I’m lying, buck naked, on a massage table in a room I’ve never seen before. Everything around me is white: the brick replace to my left, the light fixture above me, the shoji screen opposite me. The only people here are me and a brunette with pearly whites and short purple nails that complement my own lavender polish. She’s in her birthday suit, too, and she’s going down on me. Tangled up in her, I am rooted in place, content. But after five minutes, the scene ends and I’m jolted back to the real world, the weight of my clunky virtual reality (VR) headset suddenly apparent on the bridge of my nose.

I’ve been streaming a free video on PornHub, the largest porn site in the world, it’s used by 80 million people every day. To access the company’s special VR category, all I need is a $20 headset and my smartphone. The video I’ve selected—one of the many lesbian VR scenes featuring oral sex that exist—places Elle Rose, a Europe-based actor who’s found additional work in VR porn, in front of me. But unlike traditionally directed porn, which provides the viewer with an intimate look at an act between others, the perspective in this video is my own. I am the woman beneath Rose. I choose what I want to see, where I will focus and how I will experience the scene. I am the centre of attention.

It’s a stark difference from the plethora of male-centric lesbian porn widely available on the internet. Instead, VR offers the revolutionary potential of a fantasy in which female satisfaction is at the core of the scene. The technology itself could be the queer alternative we’ve been searching for, a tangible means of taking pornography out of its heteronormative landscape and putting it in the hands of the very people searching for a new way to experience sexuality. Straight men may be the biggest consumers of internet porn, but queer women deserve to see ourselves represented in a way we never have before: in charge of our pleasure.

Lesbian porn as we know it was born during the feminist sex wars of the 1970s and ’80s—a rejection of the anti-porn sentiments brewing among some second-wave feminists, and a denunciation of mainstream porn. Lesbian-run production companies began popping up, portraying queer sexuality in raw forms: the use of dildos and harnesses, women in positions of dominance, genuine orgasms. But with the advent of Internet porn in the 1990s, depictions of lesbians having sex have usually depended on the direction and desires of men. In 2013, Valerie Webber, a researcher based out of Newfoundland’s Memorial University, published a study about lesbian porn. One of her findings: the most popular videos often focus on male fantasies, namely the idea of lesbian sex as an experiment or a one-off experience. It is most often only within the realm of niche, or “alt,” sites that queer women are able to find authentic portrayals of women having sex with one another. Because VR is a rather new technology—it became more widely accessible with the release of the inexpensive Google Cardboard viewer four years ago—many companies have opted to lm the kinds of videos that garner a mass audience. That phenomenon, when paired with lesbian content, means videos like the one featuring Rose in a solely girl-on-girl scene are far less common than those showcasing threesomes with men.