Bring on the women’s porn revolution

Porn has a cultural influence on our society that we cannot ignore. Its previously underground existence and reputation as a sleazy habit for isolated men has gone. Today it is a just over £75 billion industry that receives more regular traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. The audience for porn is vast and despite repeated attempts to block underage viewers the content is still easily accessed, meaning that many teenagers are watching these videos and, in some cases, are learning about sex through viewing them. It is getting to the stage where we may have to face the fact that porn is becoming the modern-day sex education.

However, the content of many of these videos is far from ideal for teenage viewers in the way it teaches them to express themselves and treat their sexual partners. The majority of adult filmmakers are men meaning that the ideas and content are mainly from the male perspective and pander to what they believe a male audience would like to see. The result is an overwhelming amount of online content which could be seen as degrading towards women and shows teenagers an unrealistic and unhealthy way to act during intimate situations.

A study by the National Center for Biotechnology Information found that in the top 50 most popular videos: 88% contained physical aggression and 48% contained verbal aggression, overwhelmingly towards the woman co-star. Many porn studios and directors have even been criticised for making videos that are viewed as rape fantasies. In 2014, the UK government created legislation making porn that depicted rape illegal. However, this only affects porn that is produced and sold in the UK so porn containing this content is still legal here if it was made in another country and is streamed online. Young people who are watching this sort of content are becoming desensitised to what they are watching. A lot of the time mainstream porn normalises a certain way of treating your sexual partner and often also sets a very rigid standard of the way women should look and behave during sex.

Women have always been involved in porn in front of the camera and for many the experience could be liberating and empowering. Women not being involved in porn behind the camera has possibly grown from a common misconception that women do not watch porn. This is of course untrue and the industry has begun to catch onto this in recent years. One of the most popular pornography sites Pornhub recently attempted to tap into their women’s demographic by launching a new part of the site called “popular with women”. Although certainly a way of welcoming women to their site, it could also be seen as problematic. By segregating what the site classes as the content women would enjoy, it suggests that men and women cannot enjoy the same erotic content and something that is ‘woman friendly’ cannot possibly be enjoyed by men.  This downplays the talent of the people who make these videos and seems to exclude women and their content from the mainstream porn content.

Women directors such as Erika Lust are already leading the way with ‘feminist friendly’ porn. Like many women she was unhappy with the available content she found online because she believed women weren’t always being treated well and the desires of women were not being properly portrayed. Her feminist pornography site xconfessions.com is filled with videos that have been inspired by fantasies told to her by real women. Lust films the videos with a crew made up of 90% women – something previously unheard of in the industry.

Perhaps, before mainstream porn can be changed, there first needs to be a breakout out of feminist porn made by women elsewhere. Girls Out West is an Australian-based porn site created by women which rejects mainstream porn and aims to show honest, compelling and sincere content of women enjoying their bodies and their sexuality. Similarly, Selena Mooney who founded the site Suicide Girls in 2001 stated that the purpose of the site was to give women control over how their sexuality is depicted (it’s worth noting that Suicide Girls has faced criticism regarding working practices in the past, however). Both these sites have accumulated an audience that shows the popularity of alternative women-centred content.

We need more women to lead the porn revolution. Rather than simply protesting, we should be trying to get more women behind the camera and creating. This is not only so women can enjoy more realistic porn which depicts what they want to see and demonstrates how women should be portrayed and treated but, with more young people of all genders viewing this content and learning how to express their sexuality through it, it is important that porn is created from diverse perspectives and portrays women as sexual beings in their own right. When it comes to current mainstream porn: it’s time for the objectified to object.

The image is used under a creative commons license with thanks to M.Verlarde on Flickr. It is a very sensual black and white image showing a person with their hand pushed into their underwear. Only the person’s thighs, hand and underwear are visible.