More than half of the women who watch gay porn ‘imagined themselves’ as men, according to a new study.

The study stated 55% of women who watch or read gay male erotica ‘imagined themselves as a man during the course of their sexual fantasies’.

Conducted by Dr Lucy Neville, a Lecturer in Criminology from the University of Leicester, it surveyed over 500 women who said they watch porn of men having sex with men.

Neville found survey respondents via social media and pornography websites.

It’s the culmination of a 5-year long project, the findings of which are in a new book titled Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica.

But why do women love gay erotica?

Dr Neville said women like to ‘appreciate male grace and beauty’ and have ‘a desire to flip the “male gaze” prevalent in both porn and mainstream cinema.’

She also said women don’t have to feel guilty or worried about women performers.

Dr Neville said in a press release: ‘While some meet the existence of women enjoying m/m [man on man] sexually explicit media with surprise, there is growing acceptance that it is perhaps not quite as uncommon as first thought.

‘Women represent viable secondary consumers of m/m porn,’ she said.

Women love to watch gay porn

Pornography site PornHub released data in 2014 about the viewing habits of women with gay porn.

It actually found women searched the most for lesbian porn, closely followed by gay male porn.

Gay male porn for men came in 7th place for men in general, with teen topping the list.

A straight woman took to social media site Reddit earlier this year to ask if it was weird she likes watching gay porn.

Using an anonymous account, the 20-year-old straight woman wrote in an extremely NSFW post: ‘Oh my goodness.

‘I don’t want to get too graphic but I had the most intense orgasm of my life watching it [gay porn] for the first time. I absolutely loved it.’

She explains she grew up in a conservative household and didn’t discover porn until she was 18. She initially watched straight porn and was ‘grossed out’ by how unenthused the women seemed.

Then she turned to lesbian porn but found it also didn’t really arouse her.

She says she gave up hope when it comes to watching porn, until she discovered gay porn a year later.

The straight woman wrote: ‘The men in gay porn, I then discovered, are 50x more attractive than the ones in straight porn. The men in straight porn are basically props essentially I find, and it contains nothing but what I want to see: dick and male ass.

‘Since then I’ve been viewing it very often and it still gets me going every time,’ she said.