One author says there has been a 'complete dearth' of research into women’s consumption of porn. Photo / Getty Images
This story was first published in April.
Warning: This article discusses sexual content
We don’t like talking about it – but we are certainly watching it.
“Please can someone do something to rein in the current Woman’s Hour preoccupation with masturbation and pornography,” scolded a Radio 4 listener in the UK last week, referring to the show’s recent porn series. Speaking to the station’s Feedback show, another called in to say that she and her husband found it “unacceptable”, before adding: “By the way, neither of us are prudish or anti-sex.” Well, to those listeners, if you are reading – avert your gaze! You’re not going to enjoy this article, either.
We may not like talking about porn, but we are certainly watching it. One in five of us partakes during the working day, from hybrid workers on slow Monday afternoons to parliamentarians
A recent ranking of the world’s most visited websites had three porn destinations in the top 20. Adult sites account for 20 per cent of what we search for on our phones. With 12 billion monthly visitors, Pornhub is the fourth-most visited site in the world. The vast majority of users are men, but women are catching up, accounting for around a third of Pornhub’s current user base.
Despite this, there has been a “complete dearth” of research into women’s consumption of porn, says Dr Fiona Vera-Gray, the author of the book Women on Porn, released earlier this year.
“We think of men as producers and consumers, women as the product. But [women] do watch it – and besides, women have an interest, whether or not they are consumers: it has a stake in their lives, whether through their partners, or their children. We’re not silent because we have nothing to say. It’s because no one asked us. We need to open up the conversation, without judgment.
“If we open up that space, women will jump into it.”
Anna Richards created the ethical porn site FrolicMe when she couldn’t find the brand for her: “an open-minded heterosexual woman in her 40s with a bit of fluidity”. FrolicMe is erotica-luxe, the “Agent Provocateur meets The White Company of sex”, she tells me, archly, “that puts female pleasure and fantasy front and centre”. According to her data, it’s the users in their 50s who linger longest on her site. “Fifty- to 55-year-olds spend double the amount of time as 18- to 24-year-olds.”
This is also the age group most likely to own a sex toy, according to a recent survey. “They’ve got more disposable income, they’ve got more time on their hands. If they’ve been in a long-term relationship, and their nests are emptying, they want to experiment. Many of them are divorced – single again, or in new relationships.”
The UK’s Office for National Statistics showed that divorce rates in the over-60s doubled between 1993 and 2016. “For women, the stereotype is that midlife perimenopause is a time of shutting up shop. Some people are just getting started,” says Richards.
If women have been sidelined from the conversation, women in midlife have been wholly ignored – unless you count the search terms “Milf”, which is the fifth-most viewed category worldwide, or “mature”, the second-favourite category among men. With this in mind, I set out to speak with middle-aged women about their porn habits.
Louise*, 51, is a business owner and mother of four, who has been married for 23 years. When we speak, she is trepidatious. “One doesn’t generally speak about these things… Not even to close friends, really.” She watches porn with her husband “not as a crutch to an ailing sex life, but as an added delectation. We don’t watch it every time we have sex, but certainly if we have a weekend away, there’ll be pornography on in the background of many an evening and an afternoon. It allows the mind to follow through on fantasies, and to stimulate memories. And it helps sex talk to develop, for a bit of kink to come alive.” She adds, conspiratorially: “I definitely think that the older I’ve got, the kinkier I’ve got.”
Just then, we are interrupted by her teenage daughter: “She’s pulling a sickie, has got some work to do for school.” The daily stresses and mundanities of life have occasionally taken a toll on sex, as her daughter’s intrusion illustrates.
“As a mother of four, especially as the kids have gotten older, and less easy to fob off, you do have to get inventive. It’s no longer just you as an individual woman, it’s the whole family framework around you. Sometimes, it’s a case of, ‘Shut the door, let’s have a quickie.’” She has a “suitcase” of sex toys, and one of them is a long-distance vibrator that can be operated remotely by her husband. “I had a very long school run…”
Louise wants to debunk the idea that menopausal women are “dried up, frigid old prunes”. She did experience a dip in her libido around the perimenopause. “Sex involved a lot of mental stimulation, and sex toys helped to heighten arousal.” Hormone replacement therapy has restored her sex drive to its former glory. “I can honestly say that I am having the best sex of my life… I just hope my daughter hasn’t been listening at the door.”
Porn has been popular online as long as the internet has existed but the way that we consume erotic content undergoes rapid changes all the time. Audioporn is the new kid on the block: sexy scenarios, narrated by voice actors, all in the comfort of your AirPods on the commute home (and hopefully not inadvertently played out loud…). Apps such as Bloom and Dipsea have cashed in on women’s desire for pornographic content, where one’s imagination is just as important as the stimulus itself. Kim, 51, listens to audioporn because “it is private and immersive, there are no distractions and I can listen to it wherever I want. I use it to get in the mood. For sex. And to generate ideas for encounters.”
For most of her life, Kim had a low sex drive. “These days, I consciously invest in my sexuality. In the past, I took it for granted, and didn’t take the time to learn and grow. I accepted a lot of crap. I had mediocre sex without thinking. Once I started to invest in sexuality, my libido responded.” Not all of Kim’s investments have been app subscriptions.
Kim couldn’t live without sex now, she says. “As an older woman, I have grown into my sexuality. We know what we want and how to communicate, we’re open to novelty and exploration, we can approach encounters without a hidden agenda. We’re in it for the genuine love of sex. The only downside is that men find us intimidating because we won’t tolerate bad behaviour, misogyny or mediocre sex any more.”
Nevertheless, many women continue to have a conflicted relationship with pornography. During Vera-Gray’s research for Women on Porn, one interviewee told her “the kind of porn I watch – I wish it didn’t exist”. For Lauren, 50, it is imperative the porn she and her husband consume is made ethically, by women. “Sorry to say that these are the only producers I trust. Using porn to ‘get off’ used to fill me with shame after orgasm, as I’d be worried about the actors – that they were being exploited.”
When you take the shame out of the equation, she says, “you feel much more entitled to escapism”. Perhaps it is this entitlement that has made her much more open with her porn consumption in recent decades. “I’m not sure if it’s because my age means I’m less inclined to care what people think, or that it’s become more socially acceptable. A mixture, probably. I even bought my mother-in-law a FrolicMe subscription. Is that weird?”
Curiously, mothers-in-law were something of a theme in my conversations. Louise told me that, at 85 and recently widowed, her own had said: “If I knew he was going to die, I’d have got one last shag in.” She adds: “They were at it right to the end…”
Our time on earth, after all, is but fleeting. Perhaps we should all live by this example.
*Names have been changed
Let’s take a look at the science.