‘Don’t You Know that It’s Different for Girls’

Abstract

This chapter builds on previous work that has examined women's engagement with pornography, and how it relates to their engagement with romance and erotica as media genres (see, e.g., Juffer, At home with pornography: Women, sex & everyday life, New York University Press, 1998; Radway, Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature, University of North Carolina Press, 1984). It explores what this sample of women who consume or produce m/m erotic content see as the primary differences between pornography and erotica. It also looks at the extent to which many of the women I spoke to identify as male when reading, writing, watching or fantasising about m/m sexually explicit content.