Suzi Godson

Gay porn. What’s not to like? Two for the price of one can only be a bonus. The recent success of the gay cowboy film Brokeback Mountain can at least be partly put down to young women enjoying a bit of man-on-man action by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. In fact, gay porn works on so many levels that the only unusual thing about your interest is the fact that so few women admit openly to sharing it. In Germany, gay porn is so popular with women that they get together for “gay porn nachts” and, in the US a straight porn star, Jenna Jameson, hosts Club Thrust, an increasingly popular man-on-man gay porn website that attracts legions of female fans.

Two women having sex with each other is such a common male fantasy that it’s almost a cliché. For women, gay porn is simply girl-on-girl in reverse, but because gay men tend to be picky about aesthetics, the stars tend to be better looking and immaculately groomed, not always true of their straight counterparts.

Straight porn typically casts male leads for their penis size and ability to ejaculate on cue. As a result, the average hetero porn film delivers a leading male whose only attraction is a functioning set of genitals. In comparison with the podgy Swedish bloke with a blonde mullet and the ageing alcoholic donkey with a bad dye job, the gay guy gets the girls’ vote every time One of the other advantages of gay porn is that female viewers don’t have to suffer the feelings of gender betrayal that arise as a result of watching a pneumatic bimbo pretending to be a French maid unconvincingly begging for “double penetration” in an Eastern European purr. Hetero porn is made by men, for men, and the empathethic woman can find it too difficult to override unsettling questions about the motivations of the female participants to allow herself to see porn as harmless fancy.

Not all porn actresses are victims, I know, and the same argument could be applied to the young men who appear in gay porn. But pornography is more integral and more accepted in gay culture and gay porn stars have near-celebrity status in some circles, while most women who make their money in the porn industry are marginalised because of their profession.

However, the gay porn industry churns out just as much gratuitous rubbish as the straight porn industry, so it is worth sticking to better-known directors. Names to look out for are Joe Gage (group scenes a speciality) and ChiChi LaRue (raunchy male sex slaves, etc). One new title recommended by the Rainbow network is Regular Guys, directed by Rolf Silber (straight cop gets drunk in a gay bar and wakes up in bed with a dodgy car dealer). As you do.

Dr Thomas Stuttaford

Not unusual, but only a minority of women admit to finding the observation of male genitalia erotically stimulating.

If you are happily married and your husband has no objection, all well and good. Some partners feel inadequate if compared with the enhanced images of virile 19-year-olds found in gay pornographic magazines.

Alfred Kinsey noted the difference in attitudes to pornography in men and women and to their approach to the genitalia. Nothing demonstrates this better than the different sexes engaging in homosexual activity. Whereas male homosexual activity is almost exclusively initially focused on the genitalia, female homosexual activities are more concerned with the expression of emotion and the stimulation of other parts of the body, not usually considered erogenous. Only later does attention turn to genitalia.

Female patients have told me that part of the appeal of the gay male models in these magazines is that, although they have large penises, their bodies are usually not very hairy and in this, and other ways, are not aggressively male or threatening. Some female patients admit that once into middle age, the bodies of their male contemporaries are less alluring than in youth, and those in the magazines remind them of times past. I shouldn’t mention this to your husband.

This said, many other studies suggest that visual and written pornography is usually less exciting for women than for men. Kinsey found that there was one exception to the general pattern of gender reaction to pornography — women were more likely to be aroused by sexy films than men. More recently in experiments conducted in the Netherlands where women were shown films of female homosexual eroticism, scientific gadgetry that tracked physiological changes revealed that the majority of the women, who were not overtly homosexual, found them sexually exciting.

Only a small minority, however, admitted this. Conversely, when heterosexual men were shown films of male homosexuality only a small proportion, all of whom were known to be homosexual or bisexual, showed physiological changes, and the others, the majority of whom were heterosexual, registered only curiosity. In every other form of erotica, the observation of live sex, in written pornography or in graffiti, men were much more active and receptive than women.

Adult pornography does not usually corrupt. On the contrary, most people find that it remarkably soon loses its appeal — unless there is an already deep-seated, possibly previously hidden, attraction to it. If there is, and it doesn’t spoil your marriage, don’t let this curiosity worry you.

Do you have a sexual dilemma for Suzi Godson and Dr Thomas Stuttaford? E-mail body&soul@thetimes.co.uk or write to Body&Soul, The Times, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT. The authors cannot respond