New research reveals why so many women watch gay porn
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New research has shed light onto why gay porn is so popular among women, with factors including a love for the male form and enjoying the versatility of gay sex.
Researcher Lucy Neville set out her findings, published in full in her new book Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, in an article for South Africa‘s The Sunday Times.
Recent studies have shown that gay male-on-male porn is hugely popular with women.
In 2016, Pornhub revealed that women make up more than one third (37 percent) of people watching gay male-on-male porn. Proportionally, the data showed that women were more than two-thirds (69 percent) more likely to watch gay porn that their male counterparts.
And, in 2015, the porn site found that porn featuring gay men was consistently the second most popular category of porn for women.
Neville said she surveyed more than 500 women for her book, with one main reason for females watching gay male porn simply being that “a good number of women like looking at naked men.”
The researcher, who is also a lecturer in criminology at the University of Leicester, said that people are still conditioned in society to view male nudity as “gross, funny or scary.”
The new research has revealed some of the reasons why women watch gay porn. (Bigstock)
In light of this, she said: “A lot of the women I spoke to were keen to find a way to look at men and appreciate male grace and beauty.”
She added that some women also wanted to overturn the “male gaze,” which is that much of porn is made to cater for straight men, ignoring the sexual desires of those attracted to the male form.
However, she discovered some more serious reasons behind why so many women watch male-on-male gay porn.
The researcher revealed that for rape victims and survivors of abuse, male-on-male gay porn is “one of the few types of sexually explicit media they can enjoy without feeling triggered or re-traumatised.”
Neville has said there are a number of reasons why so many women watch gay porn. (rt69/flickr.com)
Neville also said that women watching gay male-on-male porn do so because they “don’t have to feel guilty or worried about women performers, wondering if they’re enjoying it, if they’re being exploited, if it hurts, if they really did just have an orgasm.”
She added that some women reported enjoying the “versatility” of gay sex, with viewers not knowing who will be the “penetrator or the penetratee” in gay porn.
And Neville said that, for women into kink and BDSM, the fact that gay male porn stars are of the same gender “removes some of the potentially off-putting power dynamics from a scene, and means they can just enjoy the eroticism of the act.”
