My brain is at war with my body. It won’t allow me to experience what I want to experience, to feel what I want to feel. I want to fully absorb what I’m seeing, enjoy it, but I find something, something deep and untraceable, is telling me I shouldn’t, that it would be wrong.
A few feet in front of me, dusk’s golden light is illuminating two bodies entwined with each other. The air smells of lemons, the ingredients for fresh lemonade shoved aside as the women choose to devour each other instead. ‘Be in this moment, enjoy this, it’s sexy,’ one voice inside me insists. But then there’s the other, turning me off by screeching, ‘You shouldn’t be finding this hot, how embarrassing, how shameful, don’t let anyone know how turned on you are...’ The second voice is louder than the first and it’s one I know too well; one I’ve listened to far too often.
This evening’s circumstances are wholly different from when these thoughts normally crop up, however. Usually, the shame creeps in when I’m alone in my bedroom, just my laptop bearing witness. Right now, I’m in a villa nestled within the Spanish mountains, and I have company. Company that is far too busy to notice the blush snaking up my chest, the light sweat I’ve broken out into. They’re also much more used to this than I am — they’re professionals, and they have a job to do: the scene needs to be captured before the light fades.
Over the next 24 hours, I will watch three scenes being filmed, as three couples have very real sex, right in front of me. Why? I want to explore women’s relationship with porn, why we are so excluded from conversations surrounding it and where this complex mix of desire, swirled with shame and guilt, comes from. Will spending months researching this world, meeting those who produce and star in it, help me uncover more? There was only one way to find out...
A new vision
“How many fingers do you like? Do you like hard or soft fingering?” It’s the morning after my arrival and Anna Richards, the CEO of FrolicMe, is doing her pre-scene briefing, under a shaded canopy. Richards launched FrolicMe, an independent erotic porn website designed for women and couples nine years ago, and is across everything they do, from story-boarding scenes to conducting briefings on set, which are in place to ensure that the performers feel comfortable and safe.
Performers Calita Fire and Maria Riot are filming a swimming pool scene: Riot is in a flowing pale pink dress that she’ll keep on for as long as possible, so the wet fabric clings to her soft, curvaceous body. Fire is in a yellow bikini, her armpit and pubic hair visible in all the shots. Riot is old-school beauty mixed with punk glamour, Sophia Loren crossed with Courtney Love, while Fire is a mischievous Keira Knightley type. “I look to cast models who have natural figures, but also those who know themselves, and their sexuality comes from within, rather than being based entirely on what they look like,” explains Richards. Later I learn that Riot is involved heavily in campaigns surrounding sex workers’ rights, while Fire worked for an NGO supporting those from a migrant and refugee background, before making the decision to enter the sex industry in her 30s.
Everyone's clicking on...
This is not what I have come to expect from porn. Until very recently, I made use of what was available to me: going on the free tube sites and trying to find what I wanted within the thousands of videos available, quickly shutting my eyes if anything popped up that I really didn’t want to see. I’d look at their professionally honed bodies, and how they still looked picture-perfect in even the most unflattering positions and question why I didn’t look that way. But more significantly, guilt and fear often crept in. I worried that the women involved weren’t really enjoying themselves or, (horrifyingly) worse, were being coerced or forced into these sexual acts, or hadn’t consented to these videos being uploaded. All of which made my relationship with porn mixed – sometimes enjoyable and sometimes not at all.
I’m not alone. When we asked 2,000 of you for your opinions on porn as part of our 2024 sex survey, and what you consume, we discovered that 80% of you consume it, and of those who do, 87% of you watch video porn, with the majority of that (73%) being found on tube sites. The impact this viewing has on your sex lives is hugely varied. Many of you feel that porn has had a positive impact (more on this later), but others voiced discomfort over whether what you’re watching is ‘fake’ and for ‘the male gaze’. As one reader commented: “Not everyone wants to watch a woman get a dick slammed down her throat.”
This idea that porn just shows ‘what men want’ is not surprising, considering that for so long women have been excluded from conversations surrounding it. Men have been the producers and the consumers; women are the product. “There’s long been this idea that women don’t consume porn,” explains Professor Clarissa Smith, who has been studying our relationship with porn for the past 25 years. “Women’s desires and sexualities have been repressed. They have been taught the false notion of, ‘Nice girls don’t ask for what they want in bed’, and our consumption of porn plays into this...” Yet, while statistics surrounding porn use shows men watch it more frequently, women do watch porn: with 53% of women surveyed by YouGov saying they do. There’s also been a shift in recent years with more women launching sex-based brands, whether that’s female-owned sex toy companies, such as Dame, or women, like Richards, creating erotic content with the female, rather than the male gaze, in mind.
This new era of porn, with content made for women by women, is often labelled as ‘feminist’ or ‘ethical’, as the films don’t just consider profit. For Richards, this means “being responsible with what I am portraying, in terms of sexual pleasure, but also ensuring that everyone has a full understanding of what’s involved and that they’re well paid and looked after”. The performers also know where their content will appear. “We own the rights to the films, we work with a company to try to keep our content off of tube sites.”
“I think what separates [this sort of porn from the more mainstream] is also a focus on female pleasure, and how that actually looks and works,” explains Nicoletta Heidegger, a licensed marriage and family therapist, sexologist, and host of the podcast Sluts & Scholars. “[The films] might not just focus on orgasming through penetration — because that only really happens for a small percentage of people with vaginas — they may focus more on the story. Basically, they offer more than just us being expected to be turned on by somebody putting in no effort.”
When, as part of a research project, Professor Smith surveyed 5,000 people on what they wanted from porn, she found that while women’s interests couldn’t be (and shouldn’t be) filtered down into liking one category or genre, there did tend to be a running thread as to why they watched porn. “We spoke to people across all age ranges and found that while men did use porn as a means of self-discovery, this tended to be when they were younger. Whereas for women, using it as the way to discover what turns them on, and to connect to their bodies, was shown in all stages of life,” says Professor Smith. “I found through my clients that there are so many ways porn can aid a sex life,” adds Heidegger. “If someone’s watching more mainstream content, [porn] can make them not feel good in their body, as they may compare themselves to a fantasy ideal. But in other contexts, it can make people feel better because they’re seeing different body types experiencing pleasure. And it can help them discover they’re not alone in their fantasies. But it also reminds us that we can be sexual, that we are allowed.”
As it’s not just porn that we’re made to feel ashamed of. “Shame is the thing that connects all of the people who I work with,” says Heidegger. “It comes from many different angles, depending on which culture you grew up in or how you were raised but, in general, there’s a very puritanical, pervasive message that’s pushed on to us. Mix that with most people not having any sort of comprehensive sex education, body image struggles, and, especially for women, the shame in being ‘slutty’. Most people have the voice in their head that tells them there’s something’s wrong with them.”
Horny for honesty
When I was researching this feature and asking people about their porn habits, I heard one thing again and again, ‘Oh, but I’m not your average porn consumer’. This usually related to who they wanted to watch: they weren’t traditional-looking porn performers with ‘perfect’ bodies, but instead, a variety of different body types and people. “I’ve been in the industry for 15 years,” explains Andy Lee, a popular OnlyFans star. “I have adapted my content to what people want, and what they want is realism. Everyone’s taste is different and varied, but it’s often not perfection that people want. I get new performers coming to me saying they’ll wait before filming until they’ve had a boob job or lost weight, or whatever. I tell them that they don’t need to, that there’s an audience for them as they are.”
His co-star, Samantha, agrees, adding that her fans aren’t looking for people who look like models and that things she once perceived as flaws are what she’s most complimented on since entering the industry. Fire says sex work has opened up her appreciation for her body hair even more. “I had already been showcasing my body hair in my art but in the industry, it was like a whole new learning — there’s not only just people who like it and admire it, but those who get off on it,” she says. Hearing the performers’ perspectives, and what they’ve found their audiences want, made me think that what we’ve been told is sexy, isn’t necessarily what everyone finds sexy. It’s what has largely been served to us, where we seek out our porn. That, in turn, should make us feel that we are sexy, even if we do not match the false ideal that we so often see.
Visiting sets and speaking to performers whom, on the whole, love their jobs also reassures me that if they are truly enjoying themselves, then we as the viewer also can. However, all the performers who I spoke to either worked for ‘ethical’ companies or for themselves, producing content for OnlyFans: avenues that allowed them creative control. So, is that the solution? Only consume porn that we pay for, ensuring that we see more bodies like our own, alongside real, hot sex? Would that erase any sense of shame or guilt? It’s a start, but I still felt shame for watching performers whom I knew, from sitting around the dinner table with them, were having an amazing time. I spoke to them afterwards, hearing how they had multiple orgasms in one afternoon, and still felt I had to hide that I had been turned on watching that. It just isn’t that simple.
Fantasy vs reality
I’m in the back of a taxi, Andy Lee in the driver’s seat. It’s a real taxi, but it’s parked in a huge warehouse, with separate rooms and areas for different scenes. It’s a bit like visiting Universal Studios... but for porn.
As Lee shows me around, we visit a locker room, a doctor’s office, army barracks, a dungeon, a toilet, and even a prison cell so realistic Lee managed to prank the internet into thinking real-life footage of a female prison guard seducing an inmate had been leaked. Lee, who owns this studio, which is used for his own work and that of friends and OnlyFans creators, discovered, from his previous life working as a plumber, that people found these professions, from plumbers to builders, incredibly hot. And not just in men, Samantha, who joins us on set, was working as a carpenter in Aberdeen before she moved over to OnlyFans.
Here Lee, whose fan base is largely comprised of women and gay men, alongside his co-workers, films a huge variety of scenes, from orgies in locker rooms to taxi drivers letting their female passengers know there is another way for them to pay the fare.
While I don’t get the opportunity to watch that scene myself, it is a thrill to be sitting with Lee in the front seat. As the taxi seduction is one I enjoy... but it’s a fantasy. If a taxi driver propositioned me this way in real life, I’d find that deeply unsettling, thinking of him as a predator who preys on women’s vulnerabilities.
“One of the deepest complexities I found was this conflict that women felt between consuming porn, particularly certain types of porn, and their feminist ideals,” says Professor Smith. “This often stopped them from being able to fully relax when viewing.”
Working with a range of technology professionals, researcher and campaigner Fiona Vera-Gray analysed the titles appearing on the landing pages, for new users, of the three most popular online pornography websites in the United Kingdom, across a six-month period during 2017 and 2018, collecting data from more than 150,000 titles. The team excluded anything labelled BDSM and, using the World Health Organization’s definition of sexual violence, discovered that acts matching that description were delivered to one in eight of the homepages of the sites.
That means a staggering one in eight of your average videos on these homepages, excluding BDSM-specific ones, depicted or described sexual violence. These videos, she explains, “eroticise existing power inequalities within our society, including misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and racism”. She had this research in her mind when interviewing 100 women for her book Women On Porn, as some of the women that she spoke to felt this conflict between their pleasure and principles.
The debate about whether porn contributes to, or increases, levels of violence against women has been going on since the 1970s and the arguments for and against are far too complex for me to fully outline within this feature. But it’s understandable that some women might feel shame in consuming content that’s been argued exacerbates a growing, terrifying problem within our society.
On the other hand, what women like sexually is varied — and that includes enjoying and being turned on by power dynamics and submissive roles. “Women who enjoy this sort of sex are often told that they don’t, not really, and that it’s a result of oppressive patriarchal standards. This attitude is, once again, shaming women for owning their desires,” says Nicoletta Heidegger. “When we’re talking about pleasure-focused porn, I don’t just mean soft and romantic sex.”
“I don’t believe that, for the majority, everything you watch is what you want in real life,” explains Tula Vida, who starred in the lemonade scene I described at the start of the feature. “Porn is stimulating, it’s entertainment.” I saw this reflected in the people I spoke to, anonymously, about their porn habits. While sometimes, they watched it for ideas, on most occasions it was simply as escapism, and a means to step into a fantasy.
Over dinner, Fire told us about one of the most “empowering and healing” films that she had ever starred in: a feminist gangbang, put together by the production company HardWerk Studio. “It’s something I’d fantasised about, for more than a decade, and I got to pick everything, from the people I worked with to the clothes that I wore,” she says. “There was a moment I looked up and saw this lovely, kind look on all of the performers’ faces. On the surface it looked hardcore, but there was so much respect between us.”
Of course, knowing that what you’re watching is consensual, is reliant on us all paying for our porn, and with only 3% of Cosmo readers surveyed doing that, and a cost-of-living crisis to contend with, what is the answer? “Sex education should teach us how to consume porn in a discerning manner, with a comprehensive understanding between the differences of fantasy and reality,” says Heidegger. While our brains can comprehend that we don’t learn about driving from Fast & Furious, we also see people driving each day. What we rarely see, if at all, is real people having sex.
With a lack of sex education, there are people turning to porn to learn from it, and, as a result, mainstream companies need to take responsibility for that. There’s so much more they could be doing, including not using algorithms but instead having a search bar, so the opening pages of the sites aren’t serving (and therefore shaping) what content is consumed, and certainly working a lot harder when it comes to age verification and removing deepfake and image-based abuse content. They could also learn a lot from the ethical companies, which often intertwine conversations to do with consent and pleasure into their storylines, with performers naturally asking, ‘Do you like that? Does this feel good?’
Our relationship with our sexuality, and therefore our relationship with porn, is deeply layered as individuals. There are no easy answers, and porn isn’t going anywhere, but by having more honest discussions about its use, we can begin to envision a future where we continue to promote the companies that care about our needs, therefore piling pressure on the ones that don’t to change. There is, as I’ve now witnessed first-hand, a power in talking so openly about sex.
Each performer I spoke to said that working in the industry had helped them discover their desires, shown them how to impose boundaries in their personal lives and have conversations with their partners about what they wanted from sex. Think of that pre-scene conversation (‘one finger or two?’) — when was the last time you discussed what you like, so frankly and honestly, with your partner?
On set, I found I felt stiff. I was so aware of my own sexual shame, I almost carried it within my spine, as I sat upright watching these scenes. In comparison, the performers were calm, sensual and... loose. A term that’s always been used to put down a woman who knows her own sexual needs or has sex with a lot of people. But watching these women, so fluid and free, I could only see it as a good thing. Their sexiness was something that they carried with them, that went beyond their looks, as they’d learned how to embrace the entirety of their sexual selves. I could see, and feel, that that was something I wanted, that I needed, and I definitely shouldn’t feel wrong in pursuing it.
Catriona Innes is Commissioning Director at Cosmopolitan, you can follow her on Instagram
Catriona Innes is Cosmopolitan UK’s multiple award-winning Commissioning Editor, who has won BSME awards both for her longform investigative journalism as well as for leading the Cosmopolitan features department. Alongside commissioning and editing the features section, both online and in print, Catriona regularly writes her own hard-hitting investigations spending months researching some of the most pressing issues affecting young women today.
She has spent time undercover with specialist police forces, domestic abuse social workers and even Playboy Bunnies to create articles that take readers to the heart of the story. Catriona is also a published author, poet and volunteers with a number of organisations that directly help the homeless community of London. She’s often found challenging her weak ankles in towering heels through the streets of Soho. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.
