Why do heterosexual women like gay porn?

Some of the most popular tube sites in the world have reported that gay male porn is among the most-watched genres by female visitors. What makes it a go-to choice?

Pooja, who requested to be quoted by a different name, discovered gay porn by accident but is glad she stumbled upon it. The student, currently pursuing a degree in journalism from a university in the United Kingdom, was privy to discussing the feminist leanings of why heterosexual women enjoy gay porn during one of her lectures. At first, she was surprised by the eagerness with which her classmates spoke about their porn preferences. “I didn’t engage in the conversation in class but soaked in their views. Then, at night, I was browsing the internet when I decided to log into a website that primarily hosted gay pornography. I thought I wouldn’t like the content, but I was surprisingly aroused,” she says. Since that chance encounter, Pooja has taken to watching gay porn regularly and has even brought it to the attention of her boyfriend of seven years. 

“He couldn’t wrap his head around my discovery. He even dismissed it and called it ‘weird’. I wasn’t expecting him to take it so badly. He told me he’d be okay if I enjoyed lesbian porn because that’s something he subscribes to. I stood my ground and pulled him up for dissing my choice. I’ve tried bringing up pegging (a sexual practice in which a woman performs anal sex on a man by penetrating his anus with a strap-on dildo) with him, too, because that’s one of the things I enjoy about gay porn—the fact that the men reverse roles in most videos. No one takes on a strict role; it’s fluid. And while I’d like that bit incorporated into my relationship, it’s  been a hard no,” she says. 

For her eyes only

Pornhub, one of the world’s largest adult websites, granted Quartz access to their data, which details India’s sexual preferences and pornographic behaviours. The data collected was between September 2013 and September 2014.

In India, a quarter of Pornhub’s users are female, two per cent higher than the worldwide average of 23 per cent. The most popular porn category among women is “lesbian”, followed closely by “gay” (male).

Only two per cent of searches on Pornhub from India were for male homosexual content during the year. However, there’s no current data on Indian women and their porn-viewing preferences since the Government of India, on 27 October last year, ordered internet service providers (ISPs) to ban 827 websites for hosting pornographic content, with Pornhub being one among those  that were blocked. 

However, despite the emergence of porn studies as an area of interest, to date, there has been little exploration within academia about the nature or prevalence of female interest in male-on-male sex, nor of what this might have to say about female audiences, female desire, and the female gaze. It is difficult to say how widespread the practice of watching gay male pornography is within the female population, as most surveys exploring women’s engagement with porn have not asked this question. 

Questions of feminism and inclusivity

The lack of research into women who watch male-on-male pornography may be partly explained by the fact that the common assumption within the academic literature for much of late modernity was that any porn did not arouse women. This could be attributed to the possibility that this perception arose because porn was about sexual imagery made public, and women had been taught that public displays of sexuality were negatively valued in social terms. 

Lucy Neville, the author of the 2018 book Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica, believes most women will often narrate the reasons why they hate heterosexual pornography before engaging in a conversation on what they love about gay porn. “Some of the women I interviewed for my book aren’t able to separate the politics from the easy enjoyment of what they were watching. And that stopped them getting turned on because they'll be like, ‘Oh, I’m not sure if I can be comfortable, and this person is consenting to this. Does this make me a bad feminist?’ Some believe they’re contributing to the oppression of women, and that that just killed their hard-on because nobody wants to worry about these issues when trying to enjoy themselves,” she says. For some of Neville’s respondents, the maternal instinct kicked in. “Some of the women who watched hypersexual pornography told me, ‘Oh, I just want to give the actresses a cuddle and then give them some chicken soup.’”

Intimacy coach Pallavi Barnwal also believes heterosexual porn can be quite triggering for cishet women. “Considering one in three women are likely to be sexually assaulted in India by a partner, watching sexually explicit material where they see a woman again being mishandled, dominated, and hurt can be triggering and re-traumatising. Watching male-on-male porn is a way to sidestep some of these dilemmas and start prioritising their desires first because in this kind of porn, it’s the men doing things with other men, and thus, there is no woman to feel bad about potentially.”

Some women said they didn’t want heterosexual porn because the actresses had unattainable body types. According to Neville, that just made them go off in a sort of spiral of self-loathing instead of enjoying what they were watching. “And there were women who would then be like, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t like it if somebody did that to me. So that’s now put me off’. Whereas when they were watching two men together, it was pure fantasy. There was none of that in real life, their own sex lives or their hang-ups about their ability to orgasm or their bodies intruding on that pleasure of viewing that variety of porn,” says Barnwal.

For many women The Established spoke to but didn’t want to be quoted regarding their preference for gay porn, the consensus was that they loved the idea of a man making love to another man’s body, at least in the type of porn they consumed. Natasha, who works in hospitality in Bengaluru, says she enjoys gazing at the beauty of the male body. “I enjoy when the camera lingers on aspects of the male body outside of the genitals, and I want a camera that allows me to see the male face in ecstasy because that’s pleasurable to me. So I think there are a lot of aesthetic choices that gay porn directors make about how they show men that straight porn directors don’t that women like. And again, the diversity of body types in gay porn, as opposed to heterosexual porn, is more inclusive. I feel more catered to than the sort of generic ‘Ken doll’ kind of boy actor you see quite a lot in heterosexual pornography,” she says. 

In her book, Neville also talks about how porn scholars don’t necessarily agree on whether watching gay porn is an act of feminism because women are taken out of the equation entirely regarding what’s shown on screen. “The idea that feminism means centering women or putting women or more women on the screen or thinking about empowering individual women is a problem because that’s not what it means at all. So I don’t think enjoying gay male pornography as a woman is anti-feminist because it allows women to be comfortable with their viewing choices,” she says. 

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