If you were following this blog last month…
One of the things that you may have noticed is that with a few of the women’s testimonies/confessions, there was a running theme that they had an attraction to homosexual porn. I thought about my own porn journey and how my preference was often the same (lesbian porn) and/or F-M-F threesomes. Then, I thought about what Tiff said in the video blog from earlier this week (which was really good so check the archives!) about how part of the reason why she didn’t want to make the confession about her interest in porn was that she didn’t think other women struggled.
Thing is, if you’re a woman and you watch porn, 8 times out of 10, a woman is in the video. And more specifically, if you ask many of the women who partake in watching lesbian porn, they would still consider themselves to be heterosexual. I decided to do a bit of research on why there is such an appeal in this way. Boy, there are articles out here for *everything!*
In the New York Times piece from a few years ago, “What Women Want (Maybe)“, here is an excerpt of their findings:
“’For heterosexual women,’ a researcher, Meredith Chivers, says in a new documentary about bisexuality called ‘Bi the Way,’ which was shown at the NewFest film festival in New York last Friday, ‘looking at a naked man walking on the beach is about as exciting as looking at landscapes.’
Dr. Chivers, a research fellow at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health at the University of Toronto, says she has data to support this assertion. She recently published results of a study in which she showed people video clips of naked men and women in various sexual and nonsexual situations and measured their genital arousal.
Heterosexual women, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by athletic naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: long pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.
What really matters to women, Dr. Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality. Even more than the naked exercisers, they were aroused by videos of masturbation, and more still by graphic videos of couples making love. Women with women, men with men, men with women: it did not seem to matter much to her female subjects, Dr. Chivers said.
‘Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t,’ she said. ‘For heterosexual women, gender didn’t matter. They responded to the level of activity.’”
It made me think of two things. For one, being that I work with inner city female teens, with more and more of them coming to me about “turning lesbian”, I am somewhat used to having the conversation with them that just because someone is attractive, female and a friend of yours, that doesn’t automatically mean the relationship needs to be sexualized. In other words, I’m not sure that we’re properly modeling *non-sexual intimacy* anymore. I have *a lot of pretty female friends*. I don’t want to sleep with them, though. Yeah. I’m not so sure if we know how to appreciate a person without wanting to sleep with them these days. And two, I thought about how the doctor stated that women tended to be more reactive to the *level of activity* over the actual gender they were watching. That made me think about the porn that I’ve seen before: it’s *definitely* the women who are being more, um, *dramatic*. Could it be that some women are drawn to women in porn because they want to be, not necessarily just as “stacked” as those women (meaning they want to look like those women), but they also want to be as uninhibited as they apper to be as well? That it’s not so much about being attracted to the women as it is of being envious of their sexual style?
You know, there’s a Scripture in the Bible that says, “For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there.” (James 3:16-NKJV) There are a lot of confessions and comments that we get on here about the latter part of that verse; about how porn has caused them to feel confused and guilty due to how evil they believe it is. Oh, but I’m not so sure if we’ve factored the other part in: that porn draws and traps a lot of us in, not just because we’re self-seeking pleasure, but because we’re envious of the kind of sex (usually acted, by the way) that is on the screen. Either we’re fantasing about someday having sex like that or wishing that we were now.
Bottom line, what do you think draws more and more women to porn? The women or the sex?
Sound off…