The following is an excerpt from my story in Broadly. Read the full story here.
When it comes to making porn for women, mainstream adult entertainment studios have tried a lot: more romance, more kissing, prettier decor, softer lighting, silk sheets—you name it. But as an increasing number of companies are discovering, a lot of women like hardcore porn just as much as men. They just like it from a different perspective.
That’s where producers of virtual reality porn hope to step in and plug the gap. Take WankzVR, a VR porn site launched last year that has released four new videos shot from the physical point of view, or POV, of a woman. POV porn was already a hugely popular subgenre of porn—a quick search online throws up video after video—but unsurprisingly, it is most often filmed from the physical point of view of a man.
In WankzVR’s videos, however, the viewer/porn actress become “one”; in this case on her back as she has sex with another performer (or two). Users can download the videos for viewing on smartphones or on VR headsets, including the Oculus Rift or Samsung Gear VR.
The attempts to reach women through virtual reality headsets come amid hopes that premium VR content will make people willing to pay for porn in general. The rise of ad-supported sites like Pornhub, that are free for viewers, have made consumers more picky about what they spend their money on.
Meanwhile, opening the market up to women may have big potential: PornHub, which logs some 92 billion views annually, says 26 percent of its global visitors in 2016 were women, an increase of two percent from the year before.
Bradley Phillips, managing director of Amsterdam-based Pimproll, which operates nearly 1,000 websites, including WankzVR, wants to find a way to eventually earn revenue from WankzVR’s female POV content (the first three videos released have each been downloaded over 10,000 times so far). “A lot more women consume adult content than we realize,” he says, “but the reality is, there’s never been a lot of focus on doing [porn] correctly for women.”
Read the full story here.
