CARNAL NATION

When it comes to porn, I have always been of the opinion that I would rather be doing it than watching it. Besides, the few porn films I had seen up to now never really turned me on.

Perhaps though, the fact that I didn’t really enjoy porn films or find them a turn-on had more to do with the situations in which I watched them than the films themselves. The first one I saw was actually Deep Throat, but for that I was in a cinema surrounded by Irish people. Another time, an asshole I was seeing and his asshole friend turned on some porn in an attempt to turn me on so that I would have a threesome with them. However, I did not want to have one, and the whole episode was more distressing and uncomfortable than sexual. On another occasion, some porn television channel was on in the background as I had lunch at a friend’s house, surrounded by people I didn’t really know.

So, when I heard about Shespot, an erotic website geared towards women and turning us on, I had to find out more. What turns us on? Is there a difference between what turns men on and what gets women all wet? If so, what is it?

“There is a difference,” says Liesbet Zikkenheimer, who began the site in 2001. “Well, the easiest thing to say is what doesn’t turn women on. Then you are looking at the porn movies in which they treat women just like stuff, like things, where you really get the feeling that the woman is acting—eeh, eeh, eeh [fake orgasm noises]. Then you get, of course, terrible things like tearing the women’s hair, spritzing in their faces, really using women.

“That belongs to the fantasies of men, and I understand. I don’t think it’s wrong to make stuff for men. But our fantasies are different. I don’t think women want to use men. What women find really important is that they have the feeling that the two people they are watching have real passion for each other. That it is not fake. That you see and understand and feel why they want to do it. It is not necessary to get the whole story from the beginning, that they didn’t know each other, and then they met, etc.—but when two people see each other, you have to understand that yes, they want to have sex.”

Liesbet adds that fantasies, including BDSM and rape scenes, can also turn many women on but still, in general, we prefer to see that both people are consenting and enjoying themselves.

When she began the site, Liesbet says: “I started rather softly. I thought, this must not be porn, just soft and really romantic stuff. But women came to me and said, you must also be hard and have BDSM—we want it! So, [I realized that the site] must be very diverse. It must be sweet for women who are just starting in the development of their own sexuality, but it must also provide something for women who have a lot of experience and now want to make their first step into BDSM. So there must be, for all kinds of women, something on the site.”

So, in an attempt to become a more informed person, and perhaps grow as a sexual being and add porn into my sex life, I turned to Candida Royalle, the original queen of female-focused porn. Watching one of her films, I felt a little turned on, once I got past the ’80s clothes and hairstyles. I liked the sex scenes, which showed the entire bodies of the actors as they were having sex and did not just zoom in on their genitals, and also showed everyone really enjoying themselves.