Women's porn habits are changing, here's why

Much like listening to the Backstreet Boys or scrolling through the Daily Mail’s celebrity sidebar of shame, watching a little porn now and again is something that many women indulge in, but few are prepared to admit to. After all, porn is meant to promote unrealistic expectations, objectify women and all-in-all be pretty degrading, isn’t it? So surely women can’t possibly be enjoying it more than ever? Well, according to 2017's year-in-review figures from two porn sites, Pornhub and xHamster, yes they really can. Not only that, but they know exactly what they want too.

According to both sites, women now make up 26 per cent of users globally, a number that has been rising consistently for the past few years. Pornhub received 28.5 billion visits to their site last year and the number of women logging on increased by 10 per cent in America and 15 per cent in the UK. But it's Indian women who are the fastest-growing group, with an astonishing 129 per cent increase in visits. Russian women, it seems, needed a little more convincing, as they were the only country in the top 20 to see a decrease.

Credit: Pornhub

In line with this increase in female users, one of the categories to witness an upsurge in demand is female-friendly porn, with “Porn for Women” being the most frequently trending search of 2017, witnessing a year-on-year increase of 1,400 per cent. Typically characterised by less male dominance and more of a focus on female pleasure than traditional porn, it marks a shift away from the portrayal of women in porn as simply the ‘givers’ and tends to include more, shall we say, realistic body images. So long impossibly-fake tits and embarrassingly vocal moans.

So what else are women looking at? Well, while not all users reveal their gender, for those that have definitely identified as women in their profiles, one of the quickest rising search terms was “cheerleaders”, with “lesbian” and “threesome” also ranking in the top five. For the first year, the term “anal” fell out of favour with women, being replaced instead by “lesbian squirt”. A perhaps surprising entry to the top 15 list was the term “gang bang”.  

The changes in what women search for online have been put down to a shifting cultural landscape, with women more determined to make their voices heard: “2017 seems to have been the year where women have come forward to express their desires more openly,” commented Dr. Laurie Betito, sex therapist and director of the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Centre. And she believes the trend is only going to continue: “Women are feeling more empowered and they have found their voice. This is a sign of things to come.”

Credit: Pexels

So what about wider searches overall? (Don’t fib, you were curious). Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, girl-on-girl porn is still the most frequently sought type of porn, with “lesbian” being the top category for the third year running. However, the use of this search term isn’t strictly limited to a male audience, despite Betito labelling this the number one fantasy for the site’s male users: “For women that have a soft fantasy or curiosity, lesbian porn allows them to explore that part of their sexuality without risk.”

In a sign of the times, demand for raunchy robots has also risen, with the use of the term "Virtual Reality" moving up a massive 14 spots in 2017. Hentai, a subculture of Japanese manga, which contains animated and explicitly sexual characters or acts, has soared, taking the number two spot globally. In Canada, the US and the UK, “step mom” is also still a hugely popular search. And in a completely irrelevant (but really quite bemusing) insight, Fidget Spinner Porn and Rick and Morty parody porn also performed extremely well - to be honest, I have no idea what either of these entail, but something tells me I really shouldn't Google them at work.

Credit: Pornhub

But back to the ladies. While the Pornhub stats can’t tell us exactly how women are consuming their porn, a 2015 survey by the magazine Marie Claire, which spoke to over 2,000 women, found that a third of women watched some porn every week. However, just three per cent of women said that they regularly tune in with their partner, with 66 per cent saying they "always" watch it alone. And as you may expect, this shift towards more female-friendly porn has given rise to a global increase in vibrator sales, with business market analysts Technavio predicting that if current trends continue, the industry will see a 15 per cent rise in vibrator sales by 2020.

As these trends show, there is a rapidly increasing demand for porn that lines up with the way women approach sex and the things they actually want to see - a demand that is just starting to be fulfilled by the industry. But rather than associate this upsurge with women suddenly waking up to the idea of porn, we should probably see it more as a sign that women are more content than ever to take their sexuality into their own hands, so to speak. After all, female sexuality is nothing new, and it's about time that the porn industry finally caught up with the idea that *shock horror* women like to masturbate too.