Pornography can be a great thing. Most of us have incredibly bad/inadequate sex education. For me, my sex education consisted of a video of a woman giving birth and then a girl passing out on our scary maths teacher, and if I’m being perfectly honest I still don’t know how to put a condom on. So, for me everything I learnt about sex was from pornography. I don’t remember how I first came across pornography, I don’t know if I explicitly searched for it or if I came across it. I think I googled the word orgasm which I heard at school, and wasn’t sure what it was. After watching porn for the first time I remember googling what is the difference between sex and an orgasm.

Anyways, from about 14 I already knew that I was bisexual. However, as a bisexual woman I’ve faced some issues with pornography. I think that it is fair and honest to say that a lot of my sex education came from pornography, as my sex ed at school didn’t exist. However, my sex education when it comes to sleeping with women couldn’t be learnt from pornography in the same way. Now, before I go into the reasons for this, it is important to note that I am not anti-pornography, that would be kinda insane as the CEO of a sustainable adult entertainment platform. But as in any industry, there are a number of issues in the adult industry especially concerning some types of content, representation and the influence that it has on our ideas of sex. And that is something that we as users, companies and performers have to take in stride. I am also not trying to generalize, this is based solely on my experience growing up. So, here are the issues that I found when viewing lesbian pornography:

Firstly, even though lesbian porn is one of the most popular categories out there, it isn’t made for lesbians and quite often it is not even made by lesbians. Rather, the porn itself is targeted towards men’s fantasies and is often unrealistic of actual lesbian sex. I had a big shock when I slept with a woman for the first time and thought that scissoring was actually a thing. So, in that regard due to who lesbian porn is targeted as I personally have found it less ‘educational’ or informative than heterosexual pornography.

Secondly, another thing in lesbian pornography is that it leads to a massive fetisation of lesbians, and threesomes. Now, what’s the problem with that you might be thinking? Well, it’s not that there’s an issue with non-lesbian or bi people consuming this content, it’s more an issue of this content is made for a fetish and not necessarily for members of that community. This then in turn has consequences in everyday life. I think that there is definitely a coincidence between this and men constantly wanting threesomes when they hear I’m bisexual. This sounds harmless at first, but comments like that have majorly effected me in my sexual identity and made me feel nervous and scared to even share the fact that I’m bisexual. So, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t consume LGBTQ+ content, I’m just saying that we all need to be a lot more aware about the effects that fetisiation can have, and that it’s not exactly always appropriate to assume that someone wants to have a threesome with you because you are a bisexual woman.

I think that a way to reduce some of these issues, and to make the content better + healthier is that we need more content that is produced specifically for the LGBTQ+ community, and not for ‘men’ and their fantasies. I wish that growing up we had more performers who specifically tailored towards this community, and shared educational tips. But, I think that’s what’s great about the new private content model in the industry is you can search for those types of performers. Likewise, with the rise of social media it is definitely easier to find educational content, but it still needs to be more widespread, in schools and also porn companies, studios and performers need to think about the influence that fetisisation content can have on young LGBTQ+ people and their identities.