Women Talk About the First Time They Watched Porn

Women, it turns out, like to watch porn on the move. Research from PornHub, mapped out in one of those fun graphs the website seems to release every other month, reveals that 80 percent of women access the site from mobile devices, as opposed to 69 percent of men.

It hasn't always been this way, of course, primarily because you couldn't physically watch porn on a mobile device until a few years ago. No: the majority of us started out on desktop computers, swapping grubby USBs or googling stuff we hoped wouldn't raise any flags were a parent to scroll through our internet search history.

Anyway, all this got me wondering about first time porn experiences for other women, so I asked some to share their memories with me.

When I was younger I used to spend hours every day glued to the computer. Growing up I learnt about my sexuality from less seedy websites, such as Scarleteen, Rookie and Tumblr.

I don't remember the first video exactly, but it was definitely something fairly vanilla. I think I got linked to a Tumblr built to teach teenage girls about sexuality. So it was a safe space, with lots of advice about consent and gender.

I only used Tumblr because I didn't want to go on glaringly obvious porn sites where there are loads of flashing GIFs of butts jiggling up and down, which would be really obvious if my mum walked in. But because there was a ban on NSFW content on Tumblr I soon ran out of videos. And you couldn't directly search for porn, so it was often a case of clicking through loads of different usernames to find stuff. A lot of the time the content would be questionable. It wouldn't be clear if the actor had given consent for certain stuff – rape fantasies, straight up misogyny, etc.

When I first started watching videos my mind was blown by the idea that girls could get off, too, which is why I tended to not really stray from the feminist or lesbian porn side of the tracks. Also, I watched lesbian porn because it's a lot less intimidating than mainstream heterosexual porn, where you never get to see the girl finishing; you just see this wailing lump of flesh.

My mum is one of those "barge into your room without warning" types, so I had to wait until after I knew she'd gone to bed and then turn the lights off, put headphones in and get under the duvet. Even now I'm still hyper aware of being caught. I triple check that I'm not streaming it to someone's telly. I went to a very small and Catholic school, so any sexual information was kept secret. There might have been the odd hint about what we were up to at lunchtimes or whatever, but it's only really in the past few years that I have gained the freedom to be like, "I use Tumblr for porn."

I learned to masturbate before watching videos. It took me about 40 minutes to cum [laughs]. I'd never really done anything sexual at this point, but I had loads of crazy hormones going on.

Initially porn terrified me, but after seeing how much it helped get stuff done I soon acclimatised to it. Like, it took me so long to click that it was human and natural. I think I had to slowly ease myself into it. I would cum and then get this weird deflated self-hating feeling. I felt so gross for so long. Even years afterwards, I told a friend and she was like, "Oh, the thought of doing it yourself is so weird" after she was explaining in graphic detail how her boyfriend had made her cum for the first time.

– Molly

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I didn't start watching porn until university because I am a child of the 1980s and I wasn't able to access a private computer. The only thing we had was a big clunky family computer in the middle of the house.

What I did do as a teenager was sex chat online with strangers, using chat rooms. It was really exciting – you could try out all this coded internet language that was totally new. I had no idea what I was talking about and could have been easily taken advantage of. I was very young and impressionable and didn't understand what relationships I was entering into, even if they were virtual ones. We would talk about what you would do to someone and vice versa. I never shared any photos of myself.

The first porn I watched was a video I saved onto my laptop. I watched it in my university room on a single bed. It was of two girls at a party playing with each other in a jacuzzi, with everyone watching and another girl masturbating. I found the women really hot; they had "good" bodies and they seemed to be really comfortable with each other. There were no men involved so it felt genuine, like they were enjoying it for themselves. I was sexually active before watching it, but porn definitely affected me. I remember copying the noises they made, thinking it was hot.

I was quite mature when I first watched, which meant there was a conflict between recognising it was fake and unhelpful for women, but also finding it exciting. I'm not against pornography as a concept, but it is an industry ruled by men that is often damaging for women. But in many ways porn celebrates difference. It caters to all fetishes.

– Jenny

The first time I watched porn was when a video called Animal Farm was being passed around school. My friends and I were curious about what it was about and wanted to get hold of a copy. One of my friends said that her cousin would be able to hook us up, but he wasn't able to get Animal Farm, so gave us some "normal" porn.

We waited until my parents were at work, and me and three other girls sat down to watch. We were absolutely disgusted by the whole thing. It wasn't the penetrative sex so much as the blowjob. We could not fathom why anyone would want to do that. We were so disturbed we turned it off.

Also, because two of us were Asian, one Filipino and one Zambian we were extra disgusted because we knew that white men didn't wash after they peed, so we were grossed out by the idea that there'd be wee in your mouth.

The video was rubbish 90s porn – fuzzy, hairy and lots of wailing noises. We would never have dreamed of watching it with boys, but if we had I think there'd have been a lot of giggling and fronting.

– Sonya

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