“It’s all just got such a… YouJizz vibe to it.”
This statement, from 31-year-old Flo, about what she likes (and really doesn’t like) about porn seemingly sums up how so many women feel about mainstream pornography. As, while we are in the midst of a sexual revolution — one where women’s sexual pleasure is finally having its moment on screen, in literature, and, most notably, in the sexual wellness and sex toy industries — there’s one key element missing: porn is still deemed a men’s domain. As per Ofcom’s 2024 Online Nation Report, in the month of May 2024 alone 13.8 million UK adults watched porn, but men made up 72% of that audience (that’s 10 million men, compared to 3.8 million women, FYI).
What can these statistics tell us about our sex lives? Some might look at them, and (wrongly) assume that women hate porn and just aren’t as sexual as men. But, in reality, they point to something entirely different: that many women do love porn — they’re just not necessarily into watching it. So what are they consuming instead? When we take porn offline, what’s produced? How sexy does it get, and what does it say about the future of our erotic lives?
The power of imagination
Open up any porn site in the UK and you’ll now be asked for ID. The UK’s recent age verification laws are having a huge impact on men’s pornography use, but, it seems, they aren’t having a big impact on women’s. Most of those I spoke to said it hadn’t changed anything for them, largely because the porn they consume (mostly audio and written erotica) hasn’t been affected by the new laws. Flo, for instance, says she’d go to a site like Pornhub “if [she] was in the mood to watch some absolute filth” but that she’d “feel guilty immediately after cumming” — and so, to get off without the side of guilt, since her early 20s she’s favoured indie directors, whose websites already required log-in, subscriptions, or pay-per-view pre-age verification.
As, despite men making up the vast majority of porn viewership, there are plenty of women-led porn companies — like Erika Lust, FrolicMe, Bellesa, and Four Chambers — who create inclusive, cinematic films with women and gender non-conforming people’s pleasure in mind, and have seen growing success in recent years.
But recently, Flo has found herself moving back to more print-based pornography and smutty novels. “Gillian Anderson’s Want awakened the part of me that used to love reading for my porn,” she says. “I’ve always had a taste for vintage porno mags, too, from the 1960s to 1980s, either straight mags for the male gaze like Playboy or queer, kink, and fetish mags. One of my formative memories was a charity shop women’s soft porn novel that I used to hide under my pillow and read every night.”
Much has been written about the erotica boom, which has taken off on TikTok via hashtags like SmutTok and SpicyTok, skyrocketed audio erotica apps like Quinn and Bloom into household names, and led to the sales of romance and saga fiction in the UK rising by 110% in just three years (between 2021 and 2023) and hitting record sales in 2024. Women under 35 make up more than half of this audience — and these aren’t your average love stories. At the heart of the boom are romantasy novels, in which love interests are more likely to be fairies, dragons, and vampires than heartthrob ‘Sex God’ teenage boys.
But beyond erotica flying off the shelves, another interesting thing is happening: more and more women seem to be getting into erotic magazines, vintage porno mags, and even archive porn videos. In the last few years, Feeld has launched a magazine, AFM, exploring desire, sexuality, and relationships; the 1995-founded Erotic Review, an erotic art magazine, has relaunched, now catering to a more diverse audience than its former iteration (heterosexual men); and, for better or worse, both Playboy and Loaded have returned, too. There’s also a host of other independent magazines that explore erotica, like Extra Extra, BUTT, Gooseberry, Sensored, and more. RamBooks, a London-based vintage porn shop, says their clientele is changing, with more and more young women coming in to buy their erotic wares. Sex in print, then, is seemingly back en vogue.
Of course, women have long been reading erotica — it’s just that they kept it a secret before. “Women have always been as interested in reading, talking, and hearing about sex, but it wasn’t seen as appropriate because women are supposed to be the more passive recipients of male lust,” says Lucy Roeber, the editor of the relaunched Erotic Review. “It’s all a load of rubbish really because ‘chick lit’ has been steamy as hell for decades, it’s just that it went undetected by the critics or open society because it was written by women for women and wasn’t seen as having literary value.”
While we’re sadly still a long way off from ‘chick lit’ and romantasy novels being respected for their literary value (and even further from audio or visual porn being deemed an art form), there’s no denying their cultural — and, if we’re being cynical, financial impact. It’s also a far cry from the stigma still attached to video pornography, particularly for women. “Women still struggle to admit that they watch porn (which they do), in the same way they struggled to admit that they masturbated a generation ago (which they did),” says Roeber.
But it’s not just shame putting women off video porn. Other women share Flo’s disdain for the kind of male gaze-y porn that’s dominated the internet since the advent of free tube sites in the mid-00s, and cite it as a reason they prefer less visual forms of erotica. 28-year-old Niamh* says she prefers audio porn because it’s more about “telling a story and setting a scene or fantasy” rather than having to watch “gross and aggressive men or scenes that are so obviously fake” in video porn.
28-year-old Lucy prefers erotic fiction because “it fuels off-script fantasies and complete immersion in a way video porn never does”. She adds: “There’s also no distractions in the form of seeing certain body types represented and feeding insecurities that I have because, no matter how the protagonist is described in a book, you can take some creative license yourself.” Plus, Lucy says she mainly goes for otherworldly erotica — aliens, monsters, fantastical figures — which, although it exists on Pornhub, isn’t exactly traditional porn viewing.
Meanwhile, 33-year-old Priya*, who’s a voracious reader of romantasy novels, is put off by the time it takes to find a porn video she actually finds sexy. “I can’t scroll through 20 videos of stepsister porn,” she says. “They all look like children, all the storylines are gross, and all the videos are labelled really grim things, like ‘teen’.”
When most of the women I speak to talk about porn, this is what they instantly imagine: free sites with unlimited videos, all with questionable titles. Of course, porn is so much more than this. Subscription sites like OnlyFans have democratised the industry, enabling sex workers to make their own content, connect directly with fans, and not be at the mercy of mainstream studios. And, as mentioned, there’s more feminist porn than ever, with diverse casts, intimacy coordinators on set, and scenes specifically filmed for the female gaze.
But old impressions die hard — and so, says Noelle Perdue, a writer, artist, and internet porn historian, audio and written erotica may be a more comfortable medium for women to explore their desires and sexuality through. “It’s also worth noting that audio and written erotica platforms are often specifically marketed towards women, unlike the majority of mainstream video porn sites,” she adds. “It’s not that women are necessarily turning away from video porn, but that erotica is capturing an audience of women who weren’t watching it in the first place.”
What about the growing interest in vintage porn films? “There’s still significant stigma around sex work, which pornography is unavoidably created out of, and I see a lot of negative misconceptions around what happens on set,” says Perdue. “The passage of time in this case, though, creates distance between the production and the product, which makes people feel more comfortable watching it. Many women I’ve talked to also report feeling more represented in vintage porn, as it didn’t have as much emphasis on body hair removal and body modification.” Ironically, she adds, ethics in porn production have improved exponentially since porn’s so-called ‘Golden Age’, between 1969 and 1984, and so watching, and specifically paying for, modern pornography is “a much better way to engage with it ethically”.
An erotic education
If women are more interested in, as Priya puts it, “porn that’s more like immersive theatre for your imagination”, what are they getting out of vintage pornos and erotic magazines that might be visual-led, don’t necessarily tell an erotic story, or, in the case of the latter, aren’t always intended to be a turn-on? The Erotic Review, for example, does publish erotic short stories, but it also boasts essays on everything from heteropessimism and sex in literature to gooning, poetry, art, and reviews. “There’s a new generation of people who are far more fluid, curious, and open around their desires and want a serious cultural space in which to read and consider and look at experiences beyond their own,” says Roeber. “It’s very important to us [at the Erotic Review] that we’re not coming from any particular gender, sexuality, or practice — we are exploring common humanity.”
On social media and beyond, more and more women are dissecting their dating and sex lives, unpacking good and bad experiences, and leaning on one another for advice and support. In short, we’re increasingly curious about our own desire, sexuality, and sexual expression — even when it’s coming out as frustration that men don’t seem to feel the same. The growing popularity of more ‘serious’ explorations of sex and eroticism makes sense against this backdrop; women aren’t just looking for alternative ways to get off, they’re hungry to learn about and experience their (and others’) sensuality in many forms, including through art.
This is also what seems to be drawing women to RamBooks, which, as well as selling vintage porn magazines, offers erotic art, fiction, and films. “Our community and clientele have definitely shifted from mostly male collectors [of vintage pornography] to a wider spectrum, including women and the LGBTQ+ community” says Kelsey Dykes, who helps run RamBooks. “Young women are getting more excited about finding the unknown for themselves, in a physical format — taking away a piece of history, finding something unseen, uncensored, and all around beautiful.” Dykes says the most popular purchases among young women are lesbian erotica, female wrestling, and female domination.
It helps that much of the content they’re absorbing is either made by women or situated in female-dominated spaces. “The shop is run by women, which is a huge comfort for everyone coming in,” continues Dykes. “We regularly get told by our customers how refreshing it is to have us working, in comparison to the few remaining shops of our nature to exist in Soho, which can be very intimidating and male-dominated. It’s about reclaiming what the patriarchy once took from us.”
Sex off screen
Alongside reduced stigma and more access to alternative forms of erotica, there’s also the obvious: that people are tiring of digital media and the fast pace of the internet (not to mention the inescapability of graphic content on our TLs, both pornographic and otherwise). Going into a shop or buying a magazine gives you agency over what you consume — and, as you’re typically paying for the experience, may encourage you to savour and appreciate it without distractions.
“More young women want a physical experience, and get more pleasure from finding [porn and erotica] themselves in our shop,” says Dykes. “By finding us and seeking out the material, whether it’s magazines or books, it creates conversations among customers, which is what it’s all about — finding a deeper, more intimate sense of self without having to spend hours on your phone mindlessly scrolling.”
It’s the same physical desire that’s made sex parties and IRL dating events so popular in recent years. In an essay for Cosmopolitan UK back in August, writer Jessica Key talked about this longing for connection, as she witnessed it in the UK’s last remaining porn cinema, the Empire Cinema Club in Huddersfield. “Seeing the men chatting, laughing, and joking afterwards, I get the impression that the space provides a social function as much as a sexual one,” she wrote. “To defend spaces like the Empire is to defend not just sexual expression, but also the right to gather; to be human in our longing.”
Whether porn cinemas or porno mags ever make a mainstream return, Perdue says it can only be a good thing that there’s “more curiosity, conversation, and openness towards porn and erotica, particularly among women”. She adds: “I hope that this curiosity can extend into people being willing to engage with the adult industry, supporting porn performers and studios who are working so hard to represent women and produce creative, ethical, and diverse films. Consumers have more power than they realise when it comes to influencing what kind of porn gets produced and promoted.”
But even if you don’t wile away the hours perusing new and old porn magazines, locking into an erotic story — whether you’re reading or listening to it — is still a way of pushing pause on the influx of information and images we’re being bombarded with at all times, and connecting with your desire and pleasure. Which, after all, is the best way to actually experience sensuality.
“It really feels like the idea that our erotic lives are separate to the rest of our lives and should be kept behind closed doors is shifting,” concludes Roeber. “And thank God for that.”
*Names have been changed
