Consumers of pornographic videos strongly “vote” for scenes of same-sex love between two (and three, four, and so on ad infinitum) women. What explains the popularity of this “genre”?
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Pornhub, one of the world’s leading providers of adult content, is famous not only for this very content, but also for its approach to business. Maybe not entirely scientific, but still. Based on visitor statistics, site administrators regularly report to “the city and the world” what users are most actively searching for and most willing to look at Pornhub. Another portion of their revelations turned out to be quite curious. It turned out that the citizens of the United States, for example, search the site primarily for lesbian porn.
pure arithmetic
The first comments on the Web on this topic were pretty funny. Their authors pointed out that either the audience of pornography is becoming more and more female, or men suffer from masochism – otherwise why would they want the kind of love that is least accessible to them? It is well known, after all, that the majority of lesbians are practically not interested in sexual contacts with men.
However, seriously speaking, both of these assumptions are untenable. For example, a thorough survey recently conducted by Marie Claire magazine showed that if women watch porn, they are much more interested in heterosexual than lesbian scenes.1. The second argument is even easier. He substitutes concepts, trying to put an equal sign between pornography and real life. Meanwhile, porn, as researchers have repeatedly noted, appeals to sexual fantasies. Which may have nothing to do with reality at all, which does not prevent people experiencing these fantasies from experiencing extreme excitement. Neuropsychologist Ogi Ogas, for example, who wrote a voluminous book based on the study of millions of erotic stories, videos and search queries on the Web2, notes that many people in their fantasies see themselves having sex with superheroes or other fantasy creatures. The chances of such sex in reality, of course, are much less than even the chances of the average man to have a sexual relationship with lesbians, but after all, they fantasize as if nothing had happened.
As for the possible popularity of lesbian porn among men, the answer offered by Oji Ogas is embarrassingly simple. The researcher states that visual stimuli play an extremely important role in the male mechanisms of sexual arousal. And what could be more stimulating than one beautiful, naked and ready to make love woman? That’s right – two such women. Or three, and so on.
The shortest distance between two points
If we talk about women, then it is much more important for them to excite not visual images, but experienced emotions. Probably for this reason, for example, the film “Brokeback Mountain” about the love of two cowboys was a huge success with a female audience. However, the dramatic story itself attracted women, and not at all the scenes of carnal love between the main characters. This is confirmed by the following fact: gay porn does not enjoy any noticeable popularity among the fair sex. It is by no means rich in stories (as, indeed, almost all pornographic products are).
Read more:
- Are erotic books a woman’s business?
Confirms these findings and the study of psychologist Michael Bailey (Michael Bailey). He studied the issues of arousal of men and women extremely thoroughly, not only fixing the activity of the brain at the moments of demonstration of visual stimuli, but also measuring the arousal at the level of the genitals.3. In his experiments, women achieved roughly the same level of genital arousal when watching heterosexual and lesbian porn, or videos featuring only men. However, when telling the researchers about their feelings, the participants in the experiments said that they did not experience any excitement from the sight of male couples making love.
So the path from purely physiological arousal to its awareness in women is very cunning and tortuous. But for men, it’s straight, as it should be for the shortest distance between two points (or organs, for example). The same experiments by Michael Bailey clearly showed that nothing excites men more than female images in porn. And the more – the better, which, in fact, was required to be proved.
1 http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a16474/women-porn-habits-study/
2 O. Ogas, S. Gaddam «A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships» (Plume, 2011).
3 M. Bailey et al. «A sex difference in the specificity of sexual arousal». Psychological Science, 2004, №15.