The Fifty Shades of Grey are motivating women to look for more sexually explicit material, according to a new study.
Diana Parry, an associate professor of recreation and leisure studies at the Canadian university, spoke with about her research. Parry and her team interviewed 28 women about their pornography patterns.
She said the book exposed many women to “a genre of material that they either didn’t know existed or they didn’t know they liked.” After reading the books, Parry noticed women began looking to consume similar type of books and sexually explicit content specifically targeted to women, rather than men.
Yeah, I think what makes it interesting for me is the way that women’s sexuality is being acknowledged, not necessarily through a male partner but her own sexuality, women taking their own sexuality into their own hands. It’s an interesting moment to look at women’s sexuality as represented in mass media or pop culture or films like “Fifty Shades of Grey” or various TV shows. But I think we need a cautionary note around it, because while they open up opportunities and provide women with unprecedented access to new genres or ways of thinking about their sexuality, at the same time, many of the scripts that are reproduced are really patriarchal scripts around women’s sexuality. So, again, we want to look at the complexity that underlies women’s consumption of sexually explicit material. It’s not all good, it’s not all bad.
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