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‘Sometimes It’s Hard to Be a Woman’

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Abstract

This chapter examines the difficulties presented to women in this sample by heterosexual (and, to some extent, lesbian) pornography, in terms of both the lack of agency afforded to female actors because of the wider political and economic situation of women, and the lack of evidence, or rather, ‘authentic’ evidence of female desire. It looks at why women the women I spoke with might therefore see m/m pornography as a viable alternative, answering the call for ‘a moral pornography’. This chapter also examines what women described as the ‘eroticising equality’ (Dyer, R, Idol thoughts: Orgasm and self-reflexivity in gay pornography. In P. Church Gibson (Ed.), More dirty looks: Gender, pornography and power, BFI, London, pp. 102–109, 2004; Pugh, The democratic genre: Fan fiction in a literary context, Seren, 2005) of gay sex, and explores the experiences of a subsection of the sample who spoke about how issues with their own bodies, and in some cases a history of previous sexual abuse (committed by men), meant that m/m porn offered a comfortable space to explore their own sexuality and sexual identity which heterosexual pornography did not.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Defined as: predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual.

  2. 2.

    Mpreg fan Lyric refers to mpreg as belonging to ‘the weird part of the internet… The [parts where] people … are like ‘WTF?’’ (Lyric, in Shrayber, 2014).

  3. 3.

    This was not a question that I specifically asked respondents, either during interviews, focus groups, or the survey. Some participants, however, spontaneously divulged their experiences with violence and sexual abuse while answering other questions.

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  1. University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Lucy Neville

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Neville, L. (2018). ‘Sometimes It’s Hard to Be a Woman’. In: Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69134-3_5

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