Why So Many Straight Women Watch Lesbian Porn

Over the years, Karen, 35, has established exactly what she likes when it comes to online porn. Three or four times a week, she goes in search of new videos in some of her favorite categories — Big breast play. Squirting. Lesbian. When she spoke to The Huffington Post, Karen had recently watched a video that hit all of her sweet spots: two women who didn’t have “perky, fake boobs,” but instead looked real, like they could be moms. They were in bed, kissing and fondling each other.

“It was nice,” said Karen. “Sensual.”

“I gravitate to what gets me going quicker,” she continued, “which is girl-on-girl.”

But Karen is straight.

There is little good data on how many self-identified straight women regularly watch woman-on-woman porn, but what evidence is available suggests Karen is hardly alone. A 2014 report from the free porn site Pornhub in collaboration with Buzzfeed, for example, revealed that “lesbian” was far and away the top viewed category among its female users, as well as the top search term — and women were 445 percent more likely than men to search for “girl on girl.” Though the survey relied on Google analytic demographic stats and therefore did not capture users’ sexual orientation, the overwhelming popularity of those terms hints at a lot of straight women getting off on same-sex porn. So does the marked uptick in searches for “lesbian seduces straight girl,” which increased by 328 percent between 2013 and 2014, according to PornHub’s internal data.

And sex experts agree.

“The statistic thrown around now is that 1 in 3 adult users of porn are female,” sex therapist Kimberly Resnick Anderson told The Huffington Post. “Though there is no way to say what percentage of that 1 in 3 are straight women looking for lesbian porn, the numbers are too high for it to be just gay women. Straight women are looking at lesbian porn.”

The industry appears to be taking notice. PornHub estimates that 7 percent of its videos are in the lesbian category, making it the site’s most popular category overall, Corey Price, the site’s vice president explained in an e-mail to The Huffington Post.

“While we don’t want to speculate on how this interest [from straight women] has changed and shaped the industry,” Price wrote, “we have noticed our content partners have been uploading more lesbian content than ever before.”

For many women, same-sex porn provides an opportunity to imagine what it might be like to be with another woman, even if they consider themselves on the strictly heterosexual end of the Kinsey scale. For them, lesbian pornography — which for purposes of this article simply refers to porn starring two or more women, not porn that is necessarily geared toward lesbian or bisexual women or even features actors who identify as queer themselves — is purely a fantasy, not a desire they want to act on.

“There’s this disinhibiting factor of the Internet,” Resnick Anderson explained. “People feel so free to explore things they would not necessarily want to do in real life, but that might be compelling to look at or learn from.”

Vickie, 46, says that’s the case for her. She has never been intimate with a woman in real life, nor has she ever given it much thought, though she considers lesbian porn her “get-off choice” and watches it three or four times a month, often with her husband. She has a clear physical type she seeks out — women with thin or medium bodies and long hair. “I like fingernails,” she said.

But Vickie has never encountered a woman in real life for whom she has felt any kind of sexual attraction.

“Lesbian porn is just much more fantasy-based,” she said.

For other women, the appeal of lesbian porn is a little bit more complicated, allowing them to express a part of their sexual identity that would otherwise remain locked. Karen, for example, has questioned her own sexuality at various points in her life, particularly in her early 20s. She now identifies as straight, but says she would be open to experimenting with women in real life — if she weren’t too timid. Same-sex porn helps her virtually scratch that itch.

“I’ve never experimented, but I think about it,” Karen said. “I think I’m so nervous and shy when it comes to that, I’d probably never follow-through.”

This article was originally written by Catherine Pearson and appeared on Medium on July 10, 2015. You can read the rest of the article on Medium.