FEATURES

Women on Porn

Dr Fiona Vera-Gray wants to know what turns you on. With her groundbreaking project Women on Porn, she’s challenging the tumbleweed silence around women’s use of online pornography, and kick-starting a more open conversation about our sexual lives.

Where academic and media debates often break down into rigid pro or anti-porn stances, Dr Fiona Vera-Gray is illuminating the complicated grey area in between—a space she empirically knows exists, but is rarely, if ever, aired in public. “There’s a massive desire to not even go there, for fear of being judged for what you find sexually arousing,” she says.

“There’s just very little room for someone to say—which a lot of women have in this project—‘I find some things arousing that actually I find very problematic too’.”

Wherever we stand, little can be achieved until we start talking. In the course of the interviews, Fiona’s also been asking broader questions, including how sexually free her subjects think women are in 2017. “What many have said is that they think women are free to be sexual, free to do whatever they want—but they’re not free to talk about it,” she says.

“Because then you get pushed into this virgin/ whore dynamic: either you’re frigid, or you’re doing it too much. The ownership of your sexual self doesn’t mean, ‘I want sex all the time and I watch loads of porn.’ Ownership of your sexual self can be, ‘There’s only particular type of sex I like to have.’ It’s about women being able to have that space to think about their own desires in their hopefully happy, healthy, exciting, explorative sex lives.”

 To read the full Women on Porn feature order your copy of issue #8 here.

All artwork by Kalen Hollomon.