Women watched a lot more porn in 2017

Pornhub and X Hamster have published their annual reports for 2017 and both sites have found that women watched more porn in 2017 than previous years.

For instance, the number one search in 2017 on Pornhub was "Porn for Women" (up 1,400 per cent year on year), while the website noted a 359 per cent growth among female users between 2016 and 2017.

Porn for Women is Queen of search:

Picture: Pornhub

There was also a large disparity in the categories most searched for by men and women:

Picture: Pornhub

The X Hamster report noted that the top search term for women in the United States was "Daddy", while the top search term globally was "Mom".

The proportion of female visitors in the UK rose 15 per cent, comparatively low when contrasted with other national averages:

Picture: Pornhub

The X Hamster report noted that female viewership rose four per cent, and that women represent 26 per cent of the website's total users.

A YouPorn survey of 24,000 women viewers last year found that 60 percent of respondents said they watched porn a couple times a month.

Meanwhile, the UK's overall top searches looked like this:

According to the report, every five minutes Pornhub transmits more data than the entire contents of the New York Public Library's 50 million books.

More video votes were cast on Pornhub last year (120 million) than in the last US election.

However, there are some suggestions that rising porn viewerships aren't a good thing:

A study from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, found that women now sustain "unrealistic expectations" of men in bed, in part due to portrayals in pornography.

The study declared that porn was "linked to consumers’ dissatisfaction with their partners’ appearance" and that women could hold "unrealistic expectations for sexual performance".

However, detractors might say these are otherwise known as high standards and that sexual liberation and awareness is supposed to be a good thing.

Meanwhile, the relationship charity Relate say that porn increasingly features in discussions about sexual satisfaction among couples:

Relate counsellors are increasingly seeing problems with relationships and sexual functioning that are associated with the use of internet porn.

This isn’t about having a healthy sexual appetite or multiple partners but about a compulsion to keep returning to the activity which is causing them problems.

This can happen surprisingly quickly, because internet use can actually change the brain.

Either way, it's probably a good thing to distinguish between depictions of sex in porn and sex in real life.

You can read the full Pornhub insights report, here.

HT Mashable

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