Expanding female market for porn video
Ladies who like it. Michelle Quinn looks at the growing female market for adult video.
Thanks to the Internet, mail-order video and DVD rental outlets, plus a general shift in sexual mores, a small but growing number of women are turning up the heat in their sex lives by turning to erotica and pornography.
Adult video and toy stores are catering to women with clean, well-lighted places to peruse sexual material and products geared for their enjoyment. Books such as "The Ultimate Guide to Adult Videos," to be released in October by Cleis Press, are aimed at pornography neophytes, especially women, says Chris Fox, publicity coordinator at Cleis. "People don't think of women as porn consumers."
And why should they? For many, women buying and watching pornography is still taboo and explodes myths about women's sexuality: that women aren't visually stimulated. That women prefer bodice-ripper romance novels to explicit videos and pornographic photos. That women feel it's immoral or anti-feminist to buy and watch pornography.
Psychologists, sex researchers and those who sell pornography say women's interest in pornography has been spurred by changes in contemporary culture, from the privacy afforded by the Internet to the trendiness of sex in TV's "Sex and the City" and other mainstream entertainment.
