What Should Porn for Women Look Like?

This female-founded production company is trying to find out

- Dana Hamilton

I grew up on the porn of the early 2000s. Late at night, my eight-inch TV (with built-in VCR!) picked up bleach-blonde hair, surgically enhanced boobs and landing strips so thin they could be mistaken for John Waters’s mustache. I squinted to make out vaginas getting plundered by salami-sized dicks in “straight” porn and jammed by fingers decorated with uncomfortable-looking press-on nails in “lesbian” porn. If a clit was ever touched—which was rarely—it was with the same energy as a flamenco guitarist after a three-day coke binge or someone trying to erase a wrong answer on a Scantron with 30 seconds left on an important exam.

As I learned more about my body—particularly my clit—and started replicating things I learned in porn, I realized none of the stuffI was seeing could result in an actual orgasm for a person with my anatomy. At first, I thought I was broken—that there was something wrong with my body—but then I started talking to women and hearing similar frustrations: The methods to please us that our partners learned from porn simply didn’t work. Many of us shared the pain of a partner believing they can stick it in an ass in one fluid motion with spit as lube, the confusion of not being able to orgasm from penetration alone, the exhaustion of girl-on-top becoming a Barry’s Bootcamp–style squat workout with no climax and the guilt of thinking our bodies are at fault.

It would be fine if we could all recognize that we’ve been lied to and have a cultural understanding that porn isn’t real, that it’s a fantasy not to be tried at home. But we don’t.

Instead, we have a world in which people believe mainstream porn is a real, usable instruction manual for how to please someone with a vulva and assume the orgasms depicted on screen are real.