Post: What Oprah Didn’t Tell You About Porn For Women

OprahI’ve written a guest post for Good Vibrations magazine. It’s called What Oprah Didn’t Tell You About Porn For Women.

I wanted to give a back-to-basics rundown of what I think are the main points about porn for women and what it encompasses. One of the things I wanted to point out is the ongoing blind spot the media has when it comes to websites. The Oprah show happily quoted the Nielsen Netratings statistic that one in three viewers of online porn are women… and then went on to only talk about films and DVDs. The freedom of the internet is one of the main reasons why women’s erotica has grown so much in the last few years.

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Anyway, here’s a few paragraphs.

In November 2009 the Oprah show went to air with a controversial topic “Why millions of women are using porn and erotica.” The show breathlessly reported that one in three users of online porn are women and dispatched Lisa Ling to investigate this apparently shocking statistic.

While it was great that such a mainstream TV show wanted to delve into the whole topic of women and porn, the end result was less than illuminating. We didn’t really find out why so many women are into porn and we also didn’t get to find out about the growing genre of porn for straight women, both in films and online. Instead, a great deal of the show was taken up with an interview with ex porn star Jenna Jameson. And despite a valiant effort by author Violet Blue, the type of porn discussed stayed firmly within the realm of big-budget, LA porn valley productions, most of which consider women to be only peripheral consumers. As far as mainstream porn is concerned, women only watch dirty videos with their husbands and spouses, not on their own.

Oprah’s show skimmed the surface but it didn’t really present a clear picture.

So, what’s the real deal?

It’s true that a third of online porn consumers are women. This has been the case for most of this decade; the first Nielsen Netratings survey to reveal the one-third figure came out in 2003. Similar surveys around the world offer the same kinds of statistics and, given the popularity of porn, that equates to an awful lot of horny women.

Few major porn companies were prepared to embrace the female market until recently, and that was only when other revenue options began to decline. It’s still a standard maxim within the adult industry that women don’t watch porn. Plenty assume that women are just “not built that way”, that biologically, we’re more interested in romance or men who do housework than sex. The myth that “women aren’t visually stimulated” remains entrenched in the public imagination.

Nonetheless, women do enjoy erotic material. A study by Northwestern University in 2003 found that most women will become physically turned on by explicit sexual images, even if the conscious mind doesn’t agree. The research reflects what many women experience when it comes to porn – it can be arousing and fun to watch, although too often our brains are rebelling at the stereotypes, plastic surgery, unrealistic sex or bad dialogue.

Head over to Good Vibrations Magazine to read the rest.

2 Replies to “Post: What Oprah Didn’t Tell You About Porn For Women”

  1. OK, applause for the excellent reporting. But there is porn and there is porn, and there are women porn “consumers” and there are women porn “buyers” — and there’s a lot of space in between.

    I work for one of the “Big Porn” companies, and we do an awful lot of customer research. We’ve found some interesting things based on actual purchases, as opposed to un-accountable surveys. Wanna know what we’ve learned?

    Over 40% of our female customers admit to enjoying porn.

    Of those, only 9% (!) said that they would actually spend money on porn.

    Of the honest-to-goddess female porn customers, those who purchase porn movies for their own enjoyment or as a tool for their sexual relationship, over half said that they prefer “traditional” (that is, the usual male-oriented strokefodder) over “women-friendly” porn. This stat is heavily weighted in terms of demographic, with older women (30+, for our purposes) tending to prefer “women friendly” or “women focused” movies by about 2 to 1, while among younger women (18-29) they prefer “standard gonzo-style porn” by about 3 to 1.

    When asked in a customer survey about their personal porn collections, men stated that they had, on average, 21-35 porn DVDs, while female porn customers had on average . . . 4.

    So that begs the question: when it comes to producing high-quality, female oriented porn, are producers making them for “women” or just a certain subset of women? And are there actually enough of them within the population to make that aspect of the industry viable, long-term?

    1. Question: you surveyed your actual customers and only 40% of the women said they enjoyed the porn they’d bought? Which means 60% of your female customers weren’t happy. I’d say that’s a problem. There’s a whole bunch of horny women out there looking for something… but it doesn’t sound like they were getting it from your “Big Porn” product. Which would explain why only 9% said they’d pay for it.

      You ask whether producers are making it for “women” as a whole… but this is an old conversation. You can’t please every woman; there’s a whole bunch of different tastes out there. Sure, there are some women who like gonzo. Lucky them: 99% of porn looks like that. But the “subset” of women who aren’t into mainstream porn is significant. And as someone who has made a living for 10 years offering erotica to this “subset”, I certainly think it’s viable.

      In 2003 I wrote an article for AVN Online about marketing to women. Nobody paid any attention. This year I’m starting to see pieces in AVN that finally acknowledge the female market – but only because the mainstream gold mine has dried up and companies are desperate for new revenue. And they’re still calling it “couples” porn because they still don’t really believe women enjoy porn by themselves. There’s a reason why the women in your porn survey only owned 4 DVDs… and I honestly don’t think it’s because they didn’t like or want to buy porn. The truth is they just didn’t like or want to buy the porn that was available to them.

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