I recently decided that I need to come to terms with the fact that I really do enjoy porn. I’ve battled with the idea that it’s ridiculously sexist, that it’s geared toward a male audience, that it’s addictive, and that it has to, in some way, affect the psyches of those who watch it. For a short while I was almost ready to jump on the abolish-all-porn bandwagon. But then I realized that “The L-Word” might lose some of its hotness and “The L-Word” is, well, hot.
With my new revelation giving me a strange sense of power – something like “Now I will penetrate this mystic world of porn with my ruby-studded feminist spear” – I decided to go in search of porn that I genuinely enjoy. This proved to be a little more difficult. Penetrating the porn world with my ruby-studded feminist spear soon lost some of its novelty.
I know I enjoy certain images, specifically lesbian porn and more soft-core heterosexual stuff, but finding porn that I felt was worth going out of my way to watch proved difficult, if not impossible. Part of the problem is that I don’t know exactly what I want, but I don’t really feel like I should have to.
The porn industry is, after all, a $10 billion industry. There should be some faction of the porn industry, however small, that not only doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable or victimized, but turns me on and does so in a way that gives me a good reason to watch it.
Someone should have already figured out what women like about porn and catered to those tastes. Who knows, maybe the result would be like “The L-Word.”
Porn isn’t hard to come by. As long as you have a working computer and an Internet connection, there’s plenty at your fingertips. And it’s free. Unfortunately, none of the free stuff comes close to my fantasy porn. For the most part, free Internet porn just makes me feel nervous. I feel like I have to constantly check over my shoulder to make sure nobody is watching.
Fortunately, porn that’s a little closer to what I’m looking for does exist. It’s porn that claims to be geared toward couples, and specifically women. Babeland, one of my favorite sex-toy shops, recommended movies by Candida Royalle on their Web site.
Unfortunately, this is now getting into porn that is no longer of the free variety. However, I decided for the purpose of research and good times that it was worth trying. Once. If the experience were a positive one maybe I would try buying porn again.
So I bought porn. I streamed it on my computer. I bought not the specific movie that Babeland recommended, but the easiest of Candida Royalle’s movies to find online – “Christine’s Secret.” It was about a woman that goes to a friend’s vacation house in the country in hopes of finding sexual fulfillment.
It didn’t take me too long to decide that there was no danger of me spending vast amounts of money on porn.
Royalle’s way of making woman-friendly porn was to not include close-up shots of genitals or money shots – and in every sex scene, after the couple finished, they would lie there and have a conversation. The entire thing was just ridiculously corny.
I feel like this is almost as sexist as “normal” porn, just in a different fashion; it’s still promoting the same gender stereotypes. Maybe most women do want to have a conversation after sex, but I feel like if the woman came – which, if it was successful sex, she should have – she’d want to roll over and go to sleep just as much as the man.
To give Royalle the credit she deserves, the movie did succeed in turning me on. It was just combined with occasional bursts of laughter. All in all, it was an enjoyable experience. But not worth paying to repeat.
Babeland had a few other recommendations, but by then I didn’t trust them and was ready to think that my ideal porn didn’t exist.
I’m not the only woman on the planet that enjoys porn. That’s relatively obvious from the number of female friends I have that watch porn. But I feel like more women would watch and be receptive to porn if it really did cater to them, and not in a corny fashion.
I’m sure all women have different tastes in terms of what they like, but I think the porn industry could benefit from some serious research into what would make some genuinely good couple- or female-oriented porn.
People mistakenly assume that only men are really into porn, but I think women are an untapped source of porn consumption.
To top if off, the morning after my porn-purchasing adventure, my parents told me that Wells Fargo had contacted them to say that suspicious charges had been made to my credit card.
I’ve decided to stick with Showtime and HBO. For now.
If you have any (free) porn recommendations for Loewenstein, e-mail her at lloewenstein@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.