Women watch porn; Christans flip out

It's such sweet satisfaction to be right.

Recently-published Nielson NetRatings show that women are an increasing driver of the market for Internet porn, currently representing thirty percent of traffic to porn sites.  Enterprising women understand the potential here and are capitalizing on this growing (and sophisticated!) market segment. As I've been saying all along, it's not that women aren't interested in porn. The biggest barriers to women purchasing porn are social stigma and poor quality products. Both factors are fixable, as we are seeing with growing niches of quality porn and the anonymity of the online marketplace, and in return women are buying.

Meanwhile, true to form, the Christian Right is freaking out that so many women will join men (all of whom are porn addicts) in hell for looking at naked people online.

Comments

[Brian]

So, in that article from JS Online, here is one comment that is open to debate:

"The women's pornography I've seen is still pretty blatant," said Diana E.H. Russell, a emeritus professor of sociology at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., and an expert on sexual violence. "It's done in a more gentle way, but it's still sex without any connection to other feelings."

So is she basically saying that women are not allowed to even enjoy the fantasy of sex without emotional connection? Or that because she herself cannot fathom this that she assumes no woman can sex without an emotional connection? Porn is fantasy, it does not have to reflect how life really is or how real relationships unfold, but she is essentially denying women any sort of fantasy apart from what reality has deemed.

[Greg]

Women are people too, and they have normal human responses. Someone clearly (back in Victorian times, perhaps?) decided that women weren't interested in sexual pleasure (advice given to wives was "lie back and think of England, my dear" - while the old man got on with it). So they were denied human feelings. But women are interested in pleasure - of all kinds - as men are. Perhaps a different style, but that's their right.