Imagine a club in which all the doors are five foot six. You’re six foot tall, so you have to duck to enter. On your way to the club, you had to get out at the train station and hop onto a crowded shuttle bus. There was a person standing with a sign directing you to it:
“Shuttle bus for people below five foot six this way!”
When you walked past them to step onto the bus, they didn’t exactly tell you to leave, but a fair few people gave you weird looks.
You hopped onto the bus. It was crowded, sure, but it was also quite small. You had to duck your head in order to sit down, while the shorter people around you sat comfortably.
When you arrive at the club, everyone piles off the bus and runs to get through the door. You take your time: you duck. It occurs to you that maybe this club just isn’t for you, but you’ve heard great things about it and you really want to get in.
Inside, everything’s designed at heights for people shorter than you. The urinals and sinks are slightly lower, so you have to bend to reach them. There are signs around the place that say “welcome, shorter people! Make yourselves at home!”
The cocktails have names that make you feel a bit shitty: “Sex on the beach (with someone who is of an appropriate height, not a horrible giant)”
No one actively tells you to leave, but everything in the club points to the fact that it isn’t for you. You won’t enjoy yourself here. It’s not an exclusive club, as such, it’s just for other people.
Do you stay? Moreover, would you be surprised if I told you that a quarter of people in the pub are over six foot, just like you? All these tall people have run the same gauntlet as you have, getting past the obstacles and the hints and the insults, purely because they think that the club might be pretty fun when they get there. Would you say that the club’s less popular with tall people because they only make up a quarter of the visitors? Or would you, more realistically, assume that because so many have run that gauntlet, there must be a party inside that they’re pretty keen to join in with?
Why don’t women like porn?
Which tortured analogy leads me on to my actually relevant point.
24% of Pornhub’s users are women.
I’ll say that again: 24% of Pornhub’s users are women.
Despite the fact that the ads on Pornhub mainly offer ‘hot babes willing to fuck in your area’. Despite the fact that, at the time of writing, PornHub has 78 top-level categories and one of those categories is marked ‘for women’ – implying that the broad range of other categories are, by definition, not. The other categories, incidentally, follow a taxonomy clearly written by someone so horny they couldn’t think straight: ‘British’, ‘Double penetration’, ‘Feet’ and ‘Fisting’, ‘Pornstar’, ‘Pussy licking’, ‘Small tits.’ ‘For women’ is separate, implying that… what, women don’t like British porn? Or feet? Or small tits? Or… pussy licking? I don’t know.
On the PornHub homepage – again, at time of writing – there are 32 videos with thumbnails, 27 of which only show a naked woman, 5 of which contain a hint of a guy, but he’s either in the background or shown only in part. There are a few ads: two of which show bouncing tits, and two of which show women getting fucked quite roughly in the ass.
Yet 24% of Pornhub’s users are women.
So I’m asking here, because I think it’s a pertinent fucking question: why do I have so many conversations with men about whether women do or don’t like porn? What PornHub has done is built a club that’s aimed primarily at straight men, with a number of features and additions which (by accident or design) help to not-so-subtly keep women out. They’ve told us that there’s a tiny corner of it for us, if we really really insist on coming. They’ve put up signs that direct us away.
And still, fully 24% of their customers are women.
Would you do that, straight guys? If there were a site which was covered with ads explaining that ‘hot Dads want to fuck you’ and plastered mostly in thumbnail pics of guys? Would you click on a silhouetted, bent over naked guy beckoning you to ‘enter’, or wade through categories like ‘tiny cocked sluts’ in order to find a few videos that had rather patronisingly been labelled ‘for men’? It’s hard to imagine what you’d do, because you’ve never needed to.
Am I saying all women like the same porn you do? No. Am I saying that PornHub is – as it clearly desperately wants to be – the ultimate resource for sexual taste? No. Am I arguing that the only porn you can ever find is on PornHub? Hell no. For a start there are plenty of excellent porn directors who make scenes for diverse audiences. There’s as much to say about porn as a genre as there is to say about films, books, or anything else.
All I’m saying is that this fact is pretty surprising, given the context of everything happening around it. Despite every sign pointing them away… despite all the content telling them it’s not for them… still, 24% of PornHub’s users are women.
12 Comments
Wait a minute — is this a question headline to which the answer is ‘yes’?
And what is going on in the Phillipines?!
I agree that women enjoy porn and that far too little porn is produced with them in mind; at the very least if a quarter of porn consumers are women then logically at least around that percentage should cater too them. Even allowing for the fact the porn tastes of some women may be indistinguishable from straight, vanilla, men that you could account for the porn catering to other genders in barely single digits is absurd.
My suspicion is that “tube sites” are simply “following the money”. As they accrue revenue from advertising or referals surely that is to suggest that the most profitable ads are those of the type you refer too and the porn prominently displayed is similarly popular.
I wonder if part of the problem is the general rigidity of much mainstream male sexuality. I see no reason why a site couldn’t have all variety of porn and appropriately diverse adverts. However I would say that a large portion of male consumers would be “turned off” by content or adverts not “to their tastes” but unlike many women they would actively leave.
It would be interesting to see a study of male/female porn consumers with otherwise identical hetro porn shot from the male/female gaze. I suspect the reaction to the flip genders gaze would be markedly different.
It’s simply not good enough to say “follow the money” when a quarter of the audience is being disadvantaged that’s “the market” not working correctly. Quite how to fix it though I don’t know, clearly we need more female directors at the very least.
Hey – good questions and you raise a lot of interesting points. To be honest a lot of these are things I want to think on and tackle in greater depth, and the main point I wanted to make with this post was that, given the atmosphere on your average mainstream porn site, the fact that a quarter of the people on it are women says something pretty strong about how much women *do* want to watch porn. I wouldn’t necessarily make the leap that they find nothing for them there, given the time they spend on the sites, etc, but I definitely would agree that the vast majority of mainstream porn is made with a straight male audience in mind. Even the simple things (I would like, pretty please, to see a man’s face when he comes) are disappointingly absent. There are lots of female (and genderqueer etc) porn directors and producers that make porn which doesn’t fit this paint-by-numbers mould, and I’d like to see more of them! Although I think it’s also probably worth pointing out that male directors could also make porn for audiences that don’t match them: empathy, imagination, etc – none of these things get wiped when someone starts making porn!
“I wonder if part of the problem is the general rigidity of much mainstream male sexuality. ”
This is a REALLY interesting point, and something I’ve pondered for a while. I don’t think that male sexuality is necessarily ‘rigid’ or at least no more than other people’s is. BUT I do think that because so much sexual material is made to cater to straight male tastes, they’re less frequently challenged or offered sexual material that might not fit one specific profile. I have something I want to write on this at some point when I can get my thoughts together on it, but I think we’re so often presented with this idea of naked women/tits as ‘default sexy’. Like the fact that a naked woman (or a naked woman in silhouette, or a pair of tits bursting out of a top) is so often used as visual shorthand for sexy. I, even as a straight woman with less interest in tits than your average straight guy, have been conditioned to see tits and expect sexual material. Therefore knockers have kind of become, for me, a marker of horniness. If I see boobs, I know I’m about to see something hot. Straight guys, on the other hand, are rarely ever presented with other things in the context of ‘hotness’ and therefore are less likely to be invited to ask the question: is this sexy? Can this be sexy? Vague and waffly, sorry, but I think you raise and interesting point.
Re: the money. I think it’s partly a massive lack of imagination on the part of advertisers and sites like PornHub. There are a fair few potential things that could be done if people really wanted to chase the money, but I think it’s hard (even where there’s money involved) to get out of the trap of believing that ‘this is what a porn site should look like – with the bouncing tit gifs and the hot mums wanting to fuck in your area.’ As a slight side note, and because I just really like it, here’s a link to a fast-food company who focused all their ad dollars on porn: http://blog.eat24hours.com/how-to-advertise-on-a-porn-website/
Firstly thanks for the link to the fast-food port advertising article, it’s a fascinating read and absolutely makes sense. It stuck out to me that it’s a privately held company though, which ought to be irrelevant ot a good business idea but sadly itsn’t!
Without good controlled research I think it’s really difficult to know if the “straight vanilla male porn consumer” is the cart or the horse in the well known analogy. You’re certainly right that female sexuality has been used as the defacto cover-all representation I would hypothesise this is because men (and it was mostly men) who originated much of the current visual sexual shorthand and iconography begining in the 1950’s took the view that women were ok seeing references to other womens sexuality whereas should a man see another penis he might suddenly develop a love of musical theatre such were in part the pervailing attitudes of the time. Heaven help us if this attitude persists today, but in some part I’m afraid it does.
On your specific point of seeing the guys face when it comes, from a dispasionately intellectual view it surely would be included as a component of most scenes “climax” but it rarely is or very briefly. I have a good example of the male attitude to other males on screen from a behind the scenes piece, it was a from a well know US studio owned by the company behind so many of the tube sites. They were filming the “pop shot” and the male talent was faking for the camera to do shots of his face interestingly. The crew, all male from their voices, laughted and comented “that was pretty weak bro”, “do it more like your actual one, it’s kinda quieter”. So he repeats the take, “I’m about to come” and a voice shouts “nah that’s pretty gay”. Now putting aside the awful use of language, this seemed like adolescent joshing partly to break the awkwardness. So are these people simply making porn that avoids their own hangups and caters to their own tastes? Thus perpetuating the cycle.
‘Logically’ 25% should be enough? – that really depends on how you count.
If it was the british electoral system (ie first past the post) then you could have 25% in every constituency and still get 0% of the seats. (ie representatives not being representative) at least ‘for women’ means there is a fractional non-zero % or representation ‘for women’
But then i asked a gay friend of mine why he used ‘gay porn’ sites, when the likes of pornhub try to provide gay categories aswell. And the simple answer was variety.
And so, all we need is someone to invest in a website for ‘hetro women’s porn’ – with an exclusive target audience, and maybe we will see some shift in those figures…
Having been the boyfriend of four horny girls who all loved porn, I’ve noticed this trend.
I actually find a lot of porn on sites like that a bit of a turn-off (and this includes all the tube sites, like YouPorn, RedTube, xHamster, &c. – they’re all owned by PornHub now anyway), because I find the repetitive bouncing tits, seizure-inducing flashing ads and “you clearly can’t get laid, so click here to automatically do so! sidebars incredibly distracting, plus I particularly don’t like close-ups: there are a lot of porn clips that show a bit of laissez-faire foreplay followed up by an EXTREME CLOSEUP OF A VAGINA with an inordinately thick cock sliding fully in and fully out like it genuinely can’t decide which way to go.
I think it’s boring. Who’s having sex? Why? Where are they? What led to this? That’s the exciting bit. Laying aside the “marketed for men” stuff, I’m confused as to why anyone would find this arousing.
PornHub’s For Women section (with a sign of Venus next to it on the sidebar, LOL WIMMINZ!) doesn’t look any different to me from a mix of videos from other categories – some mother stuff, some lesbian stuff, some babysitter stuff. I mean, how exactly do you categorise that? It can’t just be videos that have at least one woman in, because that’s basically all the porn on the entire network sans gay male stuff. Cripes – who makes these decisions?
The sort of porn I like, however, is almost always marketed for women. There are a few titles which are non-gender specific – they contain an equal amount of characters; the men are attractive but dopey; the women have huge boobs but are generally stronger characters; everyone loves the sex so there’s no imbalance here (straight hard porn often looks to me like the woman isn’t enjoying herself very much) – but there are some which are centred around female characters and have a storyline veering closely towards a romance novel, just with lots of sex.
I noticed this once at the age of about 15. After watching a sailor and her sailor boyfriend having sex in the spoons position on a beach (probably a bad idea, with all the sand), I once glanced at Radio Times to find this film described as “Women’s entertainment.” Amazon, it turned out, had a “video erotica” section in which there was a category clearly “for women” – although not labelled as such, but that’s totally what it was – which is where I bought most of my DVDs from. Slower, more sensual stuff with more thought put into it. For women.
Excuse me? Boy here, enjoying this?
So, yeah. You’re right: there’s some sort of “irrelevance factor” when it comes to women watching porn – people know it happens, but they just don’t talk about it, like there’s some sort of sexual superinjunction. But I’ve also seen this from the other side…
…in my case, however, I clearly am a minority. The usual response I get is “WHAT?!“
It occurs to me reading this post and comments (and agreeing heartily, being a porn consumer myself) that there’s a very similar argument to be made for comics (comic consumer here too). Another one of those clubs I want to be in, and am, despite the vast majority being aimed at ‘teh boys’.
Huh. Games too, come to think of it.
xx Dee
I think it’s arguable that the porn world is *more* welcoming to women than gaming and comics are. At least porn sites do often give the impression that they’re happy to have female visitors (if only as an afterthought), while women trying to get into gaming and comics often seem to be faced with massive hostility for some reason. I’ve never been quite sure what all those angry defensive guys are so afraid of.
Women like gay male porn quite a lot too. Logan McCree, anyone? Sigh.
I thought ‘tiny cocked sluts’ was hilarious :)
Stoya and Kayden Kross have just set up Trenchcoatx.com, their own website – will be interesting to see if that’s a bit more women friendly.
Nice analogy at the top. I couldn’t help but think of the first time I attended a fetish club… :)
I agree that the 24% figure seems kind of remarkable in many ways. One would hope that it would also make the porn companies wake up, realise how much of a female market for porn there is, and do more to provide for it. But I feel it’s just as likely they’ll do the opposite, and take that figure as evidence that they’re doing fine as it is: “Why should we change, when so many women are clearly happy to come to our sites as they are?” Sigh.
Come to think of it, the porn industry isn’t really too different from the rest of the film industry in that regard.
Well, I hope all you women who do look at porn take this as encouragement: you’re not abnormal, there are lots of you! Don’t let people tell you you don’t exist! Yes, those porn sites don’t exactly make you feel welcome, but if enough of you keep going to them, sooner or later they’ll surely have to change…
Yes yes yes! 16 years I’ve been doing this and I think this could be one of the better analogies.
And 16 years tells me that yes, women do like porn and yes, women will buy if you make the club for them :D
I have a lot of frustration that Pornhub has become THE location for porn on the net and it has also become The source of statistics that the media uses to make assumptions about women’s porn viewing habits. But they never take your club analogy into account.
Perhaps it should be could “porn privilege”.