Another Voice

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

Notes towards an explanation of why straight men like watching lesbians

For five years I served on the Broadcasting Standards Council, and there I encountered a riddle whose resolution has eluded me. The BSC has passed into history. Its function was really just to exist, and by existing to provide politicians and broadcasters with a plausible answer to complaints of the kind made by the late Mary Whitehouse — a responsibility now assumed by other regulators. Our job was to censure rather than censor. We took it seriously. The required monitoring was hard work.

But not always dull work. Ministers were at that time bothered by newspaper indignation about TV porn channels beamed from Europe — Red Hot Dutch was lately famous — and so for summer viewing members of the Council were asked by our staff to take home with us hundreds of hours of video-recordings of the output of such stations. We divided these among ourselves. At home, pencils in hand, we ticked boxes on pro-forma sheets listing questions like ‘NUDITY: [] partial; [] total; [] frontal; [] rear’; or ‘PENETRATION: [] simulated; [] actual; [] vaginal; [] anal’. I was frequently unsure.

Some of this was fun, some offensive. But some was less interesting than might appear — at least for me, the statutory homosexual on the Council. Over those five years I must have played, paused, fast-forwarded, rewound, freeze-framed and reviewed hundreds of hours of lesbians (or pretend-lesbians) rolling around on mattresses.

And not just mattresses. Sometimes it was tiger-skin rugs before blazing fires in baron-ial castles; sometimes it was grassy knolls in woodland glades; sometimes it was on yachts, sometimes sand-dunes. The background was more diverting than the foreground where, whatever the context, the action was always the same: rolling around endlessly and pointlessly, kissing, writhing, licking, caressing — on and on for hours and hours without serious incident... can you imagine the ennui?

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David Watkins

August 28th, 2008 3:15pm Report this comment

This is nonsense! Of course women enjoy titillating entertainment, probably as much as men do, but what titillates them is "romance", not raw, unprocessed sex. And many, I should guess most, heterosexual women are fascinated by male homosexuals, and spend much time fantasising about their love-lives. Type in the words "slash fanfiction" on google, and you will find hundreds of thousands of amateur stories, invariably written by women, inventing sexual encounters between Kirk and Spock (from "Star Trek"), Spike and Xander (from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), Harry and Malfoy (from "Harry Potter"), and countless other improbable male couples. It's totally unsurprising that the film "Brokeback Mountain" was based on a story written by a woman - Annie Proulx.

Venturer

August 29th, 2008 5:10pm Report this comment

It would seem that female small weevils from Florida "Diaprepes abbreviatus" engage in apparent lesbian sex because it attracts the boy weevils.

Apparently they find it quite hard to work out who are the boys and who are girls, so the lesbian coupling helps because (a) they assume one of the couple is female and may barge in or (b) mistake it for a larger than average weevil - the female weevils being larger than the males.

I am not sure how easily this could be applied to humans though.

See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/481394.stm

John

September 1st, 2008 1:04pm Report this comment

I only once ever had a threesome with two girls, one of whom gave some 'lesbian action' to the other, and it was the most exciting sexual experience I have ever had.

Because Mr Parris is gay, he just wouldn't be able to understand.

Not Paul Reiser

September 2nd, 2008 6:31am Report this comment

For the heterosexual male, it's quite simple. To quote the American comedian Paul Reiser:

"It's naked, it's fun, and I agree with both of them."

Tom Carter

September 3rd, 2008 6:56pm Report this comment

I've spoken to plenty of women who find two homosexual men having sex to be very arousing. As David Watkins said, the concept of 'romance' is what tends to excite women more than purely carnal lust, and I think that to many women the idea of two men effectively breaking a taboo (irrespective of one's attidudes to homosexuality, I think it is undeniable that it's still a taboo to an awful lot of people) suggests passion and overwhelming love. This idyll is very much accentuated in slash fiction online with the theme of forbidden love being extremely prominent.

I think also that lesbian pornography tends to be gentler and appeals more to the sensibilities of someone such as myself who's not always interested in watching a woman being dominated to the extent of quasi-rape (this is of course a small percentage of heterosexual pornography but if the internet isn't the place for hyperbole and logical fallacies then what is?!) and I would argue that this is perhaps a less stereotypically heterosexual thing and one might suppose that attraction to lesbian sex might actually be a sign one being further away from 100% heterosexuality for this reason.

I could carry on but the irony of intellectually masturbating on the subject of pornography might become unbearable!

Clemence de Roch

September 8th, 2008 6:09am Report this comment

Dear Matthew Parris, you seem to have led an unjustly sheltered life. Women indeed enjoy homosexual pornography, in writing, in pictures and in films. The wide world of slash fiction contains hundreds of thousand of original or fan-derivative works, some - perhaps only 5%, but isn't that the case with almost anything? - of outstanding quality; and I would say that more than half of the entire production has superior standards to commercially-written stuff. Sir Ian McKellen, among others, has confessed to liking to read slash on the Internet. I suggest an exploration, and another story for the Speccie to tell us of your research?

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