From 2018... Women’s Pornography. In Pornographies: Critical Positions

Attwood, F. ‘Women’s Pornography’. In Katherine Harrison and Cassandra A. Ogden (Editors) Pornographies: Critical Positions, 2018. ISBN 978-1-908258-32-8. Chester: University of Chester Press. https://www.academia.edu/31463313

Pornography has often been presented as a form of violence against women or an expression of patriarchy, and more recently, as the source of the sexualization of mainstream culture with significant negative impacts on women. At the same time the development of feminist porn studies (see for example, Penley et al., 2013; Maina, 2014) and ‘The ‘Fifty Shades phenomenon’ in which EL James’ book trilogy (2011-2013) became a worldwide bestseller, followed by a widely publicized film (2015), has made women more visible than ever as producers and consumers of pornography.

In this chapter I provide an introduction and brief overview of some of the developments in pornographies that are produced and consumed by women. This is necessarily highly partial given both the timescale I am interested in (1970s to the present day), the wide range of pornographies and other varieties of sexually explicit material that are available, and the relative scarcity of academic work on the production, content and reception of pornographies for women. My aim here is to introduce some of the key contributions to academic literature in the area, chart some of the most well-known areas of production and consumption during the period, and consider three key themes - characterizing women’s porn, authenticity, and participation.

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Porn comics have also been a popular site for women’s pornography. Little academic attention has been paid to Anglophone porn comics for women produced within the US market (Roberts, 2015) but the development of a Japanese tradition has been quite widely researched. Originating in shojo-manga (girls comics), originally dominated by male mangaka, shonen-ai– a genre of male-male romance was developed by female mangaka during the 1970s, focusing on intense, eroticized relationships between bishonen or ‘beautiful boys’ (Madill, forthcoming; see also McLelland, 2000; Levi, McHarry and Pagliassotti, 2010; Nagaike and Suganuma, 2013). A related genre - ‘ladies comics’ (see Shamoon, 2004, p. 82) - portrayed ‘real (or at least realistic) women actively pursuing their own sexual pleasure’ and ‘taking the initiative in sexual experimentation’ (Shamoon, 2004, p. 79; see also Jones, 2005), the comic format allowing for the portrayal of female pleasure and orgasm in a way that is not possible on film. Whereas ladies comics virtually excluded the male body, putting the female body on display (2004, p. 83) - as Anglophone comics for women have also tended to do (Roberts, 2015) - boys’ love manga focused on men’s bodies and sex between men.

Based on the shonen-ai of the 1970s a wider range of Boys’ Love (BL) media, often focusing on uke (‘bottom’) and seme (‘top’) pairings (see Sihombing, 2011), featuring a range of sexual themes including rape, non-consensual sex, BDSM, incest, and underage sex, with a mainly female fan-base and mostly created by women (Mizoguchi, 2003), has gained increasingly wide circulation. Through the mid- to late-1990s Boys’ Love (often called yaoi outside Japan and with a corresponding genre in China called ‘danmei’, see Chao, forthcoming) developed a global market and transnational fandom (Nagaike & Suganuma, 2013; Wood, 2006; Wood, 2013), becoming the site of many amateur online productions.

A focus on men’s bodies has continued to be a popular one for many female consumers of porn. As Alexandra Hambleton (forthcoming) notes, the female-friendly porn films produced by Silk Labo draw on aspects of popular Japanese media culture such as tv dramas with their focus on ‘stressed career women, lonely women who have given up on men, university students looking for love, young couples dating in fashionable or exotic locations’ and J pop ‘idols’ who provide the style template for Silk Labo’s ‘eromen’ performers. Lucy Neville (in press) suggests that women’s pleasures in m/m (male/male) porn are partly explained by the lack of pressure to identify with any of the performers. Participants in her research reported feeling less anxious about the enjoyment of watching male performers, and appreciating what they viewed as the better production values and acting, more experimental and interesting performances, and wider range of body types in m/m porn.