What Happened When One Woman Created the Porn That Women Really Wanted
When COVID-19 first began to shut us inside nearly two years ago, our collective response was fairly predictable—we flocked to internet porn. Anxious, afraid and suddenly cut off from human contact, many found the dopamine rush of living vicariously through porn stars to be particularly tantalizing.
Industry giant PornHub reported unprecedented traffic changes in late March 2020. On the supply side, subscription site OnlyFans became a household name as laid-off workers sought refuge, swelling the ranks of creators to more than a million as of 2021, up from 70,000 in mid-2019.
While it's clear we're spending more time watching porn, what this raw data leaves out is whether or not our tastes have changed at all. Has this period of collective chaos made us crave different erotic entertainment?
And was the assortment of porn available exactly what everyone wanted in the first place.
A sexy start
As it turns out, there's one production company that's been collecting this type of information for decades: Sssh.com. Founded by Angie Rowntree in 1999, Sssh.com bills itself as the "first truly interactive adult entertainment experience." Primarily a hub for video, from short clips to full-length features, the site contains other media as well, including photosets, audio porn and erotica.
Sssh.com is also a platform for sex education and community-building, and includes advice columns, toy reviews and personal essays, plus articles on everything from tantra to sex tech. Most importantly, it's a site that caters to women viewers without pandering to them. When Rowntree first founded Sssh.com—whose title satirizes the fact that women's sexuality is meant to be an unspoken secret—internet porn was in its infancy and overwhelmingly produced by men.
At the time, Rowntree would attend adult industry trade shows and marvel at how male-centric all of the offerings seemed to be.
"I would ask people if there was anything for women, or if there was a different perspective, something with more storylines," said Rowntree. "And they all just said that women weren't interested in porn, that women weren't visual."
She was also told that women would never be willing to pay for porn, so why bother? But Rowntree wasn't so sure.
Surveys and storyboards
The seed for Sssh.com had been planted and Rowntree began collecting data from the women in her orbit about their porn habits.
"I didn't want to pigeonhole women," she explained, "and I actually had no idea what women wanted to see."
What Rowntree discovered was that women's tastes were even more varied than she'd expected and that she'd need a lot more data to make any sense of it. She created an online survey asking women about their turnons, sexual fantasies and aesthetic preferences—anything that could help guide production.
One of Rowntree's most pivotal discoveries was that many other women were looking for more plot in their porn. As a result, story-driven scenes have become par for the course on Sssh.com. Many videos have all the markings of a standard sitcom, complete with a title card, quirky scoring and a production value akin to the modern music video. Viewers get to know the characters pretty well before any clothes come off. In fact, it's not uncommon for a full-length feature to run for 30 minutes or so before a single button is popped.
Other production studios have taken note of the dearth of writerly work in the adult industry's output. Sites like Deeper.com or LustCinema.com, the latter created by Swedish adult producer Erika Lust, also feature robust storytelling that's dense with dialogue.
Speaking specifically to Sssh.com's approach, Rowntree noted, "We like the sex to flow a bit more naturally, to make it feel like it belongs there. The sex needs to move the story along and not be the story."
Looking in the mirror
And that gets us back to the question of exactly what types of stories were women seeking on Sssh.com in the Before Times, and what are they watching now?
The biggest differences appear related to genre and tone. Before the pandemic, the site's top genre requests included post-apocalyptic and supernatural-themed porn, along with thrillers and other sci-fi stories. But in the time since COVID emerged, those requests have sharply declined, in favor of period pieces, forbidden romance and voyeurism.
While fantasy and escapism are still highly valued, it's clear that people are looking for a lighter mood to escape into, one that's less fraught with darkness and danger.
"Porn is a mirror of society," Rowntree clarified, "and right now, people are seeing enough violence and dystopia in real life (whether it's the news, streaming platforms or television shows), so they want porn to be a total escape from all that turmoil."
And that tracks with a few people I spoke to online.
While fantasy and escapism are still highly valued, it's clear that people are looking for a lighter mood to escape into, one that's less fraught with darkness and danger.
"I was always looking for something really intense," said casual porn viewer Mariah, 28, who has been single throughout the pandemic and watched a lot of kinky porn tinged with horror, or at least rough sex. "I wanted to feel the pain through the screen."
Right now, Mariah is unwilling to date due to the Omicron variant's unmitigated spread in the U.S. And that's left her lonely, and more interested in an emotional connection than a physical one. She still enjoys porn but has found herself drifting toward platforms like Lustery, which features porn shot by real-life couples. There, Mariah can find an endless supply of porn featuring intimate and passionate sex, even some that are quite kinky.
''I've missed that spark of chemistry with a new person so much, and this feels like the next best thing," she explained.
Unlike Sssh.com, most production studios in the adult industry rarely survey their customers about their sensibilities, making it hard for them to know when big shifts occur and perhaps influence a change in direction. Even so, it seems clear that external events can shift our taste in entertainment in some pretty unpredictable ways, and pornography is no exception.
Watch this space. That's what Angie Rowntree is doing.
