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Comment by zasdffaa | Hacker News Reader

A question. I've no problem with hardcore porn but I'm put off by badly by some of what I assume to be porn oriented at men; completely emotionless robotic banging. Porn for women is much more affectionate and for me that makes it so much more enjoyable. I really want to see people genuinely having a good time or (to me) what's the point.

I don't know if I'm unusual in this but I'd like to know what other people think. I seriously wonder if a lot of porn produced is aimed at what the studios think the audience want rather than actually finding out if it is. I could well be wrong though.

No judgement on anyone for liking what I don't, that's fine.

So, is it just me?

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> I've no problem with hardcore porn but I'm put off by badly by some of what I assume to be porn oriented at men; completely emotionless robotic banging. Porn for women is much more affectionate and for me that makes it so much more enjoyable. I really want to see people genuinely having a good time or (to me) what's the point.

Counterpoint: I find this stuff creepy and voyeuristic. I think watching porn to watch normal loving couples having straight sex is somewhere between peeping in windows to watch a healthy, normal family have dinner (and to fantasize about being them), or like going to the circus to watch nonathletic people exercise.

Watching porn to see sexual athletes and performers do what they do for a living, and enjoying the unusual and exceptional, and not really thinking that its something that you're obligated to imitate or emulate, for me, is the least creepy perspective. The opposite, to me, is a strange insistence that the only porn that is worthwhile is porn that is held up as a model, and that people who don't see pornography as a model are perverted. For me, that's like saying it's perverted to watch a trapeze artist, or a gymnast.

Saying "I watch porn for the athleticism" feels creepy and wrong to me, but then again I don't understand the fervor for professional sports so maybe I'm just not tuned into the zeitgeist.

I would much rather get turned on and get my little dopamine rush from watching two people enjoy having intense and romantic sex with each other than by watching some sexual gymnast pull off a zero-g inverse mating press with hammerlocked arms while covered in enough lube and sweat to fill a 55 gallon drum.

I think the massive increase in amateur porn is filling this gap. Much of the content on PornHub is now amateur, and there are camming sites like Chaturbate that feature real couples having live sex, and of course OnlyFans.

I think there are plenty of amazing "mainstream" porn scenes out there too, but they tend to get lost in an endless sea of repetitive sub-par pro porn.

Maybe go for erotic novels (or Visual Novels to video games) instead?

Male oriented erotica in book form is rare in US culture, but common in the Japanese light novel / visual novel community.

Books focus on characters thoughts and emotions because that's the medium of words.

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Most book-based erotica seems to be aimed at female audiences for some reason, so I think there is a bit of a cultural expectation here.

Still, with the growing popularity of erotic visual novels (and heck, just novels in general) I have to imagine that the male reader base exists out there.

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I'm not saying Hunniepop is the best written piece of literature I've seen. But there are words and emotions there, and a mild focus on what the various women want (albeit with the male sex fantasy slants).

Since the majority of the game is in fact, reading mundane situations and figuring out which gifts work best for each girl (ie gameplay mechanic to force the players into reading the story), it forces the player to at least explore the female characters a bit before you get the porno scene.

Interesting question. A few thoughts:

Obviously everyone's tastes are different but, broadly speaking, the most popular porn videos do not tend to be the most romantic or sensual. That said, there are many niches in porn, and videos made for women can be very successful within that niche.

Producers are incentivised to create videos that will sell. It's not much good if a video is popular on free tube sites but nobody pays for it. There is evidence to suggest that women are a lot less likely to pay for porn than men are, and there is therefore a lot less of an incentive to create porn for that demographic.

Creating romantic/passionate porn is not easy! The script and casting (amongst many other things) need to be just right for it to work. Therefore it's going to take more time and effort. So many studios will focus on mass producing videos. There's an obvious trade-off between quality and quantity, and many studios will have found that it's just more profitable to churn out videos as quickly as possible.

I think I'm probably the other end of the spectrum. I'm perfectly content with just a close-up picture of a vagina. Penis going in and out of vagina in as high def as possible is basically optimal. If there's anything else in the scene my brain basically disregards it.

This is the case for me about 75% of the time, unless I'm in "a mood."

This is an interesting difference because I'm a man and at bare minimum I need to see that the people doing it are really into it. I need enthusiasm, but prefer to see or read the development of how it got to such a boiling point. I also like teasing better, sex is a mind game, you play it with your brain, and it lasts more than 3 minutes that way too.

My guess is this. People like you might enjoy a softer form of porn, but are you going to click through to the ads that they're using to monetize?

Free online porn is not optimized for people's tastes. It's optimized to attract the people who are so obsessed that they're going to click through and actually buy products that are advertised at some point.

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