Inside the Emerging World of VR Porn for Women (And Anyone Who’s Not a Dude)
With PlayStation VR googles affixed to my head, I lounged on the couch, trying to imagine I was the woman getting ravished by a tattooed bearded man.
In the video the woman’s tan legs splayed on the tile as the man hovered over her, kissing what I presumed were her nipples, although I couldn’t be sure because all I saw was the top of his head. It was my first time watching so-called female point-of-view (FPOV) virtual reality porn, and I tried to suspend my disbelief. But her legs were so tan and tatted and mine nearly bare and pale that it was difficult to imagine that this was, in fact, me. Perhaps it was a failure of my own imagination. The man gazed at me, his hairless uncircumcised dick dangling, as he squirted massage oil on his hands. I was kind of turned on, but then I zeroed in on a mole on his chest. I thought: Should he get that checked for cancer? What does that Japanese tattoo below the mole mean? But I didn’t give up on FPOV porn. Soon after, I found one I liked.
VR porn from a woman’s point of view presents a radical shift in perspective in more ways than one. Type POV into PornHub and you’re most often faced with a guy’s view of his own penis with a woman hovering over it. The adult industry seemingly assumes that most viewers identify as male and desire to watch porn that centers around their dick. But a handful of companies and performers are attempting to transform the industry by creating porn from the POV of a woman, non-binary person, or person of unspecified gender, much of it in VR, with varying results as I discovered throughout my goggle-wearing journey into this world.
Porn has always been a male-dominated field. Most of the directors and consumers have been men. It wasn’t until the 1980s that directors, beginning with Candida Royalle, began to target their work to women and couples. But the number of women watching porn has always remained lower than that of men. Today, women do represent a significant amount of porn watchers, although not the majority: at PornHub it’s 36 percent.
VR porn’s share of female viewers is smaller, at about 17 percent, according to a survey by Bedbible.com. Anna Lee, a top VR director, thinks she might know why.
“VR is extremely geared towards the male gaze right now, even the way the hardware is built—it’s clunky, it’s heavy, it’s very male gamer,” said Lee.
“Just because you jumped from one type of hardware to another doesn’t mean you’re innovative,” she said regarding male VR porn directors. “You’re making the same stereotypical porn you made with a fucking camcorder. It’s the same MILF bending over in the kitchen to bake cookies.”
In 2020, researchers studied 38 women who were shown “high-quality, women-centered erotica” in VR (both POV and non-POV). Their results, published in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that women were more aroused by VR porn than comparable 2D porn and felt as if they were more sexually present in the scene.
But VR is an investment. It not only requires expensive equipment—the Meta Quest 2 headset will run you $300 while the PlayStation VR2 costs $550—but also a large, private space. When wearing VR glasses, it’s nearly impossible to see what’s happening in the room around you. Watching VR porn can be treacherous, as the first episode of Bupkis demonstrated, when Pete Davidson ends up accidentally ejaculating on his mom. Yet the market for VR porn is over $1.5 million. And while the slow adoption of VR by the public for all use-cases may be a roadblock for porn, the industry has demonstrated time and again over decades that it can push new technology forward.
If VR producers and directors can get more women to watch, they could exponentially increase those profits. But first, they have to answer an age-old question: what do women want?
The answer: nearly everything. “Research has found that women find a wide range of pornographic material exciting, arousing and significant, although it may not directly align with their individual sexual preferences … some heterosexual women are very drawn to hardcore gay male porn while others find BDSM scenes stimulating although they are not members of a kink community,” according to Clarissa Smith, a professor at Northumbria University and founding co-editor of the journal Porn Studies.
A category in the industry called “porn for women” exists, though it “remains niche,” Smith said. And it has a very specific style. “Porn for women often features more realistic and emotionally connected scenarios, and might prioritize a ‘female gaze’, though I think many directors, creators, and performers in this category might quibble with the idea there is a monolithic female gaze,” Smith said. “Even so, a lot of research has emphasized women’s interests in themes of intimacy, communication, and mutual pleasure.”
While the FPOV VR porn industry is small, it’s growing. A few companies devoted to VR porn for women have sprung up: both European, and both spin-offs of male-centric companies.
Virtual Real Porn, based in Spain, created the website Virtual Real Passion (VRP) for female POV porn in 2016 as part of their commitment to “gender equality,” said Mary Lewis, VRP’s production director. The company uses input from its customers as well as female staff members to shape its content. “Lately, the feedback we receive most often is a desire to see women engaging in sexual activity with two or more men, with her taking charge of the situation,” said Lewis.
VRP’s content appeals mostly to couples and women, although there are male customers as well. Top rated videos include “My Boyfriends Are Back!”, a female POV threesome with two guys, and “Unstuck”, an FPOV where a winning quarterback seeking to sleep with your roommate ends up having sex with you instead.
VRP stands out for having male performers intended to appeal to women, which is not always the case in the porn world. One of their stars is Jason Carrera, who appears in “My Boyfriends are Back!” Shooting FPOV porn is “weird,” he said. His female costars have bifocal cameras dangling in front of their heads with a sticker placed on it where he is supposed to focus his eyes. “It feels like you’re fucking a robot,” he said.
He wants to look at the performer’s face or body, but cannot. Still, FPOV porn is physically easier to film than male POV for him. When he shoots male POV the camera is in front of his face, blocking out most of his vision. “You gotta be in an awkward position. Your body, your neck, your back hurts,” he said.
The other company focusing on FPOV porn is immerSex, a recently-opened branch of porn studio Vroomed. But when immerSex’s founder, who goes by Miron, proposed creating female point of view VR porn earlier this year, his business partner immediately vetoed it. Porn for women, particularly VR porn, won’t sell, his partner thought. He didn’t listen to him.
“If you are able to attract females, then you just double your market,” Miron told VICE. “Female POV in VR is more personal, more intimate” than 2D porn, he said.
His girlfriend thought the idea was a good one, though, and that was enough for him. Soon he released two titles for the female-centric branch of his company: Truck Driver Skills, a POV film involving a truck driver, and All For a Woman’s Pleasure, a sensual massage movie. The videos weren’t very successful. So he’s started producing close-up genital POV films under the immerSex brand in addition to FPOV films. His recent FPOV video “A Tale of Storm and Fire,” where two women pleasure each other intensely with cunnilingus and sex toys, became the most successful FPOV film in the collection. He thinks it did so well because it appealed to all genders.
FPOV porn has a devoted following, even in these early days. In 2016 female director Fivestar saw an opening in the market: FPOV for lesbians, by lesbians. She began LezVR in 2016. It was radical at the time, offering lesbian VR porn from the POV of a queer woman, not a cis male. It was the type of porn she herself would want to watch, with hot girls and high production values, she told me. So, of course I had to watch it.
In the LezVr, I was supposed to be envisioning myself as a strap-on wearing woman penetrating another busty woman. For some reason, it was easy for me to suspend my disbelief while wearing the clunky VR goggles. Maybe it was because I was turned on. The quality wasn’t great, because of my PSVR headset and the video itself having been made six years ago. But I felt more immersed, more able to imagine myself having sex than I usually do when watching porn.
LezVR didn’t sell well. Fivestar has a theory about why the concept didn’t quite work. “[Men] are trained to be agents of their own sexuality from the time they were born. And so I think there’s more of a culture for men to buy porn, and more expendable income,” Fivestar said. The male-centric gaming culture of VR didn’t help either, she said.
Fivestar has continued to work regularly in the industry creating porn that appeals to women, including FPOV porn. “I do see a lot of people on the forums, in the comments, asking for straight female POV with cis male performers,” she said. Recently she shot a film like that: a massage fantasy from the woman’s point of view, with a hunky masseur who turns the massage sexual. During the shoot she made sure to include sex acts usually excluded from VR. “I’m like, ‘There’s not enough POV cunnilingus. You got to do some pussy licking,’” she said.
“[The films] are really using the mind as the ultimate sexual tool”
One day last year, Fivestar was attending a porn industry hike when she began talking with the hike’s organizer, Todd Spaits of Yanks VR, a female-centric porn company focused on masturbation videos, and lesbian sex. After chatting, Fivestar and Spaits realized they shared the same porn values, particularly that shooting should be a collaboration between performer and director.
“We want to capture the real orgasm and so we kind of let [performers] dictate how that happens,” Spaits says.
This article originally appeared on Vice