‘Porna’ – The New Female Porn

By Matty Silver, Sex Therapist on May 29, 2016 in Other

When we talk about porn we usually assume that men mostly look at it, but it’s no secret that women are also increasingly becoming consumers of online porn.

One of the world’s most popular free websites, Pornhub, visited by about 150 million people every month, revealed that women make up a quarter of its global audience. However, the idea of women getting off looking at porn isn’t as normalised yet as it is for men.

With the new technology available it’s so much easier for women to overcome the barriers that existed before. With a smartphone or Internet-enabled device they can access explicit material discreetly. But openly talking about watching porn is still daunting – most women are embarrassed or even ashamed – because it is still very much taboo.

Pornhub decided in 2014 to examine the choices of its female viewers and found that its lesbian category ranked number one. Most women preferred to watch porn alone, and two-thirds said they never watched it with a partner. More than half agreed that porn had a positive impact on their sex lives. Most of the respondents used porn to find out what they liked and incorporate it into their sex lives and masturbation practices.

The industry has started taking women as an audience seriously and there has been a lot of debate about what they like, since most of mainstream porn is traditionally filmed through a male lens. In mainstream porn, everything is about male pleasure and women are objects. Women were put off by the aggressive hard-core movies where women are called sluts or bitches, were shoved, choked or worse, and behaved as if they enjoyed it.

In the past few years, several female directors and producers who had become tired of mainstream porn and fed up with criticising it without offering an alternative started making erotic films they liked to watch themselves. These movies are not about horny schoolgirls, sexy nannies or naughty nurses. They are porn for women, made by women, and they focus mainly on female pleasure.

For women to get excited, they want to see women who look like them, and see independent women exploring their sexuality who are not afraid, but are not sex heroines either.

Ten years ago the Feminist Porn Awards were introduced, reflecting that female porn producers, directors and actors did not feel represented in mainstream pornography. They wanted to show a feminist viewpoint and new approaches to sexual representation. The awards wanted to celebrate people who were making porn in a feminist way and help them gain exposure to a greater audience.

Many of these movies are shown on DUSK, an international, Netherlands-based erotic-television channel for women. It prefers to call female porn ‘porna’ –distinguished primarily by the high quality of the movies and the attention given to female enjoyment.

Women have always been told what to do with their bodies and with whom. Creating and consuming the kind of erotic content they want to see may help them take ownership of their sexuality.