Straight women seeing gay porn: ‘He’s too good looking!’

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reports the findings of a small pilot study exploring how young, heterosexual women living in Western Europe engaged with a series of explicit audiovisual depictions of men having sex with men. The underlying premise was that gay male pornography (gay porn) has erotic value for many heterosexual women and that women open to looking at gay porn are open to finding it arousing. This study explored what elements represented in gay porn resonated with heterosexual female desire and how women made sense of those representations. The study was also undertaken to confirm the feasibility of using selected video clips to explore women’s sexual responses and opinions about a particular genre of pornography in more ‘real-world’ conditions. Twenty-one participants were recruited through word of mouth, watched four short videos illustrative of different subgenres of gay porn and were interviewed to explore their responses. Overall, participants responded positively to the clips, with 80% of the participants finding something at least slightly arousing. Most found the videos engaging and sexually informative, leaving them with a more positive perspective of both porn in general and gay sex in particular. Negative reactions tended to be rooted in a discomfort with men’s bodies, bodily functions, and a particular theme or low production quality, rather than with gay porn itself.