A good friend of mine talks about what she calls ‘the dinner party test’. The idea behind the dinner party test is this: if you can’t sum up what you do in a brief, pithy, engaging sentence or two that will be easily understood by everyone at the party, then maybe you don’t really understand what you’re doing. I’ve never had a problem passing the dinner party test in real life.
‘I’m a lecturer,’ I say, ‘in Criminology.’
Then, ‘I study women who like gay male porn.’
There you go. Brief. Pithy. Engaging.
Men tend to tilt their heads quizzically to one side. ‘Really?’ they ask. ‘Is that a thing?’ Sometimes they’ll add ‘Oh, like when guys like lesbian porn’ (more on that later). Other times they’ll look at me askance, ‘that’s … just weird’.
Women tend to respond a little differently. Either with happy affirmations of their own interest in m/m erotica, or with intrigue and a desire to know more. Often they’ll launch into an enthusiastic story of how hot it was when Jason and Eric made out in True Blood, or how much they enjoyed Anthony Kedis and Dave Navarro snogging in The Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Warped video.
It’s not just that I go to progressive dinner parties, either. In recent years the TV series Game of Thrones has become as notorious for its racy sex scenes as it has for its gripping storylines. However, despite the near ubiquitous sexuality, it appears some viewers feel like they’re not being catered for. Speaking at the Edinburgh Literary Festival in 2014, the series’ author, G. R. R. Martin, discussed how he received numerous letters from fans asking for more explicit gay male sex scenes to be included, and that ‘most of the[se] letters come from women’ (in Furness, 2014). Certainly Martin isn’t the first author or producer to realise that women might be interested in the representation of m/m sex. The m/m romance in Brokeback Mountain proved phenomenally successful with female audiences—as Michael Jensen observes ‘women [took] to Brokeback like flies to over-salted peanuts’ (Jensen, in Nayar, 2011, p. 235). Since then we have seen the increasing inclusion of gay male love scenes in TV shows with a large female viewership (e.g. The Carrie Diaries, The Following, Teen Wolf). Reviewing this phenomenon has led eminent transgender scholar Bobby Noble (2007, p. 154) to conclude that ‘women constitute a powerful emerging demographic as consumers of sexualised images of men—even, or perhaps especially, queer men—in popular culture’.
Female passion for m/m sex is not limited only to popular culture and the written word, but extends into erotica and hardcore pornography as well. Acknowledging that more women than men had bought his first m/m erotic novel, gay fiction author James Lear observed that women ‘fancy men, they’re turned on by men and so they’re even more turned on by men with men—it’s like “man squared”’ (in The Metro, 2008). In the realm of visual pornography, analysis of billions of hits to the PornHub site (one of the largest online porn sites in the world) shows that gay male porn has been the second most popular choice for women porn users out of 25+ possible genre choices for two years running (PornHub, 2014, 2015). Pornhub estimates that women make up 37 per cent of its m/m porn viewers (Pornhub, 2015), suggesting that women represent viable secondary consumers of m/m porn. Anecdotal data supports these figures. George Alvin, a performer in The Cocky Boys, a troupe of gay male porn stars, notes that women make up ‘at least 80 percent’ of the fans present at the troupe’s frequent meet-and-greets, adding ‘if it wasn’t for our women fans, I don’t think we would have the level of exposure that we’ve had. They are the ones that create the conversation and support the work’ (in Wischhover, 2016).
However, despite the emergence of porn studies as an area of interest, to date there has been little exploration as to the nature or prevalence of female interest in m/m sex, nor of what this might have to say about female audiences, female desire, and the female gaze. There are few academic data on how widespread the practice of watching gay male pornography is within the female population, as the majority of surveys exploring women’s engagement with porn have not asked this question. In McKee, Albury and Lumby’s (2008, p. 117) comprehensive account of their study of over 1000 porn users, the idea that images produced ‘by men, for men’ might appeal to women too warrants only one brief sentence. Of course, it could be that the women I’ve spoken with when writing this book represent only a tiny outlier group, although the PornHub (2014, 2015) data would suggest this is not the case. Viewing these data alongside the popularity of m/m sex in visual cultural products targeted at a largely female audience, the prevalence of m/m sex in women’s sexual fantasies (Nicholas, 2004), numerous anecdotal references in the literature to women in focus groups responding positively to gay male sex scenes (see Gunn, 1993), and the burgeoning popularity of writing featuring explicit m/m sex amongst women of all ages and sexual orientations (Green, Jenkins, & Jenkins, 1998; Jamison, 2013), it would appear that engaging with m/m content is not an unusual practice among women who consume erotic material—from hardcore visual pornography to erotic romance novels.
Through an analysis of the responses given by over 500 (self-identified) women who engage with m/m sexually explicit media [SEM] as to what they enjoy about it, I hope to provide a deeper insight into how and why these women engage with this type of erotica. Although consumers may not be conscious of all their reasons for enjoying a genre, it is still important to examine the reasons that they give for their enjoyment.
Women Watching Pornography
The paucity of research into women who watch m/m pornography may be partly explained by the fact that for much of the twentieth century the common assumption within the academic literature was that women were not aroused by any porn (Carter, 1977). Many researchers have observed that it is possible that this perception arose because porn seemed to be about sexual imagery made public, and women had been taught that public displays of sexuality were negatively valued in social terms—’we have learned that to engage in public displays of sexuality is to be defined as a slut. Where boys learn that sex makes them powerful, we learn that it makes us powerful and bad’ (Diamond, 1985, p. 50). Being a human who is sexual—who is allowed to be sexual—appears to be a freedom much more readily afforded by society to males than females. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that up until the mid-1990s research on porn found that men tended to hold more permissive attitudes towards porn and were the predominant consumers when compared with women (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994). However, more recent studies suggest gender disparity in accessing porn may be narrowing in the age of the internet. A cross-sectional online probability survey of 2021 adults found that 82 per cent of males reported accessing porn online, as did 60 per cent of females (Herbenick et al., 2010). There has also been a growing acknowledgement that women may like similar kinds of porn to men. Mackinnon (1997, p. 120) argues that the rise of ‘female’-produced hardcore heterosexual porn and lesbian S&M fantasy porn make it ‘far more difficult to maintain the distinctions between male-orientated pornography and female-orientated erotica’, the latter being historically regarded as ‘soft, tender, non-explicit’ (Williams, 1990, p. 231). Nevertheless, female interest in pornography has been less well explored than male interest, with Ciclitira (2004, p. 286, emphasis added) noting that ‘there has been little empirical work which has elicited women’s own accounts about their experiences of pornography’.
Women Watching m/m Pornography
There has been even less empirical work looking at women’s experiences of gay male pornography. In her seminal work, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ Linda Williams (1990, p. 7) implies that m/m porn is of little interest to women, when she states that she is not going to include gay male pornography in her study of hardcore porn on the grounds that it could not appeal to her as a heterosexual woman; ‘lesbian and gay pornography do not address me personally’. While Schauer (2005, pp. 54, 58) observes that there is a large number of scenes of lesbian sex distributed across heterosexual male porn sites, noting ‘the ‘discovery’ of lesbian ‘pleasures’ among the female population is virtually de rigueur here’, she believes that in ‘women’s porno … nowhere is man-to-man sex symbolically or otherwise evident’.
However, even if certain areas of the social sciences have been slow to explore and understand this phenomenon, the psychological sciences have noted for some time that many women respond, physiologically at least, to m/m sexual images. Meredith Chivers, who has looked extensively into the nature of female sexual response to pornographic imagery (see, e.g., Chivers & Bailey, 2005; Chivers, Rieger, Latty, & Bailey, 2004) has run a number of studies where women have been shown a variety of sexual films: including lesbian porn, gay male porn, heterosexual porn, and monkeys having sex. She and her colleagues have observed that, with respect to genital arousal, most women show a ‘strikingly flat profile’ (Bailey, 2008, p. 55)—that is, they appear at a physiological level to find gay male sex as arousing as heterosexual sex. The journalist and writer Caitlin Moran acknowledges the omnivorous nature of female sexual tastes, joking that the best things about masturbation are that ‘it doesn’t cost anything, it doesn’t make you fat, [and] you can knock it off in five minutes flat if you think about Han Solo, or some monkeys “doing it” on an Attenborough documentary’ (Moran, 2016). This is not to say that most women consciously feel equally as aroused by all visual representati...