May is National Masturbation Month, and we’re celebrating with Feeling Yourself, a series exploring the finer points of self-pleasure.
Google “porn for women” right now (if you’re not on a work-sanctioned laptop), and you’ll likely be bombarded with pages from tube sites like Pornhub and xHamster.
Anna Richards, founder of the erotic site FrolicMe, is frustrated by search engines — because these results aren’t really what many women are looking for.
“We’re creating a situation where people think they’re actually being presented with a lot of content that isn’t necessarily what they’re looking for, but start to believe that’s what porn is,” said Richards in an interview with Mashable.
Richards launched FrolicMe in 2015, but the inspiration came a couple years earlier. She was inspired by independent queer porn as well as erotic photography on Tumblr. (This was long before Tumblr banned adult content). The first words she thought of when seeing those images were hot, erotic — not vulgar or extreme.
“I was looking for the version in the film world,” said Richards. “And I just couldn’t find anything.”
Another source of inspiration was Kylie Minogue’s 2001 Agent Provocateur ad:
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“Nothing happened, obviously, because it’s a lingerie advert, right?” said Richards. “But it just oozed sex and oozed a strong woman and oozed that, ‘I’m empowered, I know what I like, I know what I want,’ sort of attitude.”
Richards said that was the kind of erotic imagery she wanted: Images that didn’t shame sex and portrayed it in a positive light. “I just felt there was nothing in that middle, beautiful mainstream category,” she said on conceptualizing FrolicMe.
Now, the site has around 250 films, as well as written and audio content.
One look at FrolicMe and the viewer can tell it fills a different void than tube sites do. After pursuing the site myself, I couldn’t help but think of it as the romance novel version of porn. Not only are the performers beautiful, but so are the locales — say in sunny Mykonos, or cozied up by a fireplace.
This is a stark contrast to tube porn, which is typically set on the infamous casting couch or another drab set.
While Richards knows her content isn’t educational — and she doesn’t want it to be — it does convey positive messages of consent and women’s pleasure. This is another distinction between the tubes, which push hardcore, sometimes violent content.
Viewers have taken notice of this distinction: They often thank Richards for making porn that doesn’t leave them feeling ashamed. It also has broad appeal; she said viewers range from 18 to 80 and all genders. She cited a couple who’s been married for 25 years as one who reached out to her to praise FrolicMe.
Additionally, experts in the field recommend it. “Sex relationship therapists and sex experts and people like that do refer the site to their clients,” said Richards.
Anna Richards
Image: frolicme
This could at least partially be explained by the fact that while the videos do emphasize female pleasure, they are still — as Richards put it — naughty. The site features scenes with anal, threesomes, elements of BDSM. The differences here are that women are emphatically enjoying themselves, and that these activities don’t encompass the entire scene like more gonzo videos.
Richards comes up with the scenarios herself. “I very much play on fantasies,” she said. “As a woman, I’m sort of thinking, ‘What would my top sexual fantasies be?'” She listed off sex in an elevator, on the beach, an illicit encounter, and spying through a keyhole as scenarios the site has explored.
“I want real chemistry, I want real connection, I want real intimacy.”
While scenarios in porn scenes aren’t groundbreaking, FrolicMe’s are not like stereotypical pornographic frames with thin storylines and cringe-worthy dialogue. In fact, there’s no conversation at all in FrolicMe’s videos beyond natural dialogue.
This is purposeful on Richards’ part. Besides awkwardness, there’s sometimes a language barrier as she films across Europe. The crux of it, though, is that she wants to capture real sex, or at least as close to it as possible. “I want real chemistry, I want real connection, I want real intimacy,” she said. “I want to show real sex as opposed to a performance.”
That’s shown up in her shoots in other ways. For one, some of her performers are real-life couples. For another, Richards prefers short shoots unlike mainstream porn shoots that could go for hours. “I think everybody gets too bored,” she said of long shoots. “I like short scenes where everybody knows what they’re going to do,” she said. She and the performers talk through the scene and do some initial photography before the cameras roll.
Image: frolicme
“I don’t want to keep cutting,” she said. “I want this to be a really natural scene. We are just the voyeurs allowed in their moment of privacy.”
Those who do want to hear sex talk can turn to the written or audio content. Those options, along with banked videos, are keeping the site populated with new content at a moment where its porn shoots (like mainstream production) have shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s also currently impossible to travel over Europe, which Richards often does for shoots.
She has a wait-and-see attitude towards when she’ll be able to shoot again, but given that some FrolicMe performers are genuine partners, that opens up the possibility for future content. “Some people you see on the site, they’re living-together couples,” she said. “So there’s opportunities there.”
Sex is often seen in opposing extremes: censorship or hardcore porn. “There is an open warfare on porn,” Richards said, citing search engines like Google again. (Google didn’t respond to our request for comment.) Ultimately, she wants to show that real sex lives in the middle — and it can be naughty and beautiful simultaneously.
“People are very sexual creatures,” she said. “Desire comes from liberating our erotic imagination, and sometimes we need a little bit of help there.”