You already know that everything under the sun is available as Internet porn. But in a new book, two scientists investigate what our online porn searches say about human sexuality. Their work isn’t without its problems, but they turn up some pretty interesting data on age, body size — and dicks.
In A Billion Wicked Thoughts, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam examine people’s Internet porn preferences through data from search engines like Dogpile and AOL and porn sites like Fantasti.cc and PornHub. They also look at depictions of sex and love in fanfiction and romance novels. In addition to a fascinating array of charts and examples, they offer some pretty pat — and often unsupported — assertions about men’s and women’s sexuality. I could spend a whole post critiquing their statements on gender and the brain (many of which are called into question by Cordelia Fine’s excellent Delusions of Gender) or poking holes in generalizations like, “Men do not have sexual cues relating to their self.” But I’m less interested in what’s wrong with A Billion Wicked Thoughts than in what’s cool about it: a bunch of fascinating facts about porn. A sampling:
Women look at Internet porn, but they’re much less likely to pay for it.
Ogas and Gaddam write,
The most popular paysites featuring adult videos, including Brazzers, Bang Bros, and Reality Kings, typically attract an audience that is around 75 percent men. Of course, that does mean that one out of four visitors is a woman — a minority, though a significant minority. But when it comes to actually paying for porn, the gender gap widens into an abyss. According to CCBill, the billing service most commonly used by the online adult industry, only 2 percent of all subscriptions to pornography sites are made on credit cards with women’s names. In fact, CCBill even flags female names as potential fraud, since so many of these charges result in an angry wife or mother demanding a refund for the misuse of her card.
MILFs are as popular as nineteen-year-olds.
It’s true that “youth” is one of the most popular search terms in Internet porn. But when Ogas and Gaddam looked at searches for specific ages, they found something interesting — while teens were indeed popular, so were older women:
Though the popularity of adult women doesn’t quite reach the stratospheric heights of teens, it’s worth observing that more men search for fifty-year-olds than search for nineteen-year-olds. There is a rather shocking number of searches for underage women, but you may be equally surprised to discover there is significant erotic interest in sixty- and seventy-year-olds.
The authors note, amusingly, that “almost no academic research has been done investigating the appeal of MILFs.” However, they speculate that interest in MILF porn may have to do with the older performers’ perceived aggression and self-confidence, as well as their “large, round butts.”
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