Cosmopolitan surveyed 4000 men and 4000 women about their porn watching habits and the result is this graphics-heavy page that is kind of interesting and kind of frustrating. The latter is because they asked different questions of the men and women which makes it really hard to quantify exactly what’s going on here. I thought I’d focus on the women’s results since this has always been the focus of my blog.
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The majority of women surveyed were aged under 25 and 93% said they were heterosexual. Interestingly, almost three quarters said they didn’t watch porn all that often. So I guess you could say this survey reflects young, straight women’s habits, albeit they are Western, Cosmo-reading ciswomen who really aren’t into porn (and there’s no definition of what “porn” is). Not sure this hits many targets in the scientific sense but statistics on women and porn are still rare I’ll take whatever info I can get.
The most interesting piece of info on that Cosmo page is reflected in the graphic above: what women look at when watching porn. In seeking to create films that reflect a female gaze, I’m trying to reflect what’s happening in that pie chart. When I make my couples films, I do my best to focus on both partners because that’s what I want to see. It’s good to know I’m not alone in this. Perhaps more frustrating is that they didn’t ask men the same question (or didn’t present the two questions concurrently).
There’s a glaring discrepancy in the question “How much same-sex porn do you watch?” because apparently 63.6% of men say they’ve never watched it. Apparently mainstream “lesbian” porn doesn’t count as “same sex” porn to men. In any case, almost half of women said they sometimes watch same sex porn. Nice to know the average Cosmo reader is up for diversity.
Cosmo women also aren’t so keen on being an amateur porn star with only 1.5% willing to do a sex tape for public release. Only 12% said they preferred BDSM porn to anything else.
Almost all the other questions to women seem to be concerned with how they felt about their partner’s use of porn. Despite the questions being slanted towards suggesting that women should police the porn use of their partner, it seems the majority of women either don’t care as long as he keeps it to himself or are happy to watch it with him.
I have to say, it seems a great shame to go to all the trouble of interviewing 4000 women and only offering the information on display on this page. Perhaps the questions were more detailed. But then again, it’s Cosmo and their main aim was a click-bait, graph-heavy page such as I’ve just sent you to. Anyway, I’ll squirrel this bit of info away into my ever-growing collection of stats on women and porn.