WARNING: SOME OF THESE LINKS ARE NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR ACCESS AROUND MINORS. OPEN WITH CAUTION.

On my Eden Fantasys profile page, I list only one recommended website that could be strictly termed “pornographic.” That site is Literotica, the self-described “FREE source for the hottest in erotic fiction and fantasy.”

Now, I’m a woman, so the fact that I’ve chosen a literary pornographic site to feature on my profile comes with all sorts of assumptions. The foremost of these assumptions is that women are stimulated more by language than by visuals. The verbal vs. visual opposition has been much touted in magazines and media. I’m sure you’ve heard this oft-cited difference between men and women blamed, in at least a few sources, for husbands not being able to understand their wives, girlfriends not being able to understand their boyfriends, etc. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. The Martians are missing an ear and the Venutians are blind in one eye.

I can’t speak for womankind, but I can speak to my own preferences, and honestly, I’d prefer to watch porn. I find even just the visual suggestion of sex highly erotic, and more often than not, I even put the volume on mute when I’m watching porn because the dialogue tends to annoy me. It would be a lie, you see, to say that I’m more of a verbally than a visually stimulated person in this respect.

Go ahead. Cry freak. I know you want to. But the truth of the matter is that the difference between verbal-women and visual-men has been highly exaggerated because, as with most so-called “empirical” gender differences, it’s easier to blame the brain than to develop more complex reasons for our gendered (interplanetary) differences.

Stanford University neuroscientists Josef Parvizi and Susan Fisk have done some good legwork to address this, and as it turns out, the problem has a lot more to do with how women and men are perceived than the types of porn we like. These ideas are also used to explain why women go into STEM classes with less frequency than men and why men are more likely to get hired for the big CEO positions than women.

Part of this comes down to differences in the ways that men and women are raised. The old nature vs. nurture argument. I know, but this is an important place to talk about it when every other study would have you believe in Martians and Venutians.

So let’s scrap this model. Let’s assume for the moment that, instead of different planets, women and men come from different clubhouses: the boys’ club and the girls’ club. In the boys’ clubhouse, it’s like Legos galore. Meanwhile, the girls’ clubhouse has more dolls than floor space. The building activities encouraged by the boys’ clubhouse leads to increased visual/spatial skill. The dolls in the girls’ clubhouse encourage the imitation of interpersonal interactions (mostly verbal), so the girls develop these skills.

This carries over to porn. In candid conversations with my female friends, they’ll admit that they enjoy watching porn. In public, I hear more women say “Ew. Any woman who watches porn is sick” than I’d care to admit. And women are trained to think this way by other women and by the magazines that tell us that porn is something that only people in the men’s club really like. They can’t help themselves, but if women can’t help it, there must be something wrong them.

If the message doesn’t sink in through these channels and a woman tries to sneak into the men’s club, she’ll get over visual stimuli pretty quickly. Most of the pornography in the men’s club (especially the free stuff on the men’s club computer) demeans women and can make women feel as disgusting as visual pornography is supposed to make us feel. The knowledge that the woman is in no way as into what she’s doing as she’s pretending to be is a complete turn off, and the porn is almost never about the woman’s pleasure anyway; it’s about the man’s. And as for the man, his body is barely in the camera shot. That’s if his body is worth filming to begin with.

Then women find out that not only is this the only porn in the men’s club, it’s pretty much the only visual porn period. Meanwhile, because women have been trained in the girls’ club to be so verbal, there’s plenty of erotic fiction floating around the internet that does appeal to us and doesn’t make us feel nasty just for reading it (although sometimes nastier things happen in verbal than in visual porn, believe you me).

There are ways to fix this. There are several groups, individuals, and websites that try to fix this, including the Feminist Porn Awards, Feministe, the Dirty Diaries’ feminist porn shorts (Really NSFW), Refinery29’s “Tasteful Guide” (NSFW), and (of course and thank heavens) Oprah. These sources really do prove that there very well could be a market for visual porn, but the problem is the biggest players in the market first assume that the market for this does not exist. Then off course, the market will not exist. It is the ultimate self-fulfilling sexual prophecy.

The result, of course, is that this woman’s Eden Fantasys profile is porn-less, and what a sad thing that is. What you can do to fix this is to pay attention to what you want instead of what the girls’ and women’s clubs have trained you to want. If you still think porn is gross, that’s still fine and totally up to you. On the other hand, if you know or find out that the visual-verbal dichotomy doesn’t work for you either, post your finds on your profiles and in the comments. Your fellow pornographic tomboys will love you forever.