new survey on women's online porn habits and self-pleasure

Gender studies professor Hugo Schwyzer and sex educator Jamye Waxman have teamed up to find out more about women's online porn habits and masturbation. Explains Jamye in her blog:

My friend and fantastic professor, writer and researcher Hugo Schwyzer approached me a few months back about working together on a project about porn and self pleasure. Hugo was interested in learning more about women’s porn habits online. He said that not only has porn viewing by women increased, but he’d also talked with women who expressed a gendered idea. It was this idea that watching porn made them “act/feel more like a man.” I found that phrase fascinating. I had questions. Questions like:

• How does a man act? Feel?
• What is the definition of a man anyway?
• What is it about porn that makes us put a gender to what we do?
• How has watching porn changed how we pleasure ourselves as women? Has it changed how women masturbate?

The two have collectively put together this short survey on female-identified persons and their particular habits around online porn and are asking for input.

There is far too little research on women's uses of porn (though a preliminary report from this extensive survey on people's uses of online porn promises lots of intriguing findings), so I am supportive of any attempts to find out more. Nevertheless, the gendered angle of the survey made me pause. Essentially, "Does using porn ever make you feel 'like a man'?" seemed like a leading question to me.

So I approached Hugo and Jamye about it. Responded Hugo:

What we wanted were open-ended responses, and though it may seem a leading question, it's led to some really terrfic mini-essays we've received.

It's not a secret that our culture sees porn use as essentially male. We wanted to cop to that reality, and see how that perception affected women's own experience of using online porn to masturbate. The results on this question are fascinating so far, and we will definitely share.

Added Jamye, Hugo had "heard his students talking about 'feeling like a man' while they watched porn and it got us talking about what that means. I didn't mean to write it like a leading question, but was curious to see if women identified with that idea and why and how."

If you would like to contribute to Hugo's and Jamye's survey, please click here. Clicking on the link will bring you to a webpage displaying all the questions, which I found helpful, giving me a complete picture of the survey up front. There are 10 questions, 2 of which are open ended. There is also a box for adding more.