women watch porn: Oprah puts me on CNN

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I woke up this morning to pretty much scream like a girl with excitement to see my article for Oprah go live on CNN. Here’s Are more women OK with watching porn? — by me. (Violet Blue on CNN for Oprah — Oprah putting the “O” in my OMFG yet again!) Snip:

Personally, I like my pizza deliveryman to do one thing: bring me my dinner. But mention this guy to a group of women, and, while most of us will think of cheesy pies with tomato sauce, a good number of us will conjure up that hilariously bad porn cliché, the randy fellow who’s always ready to accept sex in exchange for a medium sausage and mushroom.

Notwithstanding how lame the cliché is, or how simply bad most porn is (and after ten years as a professional reviewer of the stuff, I can report that much of it is very bad), the fact is, millions of women use and enjoy “explicit sexual imagery.”

What’s perhaps more surprising, given the latest scientific research, is that more of us don’t.

In the first three months of 2007, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, approximately one in three visitors to adult entertainment Web sites was female; during the same period, nearly 13 million American women were checking out porn online at least once each month.

Theresa Flynt, vice president of marketing for Hustler video, says that women account for 56 percent of business at her company’s video stores. “And the female audience is increasing,” she adds. “Women are buying more porn.” (They’re creating more of it, too: Female director Candida Royalle’s hard-core erotic videos, made expressly for women viewers, sell at the rate of approximately 10,000 copies a month.)

Meanwhile, science is finally buying into the idea that women are at least as stimulated by porn as men. (…read more, cnn.com)

Updates 07.29.09: The article got put on the front page of CNN monday, after being #5 most read friday. Check out the almost 20,000 views and over 100 comments this article’s post got on Jezebel! Revel in the conservative blogs calling me and Nielsen/NetRatings liars! Win.

Violet Blue

The London Times named Violet Blue "One of the 40 bloggers who really count" and Self Magazine named TinyNibbles one of the “Best Sex Resources for Women.” Blue is an autodidact and pundit on sex and technology, hacking and security, porn for women, privacy and bleeding-edge tech culture. She is a journalist for ZDNet, CBS News, CNET; she's an educator, speaker, crisis counselor, volunteer NGO trainer, and the author and editor of over 40 award-winning books.

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