Pornhub just released their 2019 year-in-review of users’ viewing habits and, as usual, the results were fascinating. They reported an average of 115 million site visitors per day this year, with each visitor sticking around for an average of 10 minutes and 28 seconds. Users uploaded more than 6.8 million new videos—so many, in fact, that it would take 169 (hehe) years to watch all of them. That’s a lot of porn!

You can read their full report here if you’d like, but in this post, I will offer an analysis of the psychology behind some of the most popular searches.

· Overall, the most searched-for term on the site was “Japanese,” which jumped four spots from the previous year. Interestingly “Japanese” didn’t make the top 10 searches in the United States, so it wasn’t the case that this was a huge trend everywhere. Rather, most of the increase in searches for “Japanese” came from Japan, where there was a huge spike in porn traffic. This was probably driven by a few factors. One is that Pornhub is increasingly translating their videos into other languages, thereby making them more accessible to people around the world. However, another is that Japan is a culture that is in the midst of what many have referred to as a “sex recession.” As some evidence of this, Japan has one of the highest adult virginity rates in the industrialized world coupled with a very low fertility rate. With partnered sexual activity in such decline in Japan, it appears that the search for sexual gratification is increasingly moving online.

· In the United States, the single most popular search term was “lesbian” (this term was the third most popular worldwide). Why is lesbian porn so popular? For one thing, watching two women have sex is an extremely popular fantasy among straight men. Studies find that straight men have a tendency to see female same-sex behavior as highly erotic, so it makes sense that this would be a particularly popular porn genre among male users. However, lesbian porn isn’t just popular among men—it is also the most-viewed category among women! This may be because women tend to be more sexually fluid than men. Research has found that among persons who identify as heterosexual, women are more likely than men to report having experienced same-sex attraction and having masturbated to same-sex fantasies. In the analysis of 4,175 Americans’ sex fantasies I conducted for my book Tell Me What You Want, I found that 59% of women who identified as exclusively straight said that they’d had a same-sex fantasy compared to 26% of straight men. Of course, it’s also possible that women like lesbian porn for the same reasons they tend to like gay male porn: perhaps the actors seem to be enjoying the sex more, the pleasure appears more genuine, and/or the production value and plot lines are better. This explanation makes sense in light of studies finding that most women who watch gay male porn also watch lesbian porn. So perhaps lesbian porn is just more female friendly than most of the mass-produced heterosexual porn.

· In the U.S., the second most popular search term in 2019 was “hentai” (this was also the second most popular search term worldwide). For those who aren’t familiar, Pornhub offers the following definition of hentai: “a subgenre of the Japanese genres of manga and anime, containing overtly sexualized characters and sexually explicit images.” In other words, it’s a form of cartoon porn. So why is it so popular? This isn’t something that has earned much research attention (at least not yet), so we don’t know a lot about it from a scientific standpoint. However, part of the appeal may be because it offers the opportunity to depict sex acts and fantasies that might otherwise be impossible to show in mainstream porn, which means it offers a very potent form of sexual novelty. Alternatively, perhaps its appeal has more to do with the fact that it offers distraction and an escape from reality. To learn more about the psychology behind sci-fi and cartoon sex fantasies, check out this article.

· The seventh most popular search term of the year in America was “MILF” (this term was also the fourth most popular globally). Why are MILFs in such great demand? Many heterosexual men are drawn to powerful and confident women, and that’s precisely the way that women in MILF porn tend to be depicted (e.g., they’re more likely to initiate sex and take a dominant role). In my own research on sexual fantasies, I’ve found that men who are turned on more by the idea of sexual submission tend to have more MILF fantasies. So perhaps this dominance-submission dynamic is part of what’s driving so many guys to watch MILF porn. However, that’s not the entire story. I also find that men with more attachment anxiety (meaning more insecurity and fear of abandonment) have more MILF fantasies, too—so, for some men, interest in MILFs might stem from a search for security and comfort. To learn more about the psychology of men’s attraction to MILFs, check out this article.

· Overall, 32% of visitors to Pornhub in 2019 were female (a 3% increase from the previous year). The fact that men greatly outnumbered women shouldn’t be surprising, considering that virtually all research on porn has found that women say they watch less of it compared to men. However, we should be cautious about drawing too many conclusions from this gender difference. While it might be tempting to see it as evidence that women aren’t as visually aroused as men, research does not support this idea. To the contrary, studies have found that women are very much responsive to visual sexual stimuli. The gender disparity in porn viewership likely has more to do with the fact that most porn is produced by men, for men. As I discuss in Tell Me What You Want, men’s and women’s sexual fantasies differ in several important ways, so it makes sense that there probably isn’t going to be quite as much porn out there that appeals to women if men are the ones who are making most of it.

· The top-gaining category for the year was “amateur,” which increased by 108%. The growth of amateur porn is interesting from a psychological perspective because it suggests that people are increasingly wanting to see “real people” when they watch porn, as opposed to the celebrity performers who have highly unrealistic body proportions. Greater realism of the performers may be one part of the appeal; however, it could also be that amateur porn is appealing because it’s less predictable—it doesn’t follow the same script that so much mass-produced pornography does.

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