Women Don’t Like Porn According To This Dodgy Research

In 2011 a book was published that claimed to reveal essential differences between men and women based on what porn searches they did. A Billion Wicked Thoughts by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam gathered data from search aggregate sites like Alexa and used them to “prove” their pre-existing assumption that women didn’t really like sex and just weren’t visual.

Frustratingly, they decided to use For The Girls as part of their “proof”, using audience statistics from Alexa and Quantcast to assert that our traffic was low and that half our members were gay.

I wrote a rather angry blog post in response to that here and it still applies.

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So, what do you know, they’re at it again in that highly reputable (*cough*) magazine Psychology Today.

In fact, there appears to be two fundamental truths about women and porn:

Fact #1: Most women don’t like porn.

Fact #2: But those women who do, tend to like the same kind of porn that men do.

…

There have only been two enduring and profitable websites featuring porn targeted exclusively at women (sites the consciously try to cater to the tastes of heterosexual women and avoid catering to the interests of gay men): sssh.com and ForTheGirls.com, and at the best of times they each get less than 1/100^th of the traffic of the leading porn sites targeting men. These are sites that have been honing their business model for years (for almost two decades in the case of sssh.com), trying to develop porn that appeals to women, and each of the two women who have run the sites are completely dedicated to their  female subscriber base, and yet they seem to have maxed out the potential international paying audience for the material somewhere under 50,000 women total.

I’ve left a comment on that site. I’m reposting part of it here.

Ogi Ogas has no actual statistics to back up his assertions. He never spoke to us about our traffic or our membership numbers, he has no statistics to back up his assertions about our site. His research is based on the dodgy numbers at Alexa which does not represent how most people search.

For The Girls has been online since 2003, Sssh.com since 2002 (not 20 years as he says).

It is NOT a fact that “women aren’t visual” – various research (e.g. Bailey, Northwestern University) reveals that women are just as turned on by visual material as men. The difference lies in what they’re seeing and also in their learned cultural responses to porn. There’s been a growth in feminist porn but it’s still a minority part of the industry. You could also add that Google has done a great job of hiding porn recently, making it harder for women to find any different sorts porn beyond the free porn tube sites.

If you want ACTUAL research on women and porn, I recommend the work of Clarissa Smith and Feona Attwood. Their massive porn research project is ongoing. In 2011 it revealed that young women aged 18-25 are actually watching porn more than men their age.

I should have also added that this guy is comparing the traffic of the massive free tube sites to two independently run paysites. Apples and oranges.

Here’s the thing. I KNOW that not as many women watch porn as men overall and certainly not as many of them pay for it. All of the statistics I’ve gathered since I’ve started my porn career state this. What I don’t accept is that this is proof of some fundamental sex difference based in the brain. I don’t accept the idea that “women aren’t visual”, I don’t accept the idea that women like sex less than men and I don’t accept the idea that all women prefer written erotica to visual material.

Any research that makes these kinds of generalizations is flawed. Add to that the fact that these people don’t take into account the fact that gender is socially constructed and that women’s approach to porn is dictated partly by societal expectations of behaviour.

AND THEN add to that the idea of the male gaze and how the vast majority of porn ignores women are viewers:

It’s disappointing that these two people are allowed to continue peddling this nonsense on a major site. But I guess they have a book to sell. What I don’t appreciate is having my work misused and misrepresented to “prove” something that I fundamentally disagree with.

* The above image from the Billion Wicked Thoughts website. Nice indication of the gender stereotypes they’re selling.