I work part time in a video store, and we have a small “adult room” in the back. Putting movies away tonight, it occurred to me: I know who the target audience of most of the porn categories are, but I have no idea who the transexual porn is supposed to attract. Is that stuff aimed primarily at men, women, heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals? Other transexuals? Or is it just a fetish that attracts evenly among genders and sexual orientations?
(I should note that I might be wrong in my terminology; I’m talking about porn that features – pardon the term – “chicks with dicks;” women with male genitalia.)
It attracts all manner of people- no particular gender or orientation has the monopoly attraction to transsexuals, though it seems pretty popular with straight/questioning men/closeted men. I dated a transsexual individual briefly and since then I’ve indulged in said porn now and then.
In general (i.e. outside the realm of porn), we would describe a relationship between a nontrans man and a trans woman as heterosexual, respecting the gender identity of both.
Since you refer in particular to trans women who don’t have genital surgery and therefore have penises, people have been known to question the sexual orientation of men attracted to them. I think that’s kind of futile, myself - they’re going to watch what they’re going to watch. As for the question of a fetish, many trans people object to the fetishization of trans women in porn.
If you want to shift perspective, I recently read an article about a trans man without genital surgery who has a line of porn.
Hmm, so we have two conflicting views in this thread – that heterosexual men are mostly into transexual porn, and that questioning/closeted men are into it.
In the video store I work at, it’s right below the gay male stuff, between the lesbian stuff and the bondage stuff. Then again, we’ve never rented any of it, at least not that I’ve noticed while I’ve been on shift (then again, I only work a few hours a week there nowadays, so it might not be the best sample). Maybe we’d move more of it if we put it by the straight male stuff…
Those actually aren’t that conflicting. What you watch in porn isn’t necessarily connected to real-life orientation-- I like watching movies with car chases, but I don’t drive very fast in real life!
For the most part, I think most guys would consider themselves straight if they had only ever asked out, and dated, women in the past, and never really considered wanting to date a guy or have sex with one (and part of this can be inexperience in asking a guy out, or embarrassment, or not wanting sex outside of a relationship). And despite all that, those straight guys might occasionally want to see somebody else’s penis in their porn. Out of the hundreds to thousands of hours of porn some guys will see in their lifetimes, a dozen or two hours of a girl with a penis isn’t even statistically significant.
Straight doesn’t have to mean “never thinks about a single masculine feature.” All it means is “doesn’t like guy parts enough to date guys.”