Our aim was to provide an in-depth understanding of the role of pornography in the construction of female sexuality. Building upon research that moves beyond the ‘negative effects paradigm’ in the study of pornography (Attwood, 2002; Comella and Tarrant, 2015; Hardy, 1998, 2000, 2015; McCormack and Wignall, 2017; Paasonen, 2011; Williams, 1999), we showed that consuming pornography is both disciplining and empowering for women.
Our research grant body wants to put out a “positive effects paradigm” of the product they are selling.
Our informants recognise that pornography reproduces and promotes patriarchal discourses of sexuality, but they manage to use it in order to reach a state of pleasure (exercise of fantasy, sexual gratification) and perfection (optimal way of performing sex).
They are easier to coerce into anal, and subbing
We also show the role of pornography in cultivating a renewed understanding of female sexuality and thus its role in enabling our informants to perform it differently.
The Joy of Sex should be banned, the new bearded blokes are here.
In this process, aspects of the genre are questioned, negotiated and reconciled in order to continue using pornography to satisfy desire. Our findings also show that women re-articulate the dubious and contradictory meanings that emanate from this controversial genre to align the pleasure they derive from pornography with its meanings in their lives.
By satisfy desire, we mean men’s desires, that’s why we didn’t say “satisfy their own desires”
In line with other qualitative research (e.g. Ashton et al., 2018, 2019; Attwood et al., 2018; Parvez, 2006) this study showed that women use pornography in different ways: to exercise fantasy, for sexual gratification (solo or with partners), and for learning how to give and achieve pleasure.
Focus on with partners, and “learning” how to give. Learning what their partners expect of them, so get used to it.
While much of the previous literature has focused on demarcations that set apart women’s from men’s consumption, we find that women use pornography in a fairly similar way to men as reported in recent studies (McCormack and Wignall, 2017).
When we asked “women” that was a self selected bunch. Make of that what you will. But if we can get women to agree with men that they exist to satisfy men sexually, we are sooo happy.
Prior research suggests that women are able to identify more with the erotic narratives in erotica (Chowkhani, 2016; Hardy, 2009; Wilson-Kovacs, 2009) or other alternative porn categories (Neville, 2015, 2018), and therefore tend to prefer them. Our study, however, shows that women also find pleasure in mainstream pornography, including hardcore categories, even though they do not always identify with the actors and stories.
It’s that self selecting group again. Also don’t ask what we count as hardcore for the purposes of telling you how much some women love it, so you can coerce your partners with that nugget of research from 27 people.
We find that porn tastes can be quite different from real-life sexual preferences. Consuming pornography in that sense allows women to explore sexual practices that they have not experienced in real life or do not necessarily intend to mimic (Gurevich et al., 2017).
But do not mention that it is there to educate them.
As such, when women use pornography to stimulate their imagination, they do not consider the consequences of watching sexual acts that would be undesirable in real life. Pornography, thus, is a source of experimentation and education (Albury, 2014) for women. Our informants have learnt a lot about female sexuality, its experiences and its limits through porn, and it enabled them to develop a sexual repertoire and to discover different sexual techniques (Parvez, 2006).
They learn to do what they are told and to pretend to like being choked.