Back in 2015, the wildly popular online pornography site Pornhub which boasts over 115 million daily views published a finding that took sexuality researcher Lucy Neville by surprise: Women are responsible for more than a third of the sites gay male porn views.
The finding planted the seed for what would eventually become a book, Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, which was published earlier this month. In it, Neville, a lecturer at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, investigates what women enjoy about consuming gay male erotica and how it fits in with their perceptions of gender and sexuality.
Neville interviewed and surveyed more than 500 women over five years for the project. Many of the women with whom she spoke said a lot of the problem they have with heterosexual porn is that they focus on the female body" without paying enough attention to men.
Gay porn gives an opportunity to look at the male form and male beauty and the male face when orgasming, Neville said.
What women liked most about male-male porn is versatility, and with heterosexual porn you are going to get penetrated eventually, and thats dull, she added. A lot of ways it can play out with men is more exciting, more experimentation, more open to negotiation.
Another key finding over the course of Nevilles research was that 55 percent of the women she interviewed said they had imagined themselves as men while consuming gay male erotica.
They found it quite liberating, the idea that you could pretend or imagine yourself as a man or someone who is gender-fluid, Neville explained. Personally, Ive always done that, too, but I thought I was a bit of a weirdo. It was interesting to find that half the sample had done that.
The women surveyed also expressed a strong desire to consume porn that is ethical in some way, Neville said, and they found some heterosexual porn exploitative. She found there was a general sense among those interviewed that male actors participate in pornography because they enjoy sex, while some interviewees indicated they were worried about women performers and the gender dynamics in heterosexual porn.
Not too surprising imo. Most of my female friends are obsessed with male on male.
