There was a thread on IC today where someone asked why, after decades of Feminism, depictions of bondage in the mainstream market and elsewhere are still predominantly of women. Many people came up with excellent arguments as to whether this is the case, and if so, why it is. It got me thinking.

Amongst other things, Mistress Tytania wrote:

Most porn is run and managed by men. Most women in porn haven’t much say in the end product, of what kind of eroticism is represented and sold to the horny masses. While I’m all for porn as an important part of human expression, I have serious problems about the bullying often behind the sex industry, and the way it tends to prey on the vulnerable into its ranks. Many, many women in porn would much rather do anything else (if it paid so well), and when asked, have a lot of hang ups about sexual shame.

I agree wholeheartedly, though the internet is changing the industry. Over the past few years, I’ve met an increasing number of women who produce and sell quality porn online, especially within the Femdom genre, in a way that values and empowers the models involved. In the past, exploitation of women in porn was rife, and in far too many cases it still is, but I think that things in the industry are changing for the better.

The internet has proved that porn’s end-user demographic is no longer a heterosexual male who likes to see brainless big-titted bimbos, but something far more diverse and complex. Mainstream producers no longer have the monopoly, and so we now have the choice to purchase fair-trade wank fodder.

The majority of porn produced by either gender does feature women, in both dominant and submissive situations, but – and this is by no means an objective viewpoint, just my own opinion – they are much nicer to look at. Whether all bound up, or doing the binding, women are aesthetically pleasing. Men can be beautiful too, of course, but the market is driven by consumer demand, and more people who buy porn seem to like looking at ladies than looking at gents, and so there are more images out there of women, just as there always has been.

The thing is, the men are out there to see in all their glory too. The internet has given us the choice to see images that would have been too “niche” for financially viable publishing twenty years ago, and so ultimately there’s more variety now than there has ever been. Cyberspace is still young but, both for better and for worse, it’s changed the face of porn more in the past decade than anything else since the invention of the printing press. I suppose we should just wait and see what happens next.