When we think about porn today, we still mostly think about men. Men as the producers and consumers. Women as the product, even if we’re selling it ourselves.
Now, this may have been true a decade ago when the internet was still in its teenage years, but these days, with the internet in our pockets, technology has opened access to pornography like never before. It means that while men are still its main drivers and users, women are steadily catching up.
Pornhub claims at least a third of its current user base are women, and a report from the Children’s Commissioner in 2023 found a difference of just 16% between how many girls said they had sought out porn – 42% – compared to 58% of boys. But despite this, we still don’t know that much about women and porn.
We don’t know what most of us look for or how we feel about what we find. We don’t know what it means for how we relate to our bodies, or to our partners, or to ourselves. At a time when women are more vocal than ever, there’s an elephant in the room when it comes to porn. Most of us aren’t talking to each other about what we do and don’t do with it, and it means that no one is asking the questions that many of us are asking ourselves.
So back in 2017, I set out to talk to women about porn. I started off thinking I would be lucky to interview maybe 30 women. I expected our conversations to be slightly stilted and hoped I’d have enough material to write an academic article or two. When the call went out over social media, over 200 women responded. It turned out women weren’t silent because we had nothing to say. We were silent because no one had asked us.
Over the next two years, I spoke to one hundred women. Across racial and class backgrounds, women from eighteen to seventy spoke out in frank detail about what porn has meant in their lives and how they feel about it today. For some, it was a way they had explored themselves, tested out their sexuality or learned about their body. For others, it had destroyed relationships or meant they’d spent years doing what they thought they were supposed to do in sex. Most of the women I spoke to didn’t watch feminist porn despite supporting it in theory. They used the same free mainstream sites as men, with the same free mainstream porn on it. And for many, that meant they felt a conflict between what they watched and what it said about women.
Like Makeda, who said she had no shame about her porn use but felt the way women were shown in what she watched should be wiped off the face of the planet.
“I have a love/hate relationship with most of the porn I watch”, she said “but that doesn’t stop me using it.” Ashley and Kush talked about feeling disgusted and turned on by what they’d seen. “I don’t like the fact that it brings me to those two places in equal force,” Kush said. “I think if you push it too far, you can lose yourself.” Or Prena who felt that though she’d watched feminist porn, there was a side of her that needed something more vulgar. “I don’t know how to put it any other way”, she told me, “But I almost need a hint of non-consensualness to make it sexy.”
This conflict that so many women talked about between their pleasure and their principles is the thing that stood out to me more than anything else. And I think that’s because I’d never heard it before.
For women, there’s really been just two permitted positions: either you’re the cool girl who loves porn or the one who thinks it’s violent. You’re either using it and having a great time or avoiding it completely. It’s pleasurable or shameful, never this mixture of the two. It’s hard to talk about watching mainstream porn and feeling worried about the wellbeing of performers, but not worried enough to stop watching. Or about supporting the idea of feminist porn in principle, but in practice getting more turned on by people who don’t look like you, doing things that you’re pretty sure would be painful. We’ve been encouraged to bypass points of discomfort and contradiction, asked to choose narratives that are less complicated, where we are less implicated. Our silence has been understandable, but I don’t think it’s been helpful.
In one of my last interviews, a young woman, Vanessa, said, “What are the conversations about porn that we need to be having that we don’t want to have.” I feel like that’s the question we need to ask ourselves. And then we need to listen.