far less common.

Whether it's nature or nurture I don't know. Certainly women seem better able to understand that just because we want something, doesn't mean we have the right to get it, if other people are involved.