New Zealand-born Fiona Vera-Gray is a research fellow in the Law School at Durham University in the UK.
Her work draws together feminist philosophical approaches and empirical research on violence against women and girls, and is based on her work at Rape Crisis South London.
Fiona Vera-Gray Photo: supplied
Dr Vera-Gray is currently leading a study called Women on Porn - the largest ever study solely focused on the range of women's experiences and views of pornography in the United Kingdom.
The project asks questions about how we increase women's space for sexual action, and whether women see online pornography as a vehicle for increasing or constraining this space.
She launched the survey in 2016 and closed it after 3 months, she got 2000 responses from women and of those carried out a further 100 in-depth interviews
The women she spoke to had experiences with porn that varied from seeing it as a form of abuse to using it to explore sexuality - women’s views were more nuanced than the standard dichotomy, she says.
“The argument’s framed as either pornography is empowerment, it’s sexual freedom, a great way for women to challenge the sexual double standard where we’re punished for being sexual and we’re invited to be sexy.
“Or that it’s a form of exploitation, it’s a form of violence against women it’s largely been split in terms of those two ways of understanding women’s experiences."
She says women who watched pornography regularly tended to go to the same mainstream sites as visited by men.
“What I found was women really are using pornography both infrequently and frequently a lot of the time using the online mainstream tube sites that most people would know, they’re not using the women friendly sections even on those sites they’re using mainstream pornography."
An analysis of search terms was also revealing.
“One of the things I found was a lot of heterosexual women are searching for ‘girl-on-girl’ lesbian pornography but not lesbian pornography made for and by lesbians.”
She says also this kind of porn is generally made with men in mind, the women she spoke to enjoyed it because female pleasure was its focus.
It was also less likely to include acts that made them feel uncomfortable or that crossed a line into a form of violence, she says.
She says women lack a space where they can talk about porn in a way that reflects the reality of their experiences.
“We need to find a way to move outside some of the judgement that’s going on, because all that’s doing is closing women down.
The full results of the study will be out next year, she says.
Fiona Vera-Gray will be discussing emerging findings from the study at a seminar at Victoria University on 5 December.
