...the fact is, millions of women use and enjoy "explicit sexual imagery."
What's perhaps more surprising, given the latest scientific research, is that more of us don't.
In the first three months of 2007, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, approximately one in three visitors to adult entertainment Web sites was female; during the same period, nearly 13 million American women were checking out porn online at least once each month.
Theresa Flynt, vice president of marketing for Hustler video, says that women account for 56 percent of business at her company's video stores. "And the female audience is increasing," she adds. "Women are buying more porn." (They're creating more of it, too: Female director Candida Royalle's hard-core erotic videos, made expressly for women viewers, sell at the rate of approximately 10,000 copies a month.)
Meanwhile, science is finally buying into the idea that women are at least as stimulated by porn as men.
In a 2006 study at McGill University, researchers monitored genital temperature changes to measure sexual arousal and found that, when shown porn clips, men and women alike began displaying arousal within 30 seconds; men reached maximum arousal in about 11 minutes, women in about 12 (a statistically negligible difference, according to the study).
Even more compelling were the results of a 2004 study at Northwestern University that also assessed the effect of porn on genital arousal. Mind you, a copy of "Buffy the Vampire Layer" and a lubed-up feedback device isn't most girls' idea of a hot night in. But when the researchers showed gay, lesbian, and straight porn to heterosexual and homosexual women and men, they found that while the men responded more intensely to porn that mirrored their particular gender orientation, the women tended to like it all. Or at least their bodies did.
[For the full article, see here.]
It might seem strange to some of you that a Christian would be writing anything about porn, save to blindly and blankly condemn its existence.
Actually, porn can serve very vital functions! (I remember reading many years ago that the definition of a pornographic book is a book that you read with one hand.) Indeed, as this article points out, many women also enjoy porn which was hitherto blindly thought by many to be largely within the province of men to enjoy.
Porn can give one new ideas regarding sexual expression with one's partner; it can stimulate a couple to engage in sexual activity during or after watching it; it can be sexually pleasurable by the mere watching of it for pleasure's sake; it can help defuse one's pent up sexual energy with or without culminating in orgasm.
Interestingly, there is one significant aspect of most porn that this cited article ceases to point out: in most porn flicks sex is seen as a largely mechanical enterprise devoid of emotional feeling, attachment, or commitment to another person!
This separation of "sex" from "emotional attachment or commitment" in most pornography is a fact that can be very instructive.
That is not to say that porn is necessarily "bad" or "dangerous," but it is to say that most porn as currently exists must be seen as being restricted to sexuality in and of itself, rather than it usually including emotional attachment or commitment.
As with Straight people, many Gay people separate sexuality from emotional attachment or commitment, as does most porn. Yet, what makes us "Gay" or "Straight" is not restricted to our "sexual preference" as those labels encompass our "emotional preference" as well.
And it's that combination of sexual preference or orientation with our emotional preference or orientation that determines what box we choose (and others choose) to place us.
There is such a phenomenon as sexual attraction without emotional attraction, and vice versa, and it is this very discordance that helps make sexuality such a complex matter.
Most homophobes seem to define "Gay" in merely sexual terms, whereas "Gay" like "Straight" must be seen in the combination of emotional and sexual components in one's very being.
Unfortunately, some Straight and Gay people identify themselves as "Straight" or "Gay" because of their sexual preference or orientation, even if that preference or orientation is not in line with their emotional preference or orientation. Hence, some people (And I'm not referring to Bisexuals, who can emotionally and sexually relate to both sexes.) who identify themselves as "Straight" or "Gay" may questionably do so because of the former orientation even if they lack the latter orientation.
Hence, some of the complexity of sexuality, and the difficulty, if not downright error, of placing people in nice, neat boxes or categories, when the realities of sexuality are so much more multifaceted and complex.
It is largely because of this complexity that some self-identified "Straight" people occasionally seek out furtive sexual activity with people of their own sex; some "Gay" people occasionally seek out sexual activity with people of the opposite sex, sometimes to the point of them even marrying a member of the opposite sex. (This latter phenomenon is, of course, largely aided and abetted by the culture's emphasis on heteronormativity.)
Also, the above cited article is suggestive that some self-identified Straight people (most likely women) may occasionally have same-sex sexual fantasies to stimulate them into having sexual relations with a person of the opposite sex to whom they have an emotional attraction; some self-identified Gay people (most likely women) may occasionally have opposite-sex sexual fantasies when engaging in sexual relations with a person of the same sex to whom they have an emotional attraction.
This phenomenon may well also affect some men and, therefore, given these complexities, a Ted Haggard or a Larry Craig can and may honestly feel that he is "Straight" when he engages in same-sex relations; many self-identified Straight people can be rabidly homophobic because there is a part of them that is "Gay" and they unconsciously and/or consciously repress and/or suppress that part of themselves by verbally and/or even physically attacking Gay people in order to relieve their own sexual insecurities and anxieties.
It may be that the nature of pornography can be seen to stimulate a great field for analysis of some of the complexities of sexuality, and that the nice, neat boxes in which we seek to place ourselves and others are in many cases designed to make us feel more comfortable, but may well be useless, if not downright dangerous, constructs.
And much homophobia can be attributed to both the complexity of sexuality, to the need for social acceptance, and to the futile quest for certainty in life by those who can't tolerate ambiguity in life and in their own psyches.
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