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Porn is an inescapable part of the environment we all share and should be talked about honestly. Dr. Fiona Vera-Gray is one of the leading feminist academics working on sexual violence and she has a decade’s experience in the frontline anti-violence against women movement.

When we think about porn today, we still mostly think about men. Men as the producers, and the consumers. Women as the product. Most women aren’t talking  to each other about what they do and don’t do with porn- not really.  And when we do talk about it, we are divided into unhelpful binaries.

Porn sites get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon plus, Twitter combined and one of the leading sites claims a third of its users are women, isn’t it time to change that?

In 1980s Makeda aged 12 at a family dinner party, bored she sneaked upstairs to check what her male cousins who had been sent up to watch television were doing. They were watching TV-pornography and were so fixated that at first they did not notice Makeda, who had incidentally taken a back seat, until she was noticed by one of her cousins, prompting boys to turn off the TV.

This underlying assumption that women do not, or should not watch pornography – that forms the basis of Women on Porn.

Vera-Gray interviews 100 women in an extraoridnary and powerful conversation on pronography about subjects like how they first encountered it, how they consume it and how it has affected their sex lives. What they like and what they don’t. And what it means for their relationships. Vera-Gray reveals the truth of how women are perceived and used in society by men but one in four pornography viewers are women and the complex relationship with pornography, shaped by societal expectations, personal  curiosities and the quest for sexual understanding. The book offers a nuanced perspective on why women engage with porn and how it influences their perception of sex and pleasure.

This book navigates the polarised public debates, to open an intimate window into porn and the sexual lives of women today.

Vera-Gray’s reflections on how women can be extrapolated, their desire, nobodies, sex, relationships, violence and future, a chapter that asks if pornography will usher in the widespread use of virtual reality devices.

As a teenager working on a corner shop, Vera-Gray stacked shelves with lad mags “ in the same way I would restock the fridge.” It was not until she got a job at a rape crisis centre that she began to talk to other women about porn.

Her sensitivity to violence suffered by women, at the hands of men shines through,  inspired by violent sexual videos they found online. Vera-Gray pleas to acknowledge the ways in which  porn shapes us. 

Vera-Gray claims that free-to-watch tube sites like Pornhub and Xvideos had more visitors during the pandemic than Netflix or Zoom.

A UK Children’s Commissioner report last year found that 42 per cent of girls and young women aged 16 to 21 had sought out porn, compared with 56 per cent of their male peers.

Vera-Gray’s study explains women’s experiences of pornography that range from claustrophobic to the empowering often contradicting each other, even revealing reflections on identity and loneliness as well as the search for meaning. 

Women on Porn by Dr Fiona Vera-Gray,  One Hundred stories, One vital conversation, Torva £18.99, 320 pages.