Back in June 2003 I joined up with fellow female webmistress Jane to launch ForTheGirls.com, an adult website for women. Almost 19 years later, the site is still going. It’s now one of the oldest porn for women sites on the web. And it’s now old enough to click the “Yes I’m Over 18” button on the warning page.
I won’t go into details but the partnership had its problems. In 2016, after I’d revamped the site, I stepped away from running and promoting it. I concentrated all my efforts on my own site Bright Desire. FTG has been kinda neglected since then.
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Well, now I’m back running it and I’m hoping to spend some quality time on it. A revamp is on the cards and there’s a lot of work to be done.
The site still has its entire archive of content available, which means thousands of photos and videos and a huge amount of written material. Some of it is kinda dated but I’m leaving it up because FTG is pretty much a piece of history now.
The “porn for women” landscape has changed so much since we launched the site. Back then, people didn’t think women even watched porn and were skeptical they’d pay for it. Now it’s a given and there’s a huge variety of online porn for women to choose from.
I think FTG is still a great site. We were always keen on romance, kissing, clit stimulation and hot guys. I think the market for the kind of porn still exists, even though it’s considered stereotypical.
One thing I have noticed is that the concept of the male centerfold isn’t really a thing anymore. When we launched we were determined to include lots of hot, erect naked men as part of our content because we believed women were visual and appreciated looking at the male form. Watching the HBO show Minx, about a 70s feminist magazine that features male centerfolds, I remembered how revolutionary it was for us to do this, even in 2003.
And I think it’s still worth doing. If you search “porn for women” online now, you get explicit sex scenes (and a lot of it looks pretty much the same as the usual mainstream porn, I might add). What you don’t see is nude men. That’s been relegated to the “gay” categories. But I think it’s still worth making a space to say “Hey, we’re straight women and we like looking at naked guys”.
And yes, I know “For The Girls” isn’t such a great name anymore. It was originally meant to create a “Girls’ Night Out” vibe but I know that it’s also got a bit of a condescending feel to it. And it’s just not worth changing the name and rebranding now.
Here’s what the member’s area looked like in 2008 (this was the design for many years). I’m sure you can appreciate the delightful tables-based html design. The site was not run on a content management system like WordPress back then. It was all hand-edited until 2016.
As mentioned in the previous post, the site appeared on the “Chick Porn” segment of Mondo Thingo on ABC TV in 2004.