Inside the Emerging World of VR Porn for Women (And Anyone Who's Not a Dude)

In the video the woman’s tan legs splayed on the tile as the man hovered over her, kissing what I presumed were her nipples, although I couldn’t be sure because all I saw was the top of his head. It was my first time watching so-called female point-of-view (FPOV) virtual reality porn, and I tried to suspend my disbelief. But her legs were so tan and tatted and mine nearly bare and pale that it was difficult to imagine that this was, in fact, me. Perhaps it was a failure of my own imagination. The man gazed at me, his hairless uncircumcised dick dangling, as he squirted massage oil on his hands. I was kind of turned on, but then I zeroed in on a mole on his chest. I thought: Should he get that checked for cancer? What does that Japanese tattoo below the mole mean? But I didn’t give up on FPOV porn. Soon after, I found one I liked.  

VR porn from a woman's point of view presents a radical shift in perspective in more ways than one. Type POV into PornHub and you’re most often faced with a guy’s view of his own penis with a woman hovering over it. The adult industry seemingly  assumes that most viewers identify as male and desire to watch porn that centers around their dick. But a handful of companies and performers are attempting to transform the industry by creating porn from the POV of a woman, non-binary person, or person of unspecified gender, much of it in VR, with varying results as I discovered throughout my goggle-wearing journey into this world.  

VR porn’s share of female viewers is smaller, at about 17 percent, according to a survey by Bedbible.com. Anna Lee, a top VR director, thinks she might know why. 

“VR is extremely geared towards the male gaze right now, even the way the hardware is built—it’s clunky, it's heavy, it's very male gamer,” said Lee. 

“Just because you jumped from one type of hardware to another doesn't mean you’re innovative," she said regarding male VR porn directors. "You're making the same stereotypical porn you made with a fucking camcorder. It's the same MILF bending over in the kitchen to bake cookies.”  

In 2020, researchers studied 38 women who were shown “high-quality, women-centered erotica” in VR (both POV and non-POV). Their results, published in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that women were more aroused by VR porn than comparable 2D porn and felt as if they were more sexually present in the scene. 

But VR is an investment. It not only requires expensive equipment—the Meta Quest 2 headset will run you $300 while the PlayStation VR2 costs $550—but also a large, private space. When wearing VR glasses, it’s nearly impossible to see what’s happening in the room around you. Watching VR porn can be treacherous, as the first episode of Bupkis demonstrated, when Pete Davidson ends up accidentally ejaculating on his mom.  Yet the market for VR porn is over $1.5 million. And while the slow adoption of VR by the public for all use-cases may be a roadblock for porn, the industry has demonstrated time and again over decades that it can push new technology forward. 

If VR producers and directors can get more women to watch, they could exponentially increase those profits. But first, they have to answer an age-old question: what do women want? 

The answer: nearly everything. “Research has found that women find a wide range of pornographic material exciting, arousing and significant, although it may not directly align with their individual sexual preferences … some heterosexual women are very drawn to hardcore gay male porn while others find BDSM scenes stimulating although they are not members of a kink community,” according to Clarissa Smith, a professor at Northumbria University and founding co-editor of the journal Porn Studies.

A category in the industry called “porn for women” exists, though it “remains niche,” Smith said.  And it has a very specific style. “Porn for women often features more realistic and emotionally connected scenarios, and might prioritize a ‘female gaze’, though I think many directors, creators, and performers in this category might quibble with the idea there is a monolithic female gaze,” Smith said. “Even so, a lot of research has emphasized women’s interests in themes of intimacy, communication, and mutual pleasure.”   

Virtual Real Porn, based in Spain, created the website Virtual Real Passion (VRP) for female POV porn in 2016 as part of their commitment to “gender equality,” said Mary Lewis, VRP’s production director. The company uses input from its customers as well as female staff members to shape its content. “Lately, the feedback we receive most often is a desire to see women engaging in sexual activity with two or more men, with her taking charge of the situation,” said Lewis. 

VRP’s content appeals mostly to couples and women, although there are male customers as well. Top rated videos include “My Boyfriends Are Back!”, a female POV threesome with two guys, and “Unstuck”, an FPOV where a winning quarterback seeking to sleep with your roommate ends up having sex with you instead.  

VRP stands out for having male performers intended to appeal to women, which is not always the case in the porn world. One of their stars is Jason Carrera, who appears in “My Boyfriends are Back!” Shooting FPOV porn is “weird,” he said. His female costars have bifocal cameras dangling in front of their heads with a sticker placed on it where he is supposed to focus his eyes. “It feels like you’re fucking a robot,” he said.  

He wants to look at the performer’s face or body, but cannot. Still, FPOV porn is physically easier to film than male POV for him. When he shoots male POV the camera is in front of his face, blocking out most of his vision. “You gotta be in an awkward position. Your body, your neck, your back hurts,” he said. 

The other company focusing on FPOV porn is immerSex, a recently-opened branch of porn studio Vroomed. But when immerSex’s founder, who goes by Miron, proposed creating female point of view VR porn earlier this year, his business partner immediately vetoed it. Porn for women, particularly VR porn, won’t sell, his partner thought. He didn’t listen to him. 

“If you are able to attract females, then you just double your market,” Miron told VICE. “Female POV in VR is more personal, more intimate” than 2D porn, he said. 

His girlfriend thought the idea was a good one, though, and that was enough for him. Soon he released two titles for the female-centric branch of his company: Truck Driver Skills, a POV film involving a truck driver, and All For a Woman’s Pleasure, a sensual massage movie. The videos weren’t very successful. So he’s started producing close-up genital POV films under the immerSex brand in addition to FPOV films. His recent FPOV video “A Tale of Storm and Fire,” where two women pleasure each other intensely with cunnilingus and sex toys, became the most successful FPOV film in the collection. He thinks it did so well because it appealed to all genders. 

FPOV porn has a devoted following, even in these early days. In 2016 female director Fivestar saw an opening in the market: FPOV for lesbians, by lesbians. She began LezVR in 2016. It was radical at the time, offering lesbian VR porn from the POV of a queer woman, not a cis male.  It was the type of porn she herself would want to watch, with hot girls and high production values, she told me. So, of course I had to watch it. 

In the LezVr, I was supposed to be envisioning myself as a strap-on wearing woman penetrating another busty woman. For some reason, it was easy for me to suspend my disbelief while wearing the clunky VR goggles. Maybe it was because I was turned on. The quality wasn’t great, because of my PSVR headset and the video itself having been made six years ago. But I felt more immersed, more able to imagine myself having sex than I usually do when watching porn. 

LezVR didn’t sell well. Fivestar has a theory about why the concept didn’t quite work. “[Men] are trained to be agents of their own sexuality from the time they were born. And so I think there's more of a culture for men to buy porn, and more expendable income,” Fivestar said. The male-centric gaming culture of VR didn’t help either, she said. 

Fivestar has continued to work regularly in the industry creating porn that appeals to women, including FPOV porn. “I do see a lot of people on the forums, in the comments, asking for straight female POV with cis male performers,” she said. Recently she shot a film like that: a massage fantasy from the woman’s point of view, with a hunky masseur who turns the massage sexual. During the shoot she made sure to include sex acts usually excluded from VR. “I’m like, ‘There's not enough POV cunnilingus. You got to do some pussy licking,'” she said. 

One day last year, Fivestar was attending a porn industry hike when she began talking with the hike’s organizer, Todd Spaits of Yanks VR, a female-centric porn company focused on masturbation videos, and lesbian sex. After chatting, Fivestar and Spaits realized they shared the same porn values, particularly that shooting should be a collaboration between performer and director. 

“We want to capture the real orgasm and so we kind of let [performers] dictate how that happens,” Spaits says. 

Aside from Spaits, Yanks only employs women. Soon Fivestar was shooting for Yanks VR, which produces female and non-gendered POV porn. These have been more of a success, she said. Why did this work and not LezVR? It may be because Yanks also has a healthy male following: about half their viewers are men.   

Yanks VR continues to create content for women, by women. And Spaits believes that VR provides something for women that 2D porn can’t. “You can break the fourth wall emotionally to where you have a bit of an emotional response… Sometimes you can get a little chills from…a model leaning into the camera, getting really close to your neck,” he said. 

Yanks VR is also creating an augmented reality how-to video. “We bring in a real lesbian couple, and we do like a fingering move where she fingers her partner, and we capture that from two angles in VR,” he said. 

Soon she realized that her movies, which are less focused on the actual act of genital sex than the anticipation and sexual tension, appealed to women, who are about half of her audience. 

One of her most popular productions is the Blackbox series: 20-minute ASMR solo porn videos shot in a black box, where women keep their clothes on for the first half of the production. “It's far more interesting [to film] before any clothes come off,” she said. The films weren’t specifically directed to women, they just had a non-gendered POV. “At no point did any of the performers ever say you know, oh, you’re dick’s so awesome,” Lee said. “That's why I had a lot of women come up to me and say, 'This is the first time that I felt like I was being spoken to.'” Lee thinks that non-binary POV is even more appealing to women than FPOV. “When a woman has sex, it's not about seeing, it's about feeling,” she said. 

While Lee is avoiding FPOV, top VR porn distributor and producer Sex Like Real (SLR) has produced a number of films in the genre. They started creating FPOV in part because women asked for them. At a 2018 convention, SLR had a “wishing tree” promotion at their booth where people could scrawl their dreams for VR porn themes on colorful pieces of paper. 

“One girl who came by mentioned something about a boyfriend experience,” said Telly, a director for SLR. “And I thought, yeah, maybe we'll do that one day, and then one day presented an opportunity.”  The boyfriend experience video included a takeout sushi date along with sex. “We tried to have the dialogue be very non-gender specific so that a female or male could watch it,” Telly said. The boyfriend experience didn’t make a lot of money. “Maybe it is ahead of its time, or maybe it's just a market that is too small to sustain,” Telly thought. 

Another early Telly FPOV film was Hoe Depot. In it, the viewer shares the POV of a horny woman whose friend convinces her to go to the hardware store with her “and just basically go hunting for dudes,” said Telly. The viewer watches as her friend, in a white crop tanktop with no bra, arrives at the hardware store and approaches an employee for help. “Our pipes haven’t been used in such a long time, and we need a really big one,” she says. It's a standard porno plot, but with a shift in perspective—the woman coercing and taking charge. Telly said the storyline was inspired by his friend who would don lace pants and travel to Home Depot whenever she felt unattractive to get male attention. 

Telly’s wife worked alongside him during preproduction, finessing the storyline, wardrobe, and  staging, he said. Some viewers weren't into it.  “I just don't want a guy wagging his sick [sic] in my face, sorry lmao 😄😄😄😆😆😆😭😭😭, “ one viewer commented on SLR’s site. Though many of the comments were also positive. “This is awesome, please do more female POV! :)) … not enough gets produced,” wrote one person.  

Why doesn’t more FPOV porn get produced on SLR ? Possibly it’s because only seven percent of their users identify as female. David Chapman, an executive at SLR thinks that number doesn't reflect the reality: “quite a few couples share the same headset, so the total [number] of female SLR users is likely to be higher.” 

Chapman and Telly think that appealing to female viewers is important, even if the movies often don’t make much money right now. “VR porn provides people with a safe space to try out new sexual experiences and fetishes from the safety of their own home…Users can see how they respond to BDSM, or same-sex experiences, without having to step outside, and I think there's something really valuable and appealing about that, particularly for SLR's female users,” said Chapman. 

She’s made one VR film, “360 Degrees of Lust”. Jason Carrera and Mickey Mod, a VR performer who is popular with women, starred in it alongside three other men. “It was a gangbang but more focused on her pleasure,” Carrera said. The film did well, but not as well as her other titles because, as she says “not everyone has VR kits lying around, they’re still quite expensive.” 

When I talked to a superfan of FPOV porn, who goes by the name Super Smash Cache, she said that she struggled to find much that she liked in VR.  She began searching in 2019, but she only found one video and it starred a man who looked like a “stereotypical, investment banker type,” she said. “I guess that is what men think all women want, but I like the nerdier guys.” In order to become aroused, she had to focus on his abs flexing and the penetration. Since then, she says, FPOV VR porn is “still slim pickings.” 

She loves FPOV porn, because it “puts the emphasis on servicing the woman,” she said. “A lot of women who feel alienated by mainstream porn probably would have loved FPOV porn if it was more of an option sooner.” 

While blow jobs and money shots are de rigueur in conventional porn, in FPOV porn, pillow princesses who lay on their back and receive pleasure reign and penetration is optional.  She dreams of a day when she can search for “lanky, veiny forearm guy” and a series of FPOV films will show up. 

She thinks she knows why there’s so little compelling FPOV: “The idea that men are visual creatures and women just aren't kind of became a self-fulfilling prophecy," she said. "So women's desires weren’t a core consideration for studios that are funded by and founded by men.”