Another Voice

David Watkins

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

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

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

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

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

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?