BOSTON — Angie Rowntree, the creator and operator of Sssh.com, was featured in a Cosmopolitan interview last week.
The Rowntree piece was part of Cosmo’s "Sex Work,” a weekly series that profiles women who have careers in sex-related industries — from porn stars to sex researchers and everyone in between.
Rowntree in the Cosmo article described how she pioneered "porn for women" in the late 1990s after she found a void in the sexually explicit marketplace.
“The [male-produced] stuff I was seeing, there wasn't any connection between the people,” she told Cosmo. “I didn't see any passion. In some cases, they didn't even look like they wanted to be there and it seemed contrived.”
In the article titled, "How I Started Making Porn Women Actually Like," Rowntree said she pondered the question, how can people get really turned on by a couple that's not excited to be with each other?
“People were telling me, ‘Women aren't visual. They aren't going to pay for porn or erotica,’ and I was like, ‘That's crap, of course we're visual,’” she said. “All of a sudden it became, Well, what do women want?”
Rowntree said that women’s fantasies and desires “are way more complex than men's.”
“Women wanted to see anything from BDSM, being a dom, being a sub, hair-pulling, more leather,” she said. “They wanted rough sex, they wanted to be seduced, they wanted a scenario where they wanted to get picked up by a stranger at a bar. Some of them wanted full stories, no stories, short stories, experimentation like girl/girl and voyeurism.”
Rowntree, wife of Colin Rowntree, who operates BDSM site Wasteland.com and co-operates adult search engine Boodigo, said that Sssh.com releases one or two original movies a month, along with "a curated a collection to make sure we can provide something that everyone wants,” she said.
“Ultimately my goal is that they walk away feeling really good about Sssh and about themselves. I want it to be real sex, intimacy, passion, mutual pleasure, and to have women in strong roles and in charge of their own sexual pleasure."
The Cosmo article can be read here.