Male gays in the female gaze: women who watch m/m pornography

Abstract

Male gays in the female gaze: Women who watch m/m pornographyThis paper draws on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research that examines the motivations behind women who watch gay male pornography. To date, there has been very little interdisciplinary research investigating this phenomenon, despite a recent survey by PornHub (one of the largest online porn sites in the world) showing that gay male porn is the second most popular choice for women porn users out of 25+ possible genre choices (PornHub, 2014). While both academic literature and popular culture have looked at the interest that (heterosexual) men have in lesbian pornography (e.g. Attwood, 2005), considerably less attention has been paid to the consumption of gay male pornography by women. Research looking at women's consumption of pornography from within the Social Sciences is very focussed around heterosexual (and, to a lesser extent, lesbian) pornography (e.g. Smith, 2007;Williams, 2004). Research looking more generally at gay pornography/erotica (and the subversion of the 'male gaze'/concept of 'male as erotic object') often makes mention of female interest in this area, but only briefly, and often relies on anecdotal or observational evidence (e.g. Mackinnon, 1997). Research looking at women's involvement in slashfic (primarily from within Media Studies), while very thorough and rich, tends to view slash writing as a somewhat isolated phenomenon (indeed, in her influential article on women's involvement in slash, Bacon-Smith (1992) talks about how 'only a small number' of female slash writers and readers have any interest in gay literature or pornography more generally, and this phenomenon is not often discussed in more recent analyses of slash); so while there has been a great deal of very interesting research done in this field, little attempt has been made to couch it more generally within women's consumption and use of pornography and erotica or to explore what women enjoy about watching gay male pornography. Through a series of focus groups, interviews, and an on-line questionnaire (n=275), this exploratory piece of work looks at what women enjoy about gay male pornography, and how it sits within their consumption of erotica/pornography more generally. It investigates what this has to say about the existence and nature of a 'female gaze'.Key words: Pornography, Gay, Female Gaze, Women, M/M Pornography At the Edinburgh Literary Festival in August 2014, the author G. R. R. Martin stated that he had received numerous letters from fans asking for more explicit gay male sex scenes in his Game of Thrones novels (and the associated television series), and that 'most of the[se] letters come from women ' (in Furness, 2014). The idea that women might be interested in watching men have sex with each other is certainly not new within popular discourses -there was much discussion of this issue after the success of Brokeback Mountain with female audiences (see Taormino, 2008), and there has been an increasing inclusion of gay male love scenes in TV show...

Women’s Consumption of Pornography: Pleasure, Contestation, and Empowerment

“…While much of the previous literature has focused on demarcations that set apart women’s from men’s consumption, we find that women use pornography in a fairly similar way to men as reported in recent studies (McCormack and Wignall, 2017). Prior research suggests that women are able to identify more with the erotic narratives in erotica (Chowkhani, 2016; Hardy, 2009; Wilson-Kovacs, 2009) or other alternative porn categories (Neville, 2015, 2018), and therefore tend to prefer them. Our study, however, shows that women also find pleasure in mainstream pornography, including hardcore categories, even though they do not always identify with the actors and stories.…”

“…The scarcity of empirical research focusing on women could be attributed to pornography being usually considered as beyond their reach and interest. Neville (2015) argues that this is due to social expectations warranting women to refrain from public displays of their sexuality and pornography’s openness to the depiction of sex. For example, Wilson-Kovacs (2009: 156) suggests that discussing porn preferences is a taboo topic for women, and as such, ‘pornography is simply what the male partner invariably chooses’.…”

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“…The article argues that, based on the findings of the study, women not only have a positive response to gay porn and the gay sex represented but also report feelings of empathy. Ramsay's article acts as a contribution to an emergent literature on the diverse audiences for gay porn that includes Lucy Neville's (2015) excellent essay also on female consumption of gay porn, Florian Voros' (2015) equally fascinating analysis of male porn viewers and the major audience research project conducted by Clarissa Smith, Feona Attwood, and Martin Barker (2011), and which all work collectively to explode stereotypes and generalizations about porn audiences, who they are and how they relate to porn materials.…”

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“…However, not many publications have specifically addressed the media through the prism of queer theory and psychoanalysis. An exception seems to be the evolving field of porn studies, which has shown a tendency to take psychoanalytic concepts into account, as various articles in the recently launched journal of the same title attest (Neville, 2015;Ryberg, 2015;Varghese, 2016).…”