Why Women Prefer Gay Male Porn
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The fact that women are watching porn may surprise some. The fact that they're gravitating towards a certain kind of porn could be even more surprising.
Women prefer watching gay male porn because it offers a refreshing break from the conventional male-centric sexuality peddled by mainstream heterosexual porn, research published in the journal Porn Studies suggests.
In an online questionnaire of about 275 women who said they watched gay male porn, a whopping 82 percent said the genre was their top late-night pick.
According to Lucy Neville, a senior criminology lecturer at Middlesex University in London who authored the study, male-on-male porn offers a dynamic that heterosexual porn — which tends to be formulated in the male gaze — can lack.
In gay porn, "neither party can automatically be decreed to be submissive or dominant by virtue of penetration," she told Psypost.
Neville's interest was apparently piqued after learning that George R.R. Martin, author of the "Game of Thrones" book series, had received requests from female fans to include more gay sex scenes in future works.
As Neville explains, heterosexual porn's often diminutive presentation of women and female sexuality tend to ostracize female viewers, more than accomplish anything else.
"[T]he way they perceived women as being treated and/or exploited in heterosexual porn, the invisibility of female pleasure, the fact that identifying with the female actress made them less able to enjoy the eroticism of looking, and the fact that most heterosexual porn invited them to view the sex acts occurring from a 'male' perspective – noting the way that the camera tended to linger on female anatomy and that men in heterosexual porn were 'ugly and out of focus at best, and just a disembodied cock at worst.'"
The study, published last year, seems to bolster previous research, both hard data- and Tumblr-driven, about women and girls who tend to prefer gay male porn to other types.
Neville's respondents also said they preferred the narratives of gay male porn, the authenticity, not having to worry about exploitation of women performers, and having men being the main object of sexual attraction — not women.
