The guy can get through a scene with a few barely audible grunts, or not even that, but the woman has to moan or even scream the whole time. Why is that?
Marketing. It is what the producers expect the guys (the main audience) want to hear.
It is all acting, you know – the girls are told to be loud and moan a lot.
Because most consumers of porn don’t want to hear the men.
OK, then. The test of this theory would be gay porn. Are the men in gay porn moaners and screamers? Or do they emulate their straight-porn counterparts?
You can tell if a man is aroused because he is erect. You can’t tell when a woman is aroused as easily. One major cue is auditory.
Women who are being loud or who say how good it feels or writhe in ecstasy are signaling that the sex is great rather than mechanical. It’s what the audience wants to think they do for a woman. Porn sex isn’t about sex. It’s about the camera and viewer.
True for all movies, but porn strips the point bare, so to speak.
ETA: Gay sex porn wouldn’t emulate straight sex porn. It would emulate whatever gay men think is the optimal response in the real world. That might be sound or it might be other cues.
Pure WAGs:
Because you can see the men orgasming, but you have to hear the women orgasming?
Because focus is on the women, and the men are often just anonymous “stunt cocks”?
Because women are noisier than men in real life? (And if that’s so, I could WAG that it’s because women are more verbally expressive than men? or that women learn to show their partners that they’re doing something right by moaning, shouting, etc.?)
No, there’s not a whole lot of screaming in ecstasy in gay porn. Just close ups of cum shots (of course, they pull out before shooting their load.)
I will say however that one of my past b.f.'s used to howl in ecstasy when he shot.
Straight guys watching porn of course don’t care about the man - he’s just a stand-in for the viewer (who’s fantasizing about being in his place and fucking the girl), so as much screen-time as possible is lavished on her. The man in the video has to be as nondescript as possible. The girl likely is directed to make as much noise as possible, to emphasize how much the man (i.e. the viewer) has pleasured her.
My question is…in real life, do women tend to cry out like that while having an orgasm? I haven’t had much experience with straight sex, but I always imagined that the screaming was more of a film convention.
I know somebody’s going to link to this, so it may as well be me!
I’ve been known to scream.
A lot. ;);)
It’s exaggerated for porn, but yeah, women are louder than men as a rule, as anyone who’s lived in college dorms or apartment’s with less-than-optimal walls can attest. It’s not so much screaming, but a woman enjoying herself is often quite vocal.
What you don’t get in real life that you do get in porn is the specificity of language. Porn actresses give a breathless recap of what the feller is doing and how much they approve, whereas women in real life tend more toward invoking the divine in disyllabic measures. The exception to this is if you’re doing something wrong; this leads to full restoration of verbal self-expression–if you’re lucky. Otherwise, she suffers in silence or fakes it, which is bad.
Ergo, the rule of thumb is thus:
If you’re doing it right, you’ll hear moans or repetitive brief supplications to a higher power.
If you’re doing it wrong, you’ll hear VERY specifically how you are doing it wrong, or stony silence. If it sounds like porn, she’s faking.
My girlfriend is a screamer. Two girlfriends before her were, too.
It took a little getting used to after being married to someone whose most emphatic comment during sex tended to be “ow.”
Unless they were faking it for my benefit (which is a possibility), yes.
I’ve only had sex with one woman. Once, she screamed. It was a surprise, to say the least.
All the guys I’ve been with have been fairly quiet, except for one. Jesus Christ, he would not shut up. Just moaning and gasping and whimpering. It wasn’t even words. It was just horny little animal sounds and they were all an octave or so higher than his speaking voice. The fact that I was able to continue performing through that is a miracle.
After that, I am really glad that most gay porn isn’t usually that vocal.
Darn, I’ve always felt the reverse. And all these years I thought I was normal.
I think men tend to be quieter from years of silent masturbation 
My wife does, but she is so worried about disturbing the neighbors that she does it into a pillow.
They have to moan loudly to be heard over the buzz of the vibrator(s).
*My *question is, if women are louder (and in my experience, we are), is it because we’re naturally louder, because we hear women in porn being loud and decide that’s how men want us to be, or because we get better results from men when we’re more vocal?
As a vocal woman, I have no idea, myself.
I’ve lived in lots of apartments with thin walls, never have i heard a man while having sex but i have heard tons of women.
For a guy sex is like being on stage preforming. When on stage, the more applause you get the better you think you are doing. With sex the more noise the lady makes, the better the job we think we are doing.
Obviously your partners think they are sexual gods.
For the same reason little girls screech. I actually had a couple of little girls living above me and I would hear them. I thought they were being hit or abused. One day I got up and walked up a flight, and there they were running in and out of the door, happy as can be, just screeching.
I wasn’t mad as much as jealous, I can’t remember a time I was that happy that I had to run around screeching about it. 
Noisy men is one reason I really dislike “gonzo” porn, as well as its variants that involve a guy (or guys) picking up/bringing in random girls and having their way with them. In these genres, despite being “straight” porn, it’s the guys driving all the action while the girls are basically just random chicks looking to make a quick and easy hundred bucks (or whatever they get paid) not professional porn “actresses”. These girls don’t really know how to “fake it”, so the guys have to do it. And they don’t do it nearly as well.
And really, it’s just painful listening to some guy going “Uuuuhhh… uh… uuugn… aaaaaaah…” while he’s getting blown. And since he’s so often also holding the camera, his noises are all you can hear. It really works a lot better if the men stick to using actual words, and leave the “moaning” to the women.