Backstory:
lefaym pointed me to
this. It reminded me of all the headdesking I did while reading a bunch of crap articles on slash for a stupid assignment I did last year. This resulted.
Disclaimer: I wouldn't actually argue that slash and mainstream pr0n are equivalent in the slightest, FWIW. But hell, most articles about slash are totally inaccurate, so... yeah. I invoke
ROF.
Introducing "lesbian porn" - a new erotic craze, led by men!
"Blonde girl puts her mouth on brunette girl's left breast. Brunette girl moans in slightly cold and bored-sounding way. Both remove their underwear, and then brunette girl places one of her long acrylic fingernails inside blonde girl's vagina. Blonde girl grunts."
Sounds strange? Welcome to the world of lesbian porn, a parallel universe of erotica where airbrushed, dead-eyed women pretend to have sex with each other in a variety of awkward positions, with none of the elbows-in-the-face of real sex. Almost all lesbian porn features women together (the "lesbian" part comes from an old Greek word meaning "lesbian"). It's hot, it's exciting, and - perhaps most strangely - lesbian porn is produced and watched exclusively by... straight men.
Jodrell Bank
It all began back in the 1970s, when a new generation of men began producing "jazz mags", featuring pictures of women wearing few or no clothes. Most of these images were of women alone, but a handful featured two women in the same shot - and so lesbian porn was born. In the 1990s, the dawn of the internet led to many men discovering a new way of logging on - and getting off!
It seems crazy, but estimates say hundreds - perhaps even thousands - of men look at lesbian porn. One website hosting it, moist-teen-cheerleaders.com, might get fifty or a hundred hits a week, and this number is growing as lesbian porn increases in popularity.
Entering "lesbian porn" into any search engine only proves exactly how popular this bizarre fetish is becoming - and the variety of jizz resources out there. A lesbian porn film might feature "sexing" between, for instance, two blonde women, two brunette women, or even a blonde and a brunette.
You fap, you lose
So who are the men consuming lesbian porn?
Dave, 36, is a network administrator from Croydon. Until he mentions his lesbian obsession, he seems like a perfectly normal, well-educated, middle-class guy.
"I don't know what it is about lesbian porn that appeals to me," he admits. "The fact that it's two women together... there's just something hot about it!"
Another fan, who didn't want to give his name, had this to say: "It's not just about the sex. It's about the emotion too - there's something about two bored women pretending to enjoy themselves that is very intriguing. Really good lesbian porn makes you feel sexy all over, not just in your wang and nutsack."
But why lesbian porn?
Massaging Colin
Steve is 23 and the assistant manager of a hardware store. He admits that he masturbates to lesbian porn, but says he doesn't put himself in the shoes of the characters on the screen. "Some people say watching lesbian porn is because you fancy the women, but don't want to see penises getting in the way," he says. "That oversimplifies things, in my opinion. There is certainly something exciting about seeing two hot women together - twice as many breasts! - but ultimately it's about the total lack of an emotional connection, the fact that you don't know anything about the girls' personalities or how they came to be lying on a leopard-print bed together, wearing schoolgirl outfits even though they are both over school-leaving age."
Strangely, none of these men exist in a vacuum - while some are content to merely consume lesbian porn, others are actively involved in collecting it, or exchanging it with friends. Some men even watch it in groups: Dave admits that "lads' nights" sometimes involve sitting together to watch it. All the men find this arousing, but curiously none of them seem to find this in any way problematic or gay or nothing.
Holding on to what you've got
Of course, the most significant thing about lesbian porn is that it's nothing more than a fantasy. Professor Rosie Palmer, a sex specialist at UCL, points out that the sex portrayed in most lesbian porn is unrealistic and would be difficult to achieve in real life: lubrication is rarely used, the women's nails are often long and sharp, and few women actually wear those sorts of shoes, especially on water beds. But what does she think about men's interest in the topic?
"If I'm honest," Professor Palmer confesses, "I don't understand why any man would want to watch lesbian porn. In my extensive career as a psychologist, I've very rarely encountered anything that would suggest there's an advantage - evolutionarily, socially, in terms of game theory - to harbouring an interest in this type of thing. And, quite frankly," she adds, "it's bizarre to think that any man would take pleasure from watching two women together when he could be - for example - being humiliated at work by his sadistic boss, being comforted by the man who is simultaneously his professional partner and best friend, and eventually allowing that man to heal his pain through oral sex. And letting me watch."
Professor Palmer's argument is admittedly very difficult to disagree with. But if Steve, Dave, and all the other men who log on to lesbianvampirefillers.com are correct, lesbian porn could be here to stay.