Pornhub launched a "porn for women" category last year, but the adult content monolith certainly isn’t the first or only corporate entity to identify a demand for "female-friendly" porn. Platforms like Bellesa, ForHerTube, and Sssh.com are now more accessible than ever, and that’s mostly a good thing. Women deserve affirming adult content that centers women’s agency and portrays them as active, consenting players enjoying realistic sexual experiences.

“If you look back at the emergence of porn for women, or lesbian porn, or feminist porn, it was a call to arms, so to speak,” Lynn Comella, author of Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure said. “It was a desire for cultural intervention into a marketplace of images and discourses related to sex and sexuality that catered primarily to men.”

These early woman-centered enterprises were part of a largely political movement for porn that freed women’s sexual expression from the male gaze.

The idea that women watch porn isn’t new. In the early 1980s, director and producer Candida Royalle rose as an industry icon for her work creating adult films from a woman’s perspective. Lesbian production company Fatale Media and On Our Backs, the first woman-run lesbian porn magazine, also emerged as porn innovators around this same time. These pioneering enterprises sought to create porn that centered women’s physical pleasure—a rejection of the frenetic thrusting, oily bodies, and theatrics that defined mainstream porn for years.

“The term ‘porn for women’ is problematic because a lot of porn does cater to an assumed cis male audience, and as part of the general porn consumer base women should feel free to select films from any genre,” artist and performer Courtney Trouble said. “In one way, creating a porn for women genre allows for a ‘men only’ genre to perpetuate itself. It just buys into an either/or dichotomy that doesn't even begin to disrupt the foundational issues that create the market gap.”

However, much of the rhetoric surrounding “porn for women” emerges from misguided assumptions and broad generalizations about the kind of porn women enjoy, and the kind of women who enjoy porn.

This era also marked a truly revolutionary moment in porn history.

“This was incendiary in the 1980s,” Sociologist and author Chauntelle Tibbals said. “Because although women had always been involved in content production, this was not generally acknowledged or understood by the viewing public.”

The social and political discourse surrounding this first wave of porn created by and for women eventually reached mainstream consumers and creators, inspiring cultural conversations in support of ethical porn, the importance of paying for porn, and the need for racial and gender diversity both in front of and behind the camera. Thanks in part to extensive media coverage and corporate interest in recent years, public discussions about women and porn are far less taboo, but still lack the depth and complexity necessary for a truly evolved cultural understanding.

“In 2019, women have more opportunities to find sexual commodities, products, materials, that are designed with them in mind, but the way in which they're imagined as sexual consumers or porn consumers continues to be narrow, overall,” said Comella.

Generalizing the Female Gaze

Angie Rowntree, founder and director of Sssh.com, believes “porn for women” functions primarily as an SEO-friendly marketing term for mainstream tube sites. “It’s very misleading and dishonest,” Rowntree said. “The term puts women in a box, and it’s one I don’t particularly care for. ‘Women like these things, but not these other things.’ We’re pigeonholing people. It’s a huge injustice to the diversity of our desires.”

The same glowing media coverage that normalized women as porn consumers—as well as some of the language these sites sometimes use themselves—seems to assume that women as a whole are straight and cisgender. Porn site Bellesa claims on its website that it features “hot guys. Storylines. Natural bodies. Free erotic stories. Real orgasms.” On Sssh.com, Rowntree prefers terms like “female-focused” and “female-led” to distinguish Sssh.com’s content from male-oriented offerings, like a popular woman-on-woman category that includes a scene centered on same-sex marriage, though the images featured on the site’s homepage only depict heterosexual couples.

"It’s a huge injustice to the diversity of our desires.”

On most adult content sites, “porn for women” now occupies its own genre and aesthetic defined by soft lighting and vanilla sex, with a narrow view of what can—or should—turn women on.