# Ratio of pornography audience gender **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 30, 2005, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ratio-of-pornography-audience-gender/333413 "2005-11-30T18:09:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Dead\_Battery](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b38774/32.png) [@Dead\_Battery](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dead_Battery)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ratio-of-pornography-audience-gender/333413/1 "2005-11-30T18:09:44Z")
What is the ratio of porn produced for a male audience vs for female audience? It seems to me it would be heavily toward male, why is this so? ---
**Author:** ![Hello\_Again](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/85e7bf/32.png) [@Hello\_Again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hello_Again)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ratio-of-pornography-audience-gender/333413/2 "2005-11-30T18:24:53Z")
Depends how you define “porn.” The market for Romance novels containing extremely explicit and graphic descriptions of sex is nearly all women. “Erotic romance” is a category whose sales are… hehe… engorging rapidly. ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ratio-of-pornography-audience-gender/333413/3 "2005-11-30T18:56:30Z")
IANAAnthropologist but I have some life experience. In general, males are aroused by visual stimulation and women are aroused more by physical stimulation as well as other things that are not directly sexual (candy and flowers, to oversimplify). This probably has something to do with some evolutionary path that happened millions of years ago that led to how humans initiate the sex act. Men want sex, women want resources and security. To oversimplify. I have never read one of those romance novels, but I didn’t know they had “explicit and graphic” sex. I thought they were more subtle, stressing the “romance”–the hero literally sweeping the heroine off her feet and onto his galloping stallion, defending her honor, then maybe a few hot kisses. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ratio-of-pornography-audience-gender/333413/4 "2005-11-30T21:24:41Z")
Romance novels, at least as I recollect from thumbing through my mom’s as a pre-teen, can get pretty hardcore. There are lots of flowery phrases about “purple knights” and “love tunnels” but the overall picture is pretty clear. I think plenty of women enjoy pronography, but it will be hard to get a true picture until the societal idea that women should not display interest in sex falls away. ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ratio-of-pornography-audience-gender/333413/5 "2005-11-30T22:31:19Z")
> [@even sven](#): > > …until the societal idea that women should not display interest in sex falls away. Didn’t that fall away about 30 years ago? Any residual lack of interest in sex that women have now is inherent, not sociogenic. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ratio-of-pornography-audience-gender/333413/6 "2005-11-30T22:45:46Z")
> [@CurtC](#): > > Didn’t that fall away about 30 years ago? Any residual lack of interest in sex that women have now is inherent, not sociogenic. No, you still see it. For example, in a recent thread we had someone muse that a woman would be highly unlikely to sleep with someone they had just met in a bar-type setting. Several women piped up and said that wasn’t true. In other threads we’ve seen attitudes like nobody would ever _choose_ to be a prostitute/stripper/loose woman and the repeated myth that women have a lower sex drive than men (wholy a societal myth- in the Middle East the view is exactly opposite.) Heck, you’d be shocked how many women have never looked at their own genitals. While on the outside things seem a lot more equal, there is still alot of residual guilt/shame/whatever when it comes to women’s comfort with their own sexuality and sexual roles. ---
**Author:** ![Diceman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Diceman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diceman)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ratio-of-pornography-audience-gender/333413/7 "2005-11-30T23:23:01Z")
I can’t offer any cites, but I’ve heard it claimed that women make up a large fraction of the audience for gay (ie, male/male) porn. ---
**Author:** ![Hello\_Again](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/85e7bf/32.png) [@Hello\_Again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hello_Again)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2005, 2:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ratio-of-pornography-audience-gender/333413/8 "2005-12-02T02:56:57Z")
> [@CookingWithGas](#): > > I have never read one of those romance novels, but I didn’t know they had “explicit and graphic” sex. I thought they were more subtle, stressing the “romance”–the hero literally sweeping the heroine off her feet and onto his galloping stallion, defending her honor, then maybe a few hot kisses. That used to be the case back in the stone ages (like, the 70s, lol) but not anymore. It all changed with Kathleen Woodiwiss and her novel “The Flame and the Flower” – the first “bodice ripper” AKA rape-fantasy romance novel that included a euphamistic but quite explicit sex scene. This novel sold like crazy and literally turned the industry upside down. Perhaps you would like to read my [interview with Kathleen Woodiwiss](http://www.bordersstores.com/features/feature.jsp?file=woodiwiss), I used to be considered a quite important person in the romance novel world. Nowadays things are much, much steamier. There is even a line, called Brava Books (an imprint of Kensington Books) that specializes in extremely hot, graphic sex (and lots of it). It is interesting to consider that these books also have clever modern cover art, not cheesy “swept away” Fabio covers. One of their authors, Lori Foster, has a several books whose cover art makes erotic allusion to fruit. There are no people on the cover, just moist… [http://www.lorifoster.com/images/Bookcovers/tmtaarpcover.jpg](http://www.lorifoster.com/images/Bookcovers/tmtaarpcover.jpg)]peaches. Nothing you’d be embarassed to read on the subway. They are printed in “trade paperback” format and cost about $14. Which tells yout that not only do women want supersexy books, they pay quite a bit extra to get them vs traditional Harlequin at $4 per or traditional novel-length at $7 per.