Negotiating Sexuality: Indonesian Female Audience towards Pornographic Media Content

Abstract

As one topic that is deemed as controversial in Indonesia, pornography is rarely discussed, moreover in terms of adult audience. Most Indonesian research in pornographic media content mainly discussed about its effect on male teenagers. However, as one of many media content forms, pornography is segmented for specific audience, in which is adult. Things become more complicated when it comes to female audience, though, as the normativity of Indonesian society has a set of beliefs that sexual desires only belong to men. Nevertheless, women are able to watch porn as well. Hence, this paper is going to examine how Indonesian female audience perceive the pornographic media content they access, as further to how its impact towards their sexuality as a woman who lives in Indonesian patriarchal society. The research is conducted by new ethnography method with Indonesian female informants who are the audiences of pornographic media content. Significant finding in this research shows that women in this research are highly aware that they, too, have sexual desires just the same as their male counterparts. On the other side, they’re also highly concerned of how people around them make a judgment in regards to women who like sex or watch porn in particular; hence, it affects their sexual expression in their daily life. Furthermore, watching porn has made them negotiate their sexuality as a woman, in a way that they try to make sense of their sexual fantasy and the reality.