Why am I straight but enjoy gay porn?

@AskPeaches: I’m a 31-year-old, straight, cis-gender woman, but I enjoy looking at gay male porn. I watched the first video clip in college with my gay best friend, but still enjoy watching from time to time. I wouldn’t describe it as a fetish, but I find it arousing. Is this normal?
—Maria Tweet
@Maria: If the phenomenon exists, it is normal (to use your words). But here, at Freshfruit, we prefer to use the word uncommon to describe behaviors not displayed by a majority of members in a group. You would be surprised that you’re not alone. A surprising number of women watch gay male porn; LGBTQ+ and straight alike.
In collaboration with the magazine, Cosmopolitan, Pornhub, which sees about 115 million daily views, shared its “More of What Women Want” insights report in 2017. It revealed that 37 percent of all the gay male porn on their site were being viewed by women. And even more interestingly, while more women between 18 and 24 years old watched gay male porn, for those over 45, it was their number one porn category. The study didn’t distinguish between the sexual orientation of the women surveyed, but seems to indicate that some women, of all persuasions, felt that the gay boys are doing it right.
This finding inspired, and was also confirmed in a book by Lucy Neville, a lecturer at the University of Leicester in the U.K., called Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys. She interviewed over 500 women, 45 percent of whom identified as straight. Of all the women with whom she spoke, including straight, queer, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual and demisexual, 68 percent watched straight porn, 53 percent watched lesbian porn, but a whopping 82 percent of all of them preferred gay male porn.
What she unearthed was that women enjoyed watching gay male porn because they found it authentic; they felt the actors weren’t playing to the camera. And, unlike straight porn, which is often shot from the straight male’s perspective, the women could appreciate the male form better. They also mentioned that gay male porn didn’t seem as exploitative, violent or dehumanizing toward the receptive partner, and that the submissive partner seemed to be enjoying the sex act in contrast to what they observe in how women are treated in straight porn. In fact, those interviewed even went as far as to suggest that they liked the versatility of gay male sex, and about half of them regularly fantasize about inhabiting the male body and having that kind of sexual fluidity, which they can’t really enjoy with straight men.
Now, I’m not saying all of this to say that you’re exactly like these women, but merely to suggest that there is a high level of female interest in gay male porn, and that the interest, beyond sexual, has largely to do with the fact that straight porn is designed for the male gaze and doesn’t quite reflect what even straight women want. So perhaps the gay men are doing it better in front and behind the camera.
Just enjoy and maybe you pick up a few tricks along the way. But don’t worry, this shows you’re not that uncommon after all.
The @AskPeacheas column is prepared by committee but written from one person’s experience. Send emails to askpeaches [at] freshfruitinc [dot] com with “@AskPeaches” in the subject line. Be sure to give enough background, so the advice can be more specific and relevant.