A Drought in Male-Focused Pornography
A Drought in Male-Focused Pornography: The Misguided Efforts of Feminism in Supplying Women with Good Heterosexual Porn
By Isabella Blu Ptito-Echeverria
Voices & Connections Editor
As the next generation of filmmakers and artists, take the following into account if you pursue a career in adult cinema:
A lot of porn is made for men— and I don’t mean this in the typical “women are objectified in pornography” way, because the nature of kinks is generally to objectify.
The problem with a lot of vanilla heterosexual porn is how the camera is over-focused on women. Their reactions, their bodies, while the men are cast off to the side and seen as little as possible.
Particularly frustrated with this reality one night, I cracked my knuckles and viciously scoured the internet in a fit of academic horniness,for knowledge:
Male-focused porn, I Googled. Some brief compilations of professional porn clips with generic club music pounding over them appeared, but that wasn't my cup of tea. Even pornography of women dominating men seemed to be made for men.
Porn for women was the next thing I searched for. This was an odd side of the internet I discovered; entire pornographic websites dedicated to a political cause: creating porn that didn’t objectify women. That’s great, in theory.
Although these women weren’t necessarily being objectified, they were still the focus of the camera work. What audience was this website catering to? Perfect for homoflexible politically-charged lesbians perhaps, but not so much for the average heterosexual woman; It was more like porn to promote the respect of women. Unfortunately, cinematic intros featuring B-roll stock footage of fireplaces and secluded cabins followed by a girl getting eaten out to royalty-free sexy saxophone smooth jazz does not make your porn feminist, it just makes it pretentious and boring. Your porno is not a Netflix original.
I’m not shitting on Porn For Women’s mission, but being in the midst of a break-up and consequently feeling like a can of Pabst in the backpack of a lass at an outdoor rave made the discovery of such a misleadingly-named niche all the more infuriating. This was not porn for women; it was porn made to train the horny eye not to see women as sexual objects. If we’re talking efficiency over sheer principle, porn is the worst possible place to make this change.
Porn is the one place where purposely objectifying people is okay, so long as the video is produced in an enthusiastically consensual environment. This is because sexuality is society’s pressure valve; Masturbation is the time in which human beings are allowed to behave primally and apolitically. What you do in your own sheets with your own hands should be your secret.
I know from a myriad conversations with women that heterosexual women do watch porn. I know that myself and other women favor gay porn, simply because that is often the most accessible genre when in dire need of male-focused action. However, numerous polls suggest that women watch porn significantly less frequently and in lower quantities than men tend to. The question remains; are women simply less inclined to watch porn, or is there a lack of content that caters to the fantasies of porn-seeking women?
Horniness is not a gendered feeling, yet today's pornographic media scape appears to operate under the notion that men are hornier and kinkier than women, and must thus be the only consumers of pornography. Where is the proportional supply of male-focused porn to the heterosexual female demand for it?
Funnily enough, this whole situation made me realise the shortcomings of feminism in the world of pornography. Feminism is the belief that men and women must be treated equally. Realistically, shouldn’t some additional sector of feminism cater to the idea that women can be just as horny and morbid as men? If a man has the capacity to seek porn that blatantly objectifies women, shouldn’t a woman have the option to seek porn that blatantly objectifies men? To have access to pornography that caters to the animalistic and morbid female gaze?
That is equality. That would be true feminism at play.
It was a feminist idea that inspired the creation of a website like Porn for Women; The idea that if men aren’t objectified, women should not be objectified either. Props to men who actively seek women-respecting porn: you’ll have a great time on Porn for Women. Unfortunately, a website with the aim of diverting the invasive male gaze won’t do its job if the only people looking for you already agree with you.
This is why feminism in the porn realm should direct its focus toward supplying male-focused porn for fellow women, as opposed to creating porn aimed at retraining the desires of men. For heterosexual women, the results will be much more beneficial, impactful and, dare I say, climactic this way.