Pornography (General)Pornography

(older archives available here)

  • Since its inception in 2015, the Revenge Porn Helpline has received over 338,000 reports of image based sexual abuse.  The number of reports received by the Helpline increased 106% in 2023 alone. (2023 Revenge Porn Helpline Report, www.revengepornhelpline.org.uk)
  •  A 2022 study found that 52% of teens exposed to pornography reported seeing violent forms of pornography such as choking (36%), someone in pain (37%), or depictions of what appears to be rape (19%) (Common Sense Media, 2022)
  • Among those that said they had seen pornography, children in the youngest age-group (11 to 13) were the most likely to say that their viewing of this content was mostly or all unintentional (62% vs. 46% of 16- to 17-year-olds).

    50% of 11- to 13-year-olds, 65% of 14- to 15-year-olds and 78% of 16- to 17-year-olds reported having seen pornography in some way (shown/sent by someone else, searched for/stumbled upon it)

    There was a disconnect between parents’ perceptions of their children’s pornography viewing practices and the reality: 75% of parents felt their child would not have seen pornography online, but of those children, 53% said they had in fact seen pornography

    Of the children who admitted to intentionally searching for pornography (n=276), nearly two-thirds of them (63%) said they had done so at one point or another specifically for one or more of the four reasons: (1) Ideas for new things to try sexually (2) Learning about sex generally (3) Learning how to get better at sex (4) Learning what people expect from me sexually

    Girls in particular mentioned using pornography to learn how to meet boys’ “expectations”

    Overall, 41% of all children who were aware of pornography agreed that “watching porn makes people less respectful of the opposite sex”*.

    Given that 63% of children aged 11 to 13 who had seen pornography said their first exposure had been unintentional, age-verification is likely to have a significant impact here.

    83% of parents agreed with the statement “there should be robust age-verification controls in place to stop children (under-18s) seeing commercial pornography online”

    Source: Report on People, Pornography & Age Verification (bbfc, January 2020)

  • A study analyzing videos from Pornhub and Xvideos found that 97 percent of the targets of violence and/or aggression were women.  (Archives of Sexual Behavior, A Descriptive Analysis of the Types, Targets, and Relative Frequency of Aggression in Mainstream Pornography July 13, 2020)  

  • Online pornographic videos represent 27% of the online videos, 16% of the total flow of data and 5% of total Greenhouse gas emissions due to digital technology. (Reward Foundation, 2019)

  • According to a survey by the research company Savanta ComRes last year, 38% of women under the age of 40 have experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during consensual intercourse. Deepfake pornography accounts for a significant majority (96%) of deepfake videos online, even as other forms of non-pornographic deepfakes have gained popularity. (Deeptrace, 2019).
  • Visits to Pornhub totaled 33.5 billion over the course of 2018, an increase of 5 billion visits over 2017. That equates to a daily average of 92 million visitors and at the time of this writing, Pornhub’s daily visits now exceed 100 million

30.3 billion searches, or 962 searches per second.

Every minute, 63,992 new visitors arrive at Pornhub,

12 new videos and 2 hours of content are uploaded to Pornhub every minute

Stormy Daniels came in first on our list of the searches that defined 2018.

Searches for the hit game ‘Fortnite’ also defined 2018 as it skyrocketed from obscurity to one of our Top 20 searches of the year. Each time a new Fortnite character was released, searches would increase dramatically.

Not only did searches for ‘outdoor’ porn grow throughout 2018, but our statisticians also noted that the number of uploads tagged as being filmed outdoors nearly tripled.

2018 saw Pornhub’s average visit duration grow by 14 seconds to 10 minutes and 13 seconds.

Pornhub’s top 4 searches worldwide by volume remained the same from 2017 to 2018. These included ‘lesbian’, ‘hentai’, ‘milf’ and ‘step mom’.

2018 saw the proportion of female visitors to Pornhub grow to 29%, an increase of 3 percentage points over 2017.

the average worldwide Pornhub user now being aged 35.5 years old. Together, millennials aged 18 to 34 remained as 61% of Pornhub’s traffic.

80% of Pornhub’s worldwide visits now coming from smartphones and tablets.

Among desktops, the Chrome browser still remains king at 57.3% of all visits, with an 8% gain in share during 2018. On mobile devices, the Chrome browser saw a slight gain to 41.1%, breaking its previous tie with Safari in 2017.

(Source: PornHub website, 2019)

  • Research commissioned by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) shows that children and teenagers are watching and stumbling across pornography from an early age - in some cases as young as seven or eight. (BBFC, Sept. 26, 2019)

  • The Porn Epidemic: Facts, Stats and Solutions (Josh D. McDowell, 2018)
  • According to British authorities involved with implementing the new age verification law, there are at least 4.5 million porn sites, of which more than half are located in the US.
  • More than four in 10 Americans (43%) now say pornography is morally acceptable, a seven-percentage-point increase from last year. (Gallup, June 2018)

  • One in six of the over 15000 global respondents has watched pornography on a public network, among other things. (Neowin, July 2018)

  • A Model: Age Verification. In 2017 the UK Parliament mandated age verification for access to pornography sites. If sites fail to comply, they may be fined, denied access to ancillary services or blocked. It is time for Congress to act. One researcher called children’s unlimited access to extreme and graphic internet pornography, “the largest unregulated social experiment in history.” Our society is paying a severe price for it.

  • A 2017 global survey by Norton by Symantec found that one in six people admit to having used public Wi-Fi to watch adult content. Of those who admit to it they’ve done so in the following locations:

    - Hotel/Airbnb (40 percent)
    - Café/Restaurant (30 percent)
    - Work (29 percent)
    - Airport (25 percent)
    - On the street (24 percent)
    - Train/bus station (18 percent)
    - Public restroom/toilet (16 percent)

  • Pornography has changed. Extreme content is the new norm. Soft porn has disappeared. In 2010 the journal Violence Against Women reported physical aggression in 88.2% of leading pornography scenes and verbal aggression in 48.7% with 94.4% of the aggression directed towards women and girls. A February 2018 headline in Esquire Magazine read, “Incest is the Fastest Growing Trend in Porn.”
  • The Minnesota Human Trafficking Task Force recently found 46 published research studies demonstrating that exposure to pornography puts individuals at increased risk for committing sexual offenses.
  • Researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Boston performed a Google trend analysis showing searches for “teen porn” more than tripled between 2005-2013, and teen porn searches reached an estimated 500,000 daily in March 2013 or over one-third of total daily porn searches. You read that right, 500,000 searches daily for teen pornography. Americans are becoming more and more attracted to pornography depicting sex with underage persons and this growing exposure to increasingly deviant porn is driving more criminals toward victimizing more teenagers.
  • Consumers might tell themselves that they aren’t personally affected by porn, that they won’t be fooled into believing its underlying messages, but studies suggest otherwise. There is clear evidence that porn makes many consumers more likely to support violence against women, to believe that women secretly enjoy being raped, and to actually be sexually aggressive in real life. (How Consuming Porn Can Lead to Violence. Fight the New Drug)

  • Free access means porn use has skyrocketed. Today, many porn sites are free. New York Magazine reported that a decade ago total daily adult site traffic averaged less than 1 million unique visitors on the entire internet. Today, free Mindgeek tube sites alone receive 100 million unique visitors per day (The Economist – 2015).

  • The use of filters by parents has not worked. In 2005 Pew Research found 54% usage of filters; in 2016 it was 39% with just 16% on mobile devices. Parents need help.

  • A survey of 313 college students indicated that exposure to men’s magazines was significantly associated with lower intentions to seek sexual consent and lower intentions to adhere to decisions about sexual consent. Establishing and Adhering to Sexual Consent: The Association between Reading Magazines and College Students’ Sexual Consent Negotiation,” Journal of Sex Research 51, no. 3 (2014): 280–290.
  • Harmful Effects of Pornography: 2016 Reference Guide. (Fightthenewdrug.org, 2016)
  • PornHub, one of the industry’s biggest providers, claim their site streamed 75 GB of data a second last year—enough to fill 175 million 16 GB iPhones—a total of 87.8 billion views, up ten billion from 2014, another 15 billion over 2013. An estimated 87% of college-age men—and around 30% of women—doubleclick for sex either weekly or every day. (January 2016) "Falling In Love With Screens: The science behind how double-clicking for sex rewires our brains—and affects us all".
  • Individuals who never view sexually explicit material report higher relationship quality and lower rates of infidelity than those who do.
  • Pornography is frequently cited as the ‘explanation’ for anal sex, and that ‘people must like it if they do it,’ contradicting the expectation that it will be painful for women. Men also are expected to persuade or coerce reluctant partners, which has become normalized as well as ‘accidental’ penetration. Marston, C. & Lewis, R. (2014) “Anal Heterosex Amoung Young People and Implications for Health Promotion: A Qualitative Study in the UK.” BMI Open.
  • The more pornography a man watches, the more he needs to conjure images of pornography to maintain arousal, and will be more likely to ask for particular sexual acts with his partner and have concerns over his sexual performance and body image. Sun. A., Bridges, A., Johnson, J. & Ezzell, M. (2014) “Pornography and the Male Sexual Script: An Analysis of Consumption and Sexual Relations.” Archives of Sexual Behavior.
  • Those who frequently consume Internet pornography are less likely to marry because they see pornography as a marital sexual gratification substitute. Malcolm, M. & Naufal, G. (2014) “Are Pornography and Marriage Substitutes for Young Men?” Institute for the Study of Labor.
  • There is a positive correlation between hours of pornography consumed and higher narcissism levels. Additionally, those who have ever used pornography had higher levels of all three measures of narcissism than those who have never viewed Internet pornography. Kaspera, T., Shorta, M. & Milam, A. (2014) “Narcissism and Internet Pornography Use.” Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. Vol. 41 (5)
  • Extramarital sex is one of the most commonly cited reasons for divorce, and Pornography consumption is correlated with positive attitudes towards extramarital affairs. Wright, P., Tokunaga, R. & Bae, S. (2014) “More Than a Dalliance? Pornography Consumption and Extramarital Sex Attitudes Amoung Married U.S. Adults.” Psychology of Popular Media Culture.
  • 17% of women describe themselves as addicted to pornography. Keith Perry, “Sex: Women ‘just as easily hooked on online porn as men.’” Daily Telegraph, 8/6/14, at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11016874/Sex-Women-just-as-easily-hooked-on-online-porn-as-men.html
  • Porn Sites Get More Visitors Each Month Than Netflix, Amazon And Twitter Combined. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/03/internet–porn–stats_n_3187682.html (accessed June 6, 2014).
  • A Google Trends analysis indicates that searches for “Teen Porn” have more than tripled between 2005–2013. Total searches for teen–related porn reached an estimated 500,000 daily in March 2013 — one–third of total daily searches for pornographic web sites. [23] Gail Dines, “A rare defeat for corporate lobbyists,” (August 1, 2013), http://www.counterpunch.org/ 2013/08/01/a–rare–defeat–for–corporate–lobbyists/ (accessed June 6, 2014). Dr. Dines also analyzed the content of the three most popular “porntubes,” the portals that serve as gateways to online porn, and found that they contained 18 million teen–related pages–again, the largest single genre and about one–third of the total content.
  • 30% of the Internet industry is pornography.[19] Stephen Yagielowicz, “The Internet Really is Porn,” http://www.xbiz.com/news/146703 (accessed 6/11/14). “Anthony compiled data from Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner to reveal that XVideos is currently the largest adult website, boasting 4.4 billion page views per month; with other adult sites, such as LiveJasmin, YouPorn, Tube8 and Pornhub all commanding vast expanses of market share, ‘that dwarf almost everything except the Googles and Facebooks of the Internet.’” “. . . that sets adult sites apart from non–adult sites; with Anthony comparing a 15–20 minute average porn site visit to a three–to–six minute visit on a news site as evidence of adult’s stickiness. . . . Anthony states that‘s while the amounts vary, typical adult websites contain 50 to 200 terabytes of porn and are responsible for nearly a third of all Internet traffic.’” “Anthony stated, ‘It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30 percent of the total data transferred across the Internet.’” See Sebastin Anthony, “Just how big are porn sites?” Extreme Tech (Apr.4 2012), http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123929–just–how–big–are–porn–sites.
  • The online porn industry makes over $3,000 per second. [20] Ibid.
  • Mobile porn is expected to reach $2.8 billion by 2015. [21] Juniper Research, “Videochat and subscription services to drive mobile adult revenues to $2.8bn by 2015, Juniper Report finds,” Oct. 14, 2010. http://www.juniperresearch.com/viewpressrelease.php?pr=210 (accessed December 27, 2012).
  • The United States is the largest producer and exporter of hardcore pornographic DVDs and web material. [22] http://familysafemedia.com/pornography_statistics.html#important_countries(accessed June 6, 2014). Pornographic web pages by country are U. S. 244,661,900(89%) and Germany 10,030,200 (4%).
  • Of the 304 scenes analyzed, 88.2% contained physical aggression, principally spanking, gagging, and slapping, while 48.7% of scenes contained verbal aggression, primarily name–calling. Perpetrators of aggression were usually male, whereas targets of aggression were overwhelmingly female. [24] Ana Bridges, et al., “Violence Against Women,” Sage 16, no. 10 (October 2010): 1065–1085. This current study analyzes the content of popular pornographic videos with the objectives of updating depictions of aggression, degradation, and sexual practices and comparing the study’s results to previous content analysis studies. Findings indicate high levels of aggression in pornography in both verbal and physical forms.
  • A Google search for ‘bestiality’ generated 2.7 million returns. (Google-accessed April 28, 2014).
  • 30% of the Internet industry is pornography. [18] Stephen Yagielowicz, “The Internet Really is Porn,” http://www.xbiz.com/news/146703 (accessed 6/11/14). “Anthony compiled data from Google’s Double Click Ad Planner to reveal that Videos is currently the largest adult website, boasting 4.4 billion page views per month; with other adult sites, such as LiveJasmin, YouPorn, Tube8 and Pornhub all commanding vast expanses of market share, ‘that dwarf almost everything except the Googles and Facebooks of the Internet.’” “…that sets adult sites apart from non-adult sites; with Anthony comparing a 15-20 minute average porn site visit to a three-to-six minute visit on a news site as evidence of adult’s stickiness. . . . Anthony states that ‘while the amounts vary, typical adult websites contain 50 to 200 terabytes of porn and are responsible for nearly a third of all Internet traffic.’” “Anthony stated, ‘It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30 percent of the total data transferred across the Internet.’” See Sebastin Anthony, “Just how big are porn sites?” Extreme Tech, http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123929-just-how-big-are-porn-sites.
  • The United States is the largest producer and exporter of hard core pornographic DVDs and web material, followed by Germany. Ibid.
  • A Google Trends analysis indicates that searches for “Teen Porn” have more than tripled between 2005-2013. Total searches for teen-related porn reached an estimated 500,000 daily in March 201— one-third of total daily searches for pornographic web sites.
  • A Google search for ‘bestiality’ generated 2.7 million returns. (http://familysafemedia.com/pornography_statistics.html#important_countries)
  • 43 percent of those surveyed started to view porn between the ages of 11 and 13, 47 percent spend between 30 minutes and three hours a day watching porn. (Study exposes secret world of porn addiction, University Of Sydney, May 2012)
  • A longitudinal study following 10–15-year-olds over a period of three years found that exposure to violent pornography predicted a nearly six-fold increase in self-reported sexually aggressive behavior later on. To be very clear: violent content is not a small subset of the pornography kids are seeing. (NIH, 2011)
  • A recent content analysis of the 50 best-selling adult videos revealed that across all scenes:
    • 3,376 verbal and/or physically aggressive acts were observed.
    • On average, scenes had 11.52 acts of either verbal of physical aggression, ranging from none to 128.
    • 48 percent of the 304 scenes analyzed contained verbal aggression, while more than 88 percent showed physical aggression.
    • 72 percent of aggressive acts were perpetrated by men.
    • 88.2% of top-rated porn scenes contain physical aggression (spanking, gagging, slapping, etc.); 48.7% contain verbal aggression (name calling). Perpetrators were usually male,
    • 94 percent of aggressive acts were committed against women. (Bridges, A., Wosnitzer)
    • R., Scharrer, E., Sun, C., & Liberman, R. (in press). Aggression and sexual behavior in best-selling pornography: A content analysis update. Violence Against Women.)
  • Findings from the Youth Internet Safety Survey indicate that 15% of 12-17 year olds have purposefully looked at x-rated material online.
  • Data from the PEW Internet and American Life Project suggest that 70% of 15-17 year old Internet users accidently view pornography "very" or "Somewhat" often.
  • Men who view pornography are more likely to show an increased behavioral intent to rape, and are more likely to believe rape myths. Foubert, JD; Brosi MW; Bannon, RS. “Pornography Viewing amoung Fraternity Men: Effects on Bystander Intervention, Rape Myth Acceptance and Behavioral Intent to Commit Sexual Assult,” Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, 2011; 18(4): 212-231, at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10720162.2011.625552#.VLGJH2sfrtQ
  • The words "sex" and "porn" rank fourth and sixth among the top ten most popular search terms. [15] Symantec. (10 August 2009). School's Out and Your Kids are Online: Do you know what they've been searching for this summer? Cupperton, CA.