It’s one of the most persistent tropes there is: men like
(disgusting, crude, blatant) porn while women like (softer, classier, more
intelligent) erotica. Like most tropes, it’s mainly adhered to by people who
don’t know an awful lot about either. It also props up another basic and
unhelpful myth – that women want love and men want sex. While there are people
more interested in one than the other – and a percentage of people with little
or no interest in either – women can be driven by lust, keen to experiment with
multiple partners, toys, roleplay and fetishwear and men can be romantic
purists, interested only in the naked body of the beloved.
Sometimes, the boundaries get properly blurred, at least for
a while – in the early 90s there was a small explosion in the provision of porn
aimed at women. First came the magazines: Ludus, For Women, Women Only, Women
On Top, Bite! And, running along in a panic and a little bit late to the
parade, a UK relaunch of Playgirl, then the launch of Black Lace in 1993: a
fiction imprint loudly and proudly touted as By Women For Women. Around the
same time other publishers were busy launching or expanding erotica imprints
that were not just female-friendly ‘Mills & Bonk’ as they were sometimes called
– X Libris, Chimera and Nexus all provided homes for the work of a wide range
of authors.
At present, even though it seems like the mighty wave of
Mary-Sue-ish ‘virgin and billionaire’ cut-and-paste Erotic Romance is peaking
and about to drown the whole genre, there is still interesting stuff going on
if you know where to look for it, and it doesn’t divide strictly along gender
lines. Authors like Peter Birch, Slave Nano and Charlie J Forrest produce
interestingly filthy, but also well-written and empathetic works of fiction,
and there is also a growing movement of
feminist porn, and female porn producers exemplified by the likes of Pandora Blake.
As with everything else, it doesn’t have to be Different For
Girls.
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