All About Porn: Part 1

Facts, figures, and how it affects teens

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Summary for Busy Sapiens

This is Part One of a two-part series on porn. Today, we’ll cover basic facts and figures surrounding porn, as well as the research on its prevalence and effects among teens. Next week in Part Two, we’ll discuss how on earth to talk to kids about it.

• Between 40-70% of men and 30-40% of women have watched porn in the past year

• Most studies suggest 30-65% of teens have been exposed to porn in their lifetime

• Porn is not “addictive” in the same way as drugs, but a small number of people may use it compulsively

• We have some evidence that adolescents’ viewing of porn—especially when it is violent or degrading—can be harmful. But some of what we hear about porn’s negative effects may be overstated.

• The good news: talking to teens about porn can make a difference. The bad news: very few parents are actually talking to their kids about porn.

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I have a distinct memory of being 10 years old, sitting on a noisy, metal foldout chair in a dark auditorium with friends, our moms sitting behind us. This was it. It was time to become a woman. 

Puberty Movie Night was an annual tradition, sponsored by the elementary schools in our town. All the local fifth graders had traveled, with a parent, to sit in one of two rooms (separated by gender, of course) to watch a VHS tape about puberty and sex. I remember very little about the movie, beyond the upbeat electronic PBS-style music, and the uproarious laughter that filled the room when the narrator said “penis.” 

I remember, at the time, wondering why it was necessary to gather all of the town’s fifth graders and parents together for this event. Why this had to happen in such a public space. Why each child then had to sit, in a cold sweat, next to their parent for the never-ending drive home. 

I still have many questions about how this all went down—particularly for the parents, who were forced to sit next to a bunch of people they barely knew and watch a detailed breakdown of the male reproductive system. 

But I now also see the hidden genius. Those post-Puberty Night car rides home were likely more important than the movie itself. Talking openly about things we don’t usually talk about encourages conversation, critical thinking, and better decision-making. By making private topics public, they become less taboo. 

And so, without further ado, let’s talk about porn!

There’s a lot to unpack here, so we’ve got a two-parter. Today, we have an overview of facts and figures surrounding porn, and we’ll cover the research on its prevalence and effects among teens. Next week, we’ll be back to discuss how on earth to talk to your kids about it.

Let’s start with some basic facts and figures

The takeaway: there is a lot of porn online, and many adults watch it. 

• Here we’re using the term porn, i.e., pornography, to refer to videos (or photos) of sexual behavior that can be accessed freely online. This is sometimes called “mainstream” porn.

• Two of the most popular porn sites, Pornhub and XVideos, rank in the top 15 most visited sites on the Internet (right behind giants like Wikipedia and Facebook). 

• In May 2022, Xvideos received 3.3 billion visits. For comparison, Amazon received only 2.4 billion.

• Porn use is common among adult men. A recent review suggests that over 80% of men have watched porn in their lives, with 40-70% viewing in the past year. Roughly half of men ages 18-25 watch porn weekly. 

• Among women, the numbers are a bit less clear, but U.S. surveys estimate 30-40% of women ages 18-39 watched porn in the past year, and 16-19% in the past week.

• Pornhub is visited by 130 million people per day. In 2021, 80% of all its traffic came from mobile devices; 15% from desktops, and 4% from tablets.

Surely Pornhub doesn’t employ a full data science team to analyze user traffic and searches?

Why, yes. Yes it does. Pornhub’s  in-house data science team writes an “Insights” blog sharing recent stats, including an annual Year in Review [note: maybe don’t click these links at work]¹. Because I can’t resist a good statistical analysis, I’m going to share a few of these “insights” here. But because I’d also like to be able to show my face on future departmental Zoom calls, I’ll keep this to a minimum. 

• Last year’s most searched term on Pornhub was “hentai.” According to the site: “In Japanese culture, hentai can refer to any sort of sexual fetish. But around the world it most often describes the pornographic form of anime, a style of Japanese film and television animation.”

• Pornhub reports differences in searches across Apple vs. Android devices. For example, “car sex” is 170% more popular on Apple vs. Android, while “pokemon” is 111% more popular on Android.

• During the October 2021 Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outage, traffic to Pornhub increased by over 10%.

• Last year’s top searches differ by state. Most cannot be repeated here, but a few of the tamer (and more confusing) results: Alaskans are more likely to search “morning sex,” and those in Washington, D.C. more often search “vintage” (?)

• In 2017, Pornhub published the most common misspelled searches on their site by state. I cannot get over the fact that across a number of states, the most common search—remember, this is a website literally called Pornhub—was “porm.” 

Is porn addictive?

There is debate about whether excessive porn use should be described as an “addiction.” This debate mirrors the larger conversation around “behavioral addictions,” or addictions to behaviors (like shopping or eating chocolate), rather than substances (like alcohol or drugs). Only one behavioral addiction, Gambling Disorder, is officially recognized by U.S. psychologists in their handbook of mental illnesses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). No porn addiction is listed for now.

The current research suggests that porn is not “addictive” in the same way as drugs. But a small number of people may use it compulsively, and this can be very distressing to those people and the people in their lives. A 2019 review suggests that roughly 1% of women and 4% of men describe themselves as addicted to porn.

So, a lot of adults watch porn. What about teens?

It’s one thing to talk about legal, consenting adults with fully formed frontal lobes choosing to watch porn. It’s entirely another to talk about teens doing so. Questions about porn are some of the most common ones I get when it comes to teens’ tech use. 

So, let’s break it down. Most popular porn sites display a pop-up asking users to verify (i.e., click “yes”) that they are at least 18 years of age before entering the site. This is because in many countries, including the U.S., it is illegal to show porn to someone under the age of 18. These types of pop-ups are, of course, easy to bypass.²

So, how many teens are actually seeing porn?

• Estimates vary across studies depending on definitions used, but most find that somewhere between 30-65% of teens have been exposed to online porn. 

• Intentional viewing (i.e., teens seeking it out) is generally a bit lower (roughly 20-40% of teens) than unintentional exposure (e.g., stumbling on it though a mistyped search; roughly 40-65% of teens). See this table for a full breakdown of studies and prevalence rates. 

• These numbers are almost universally higher among older versus younger teens, and among boys compared to girls 

• Here’s a 2019 study of 1,142 kids and their parents in the U.K. This chart shows us that 51% of 11-13 year olds have been exposed to porn, and 79% of 16-17 year olds have. Note: these numbers may be a bit high given the liberal definition of porn (“pictures or videos that would count as pornography”)

  

• You may have seen the numbers from this 2021 U.S. study floating around. It found that 70.3% of 14- to 18-year-olds had viewed porn (84% of boys and 57% of girls). These numbers come from a nationally representative survey. They are likely also inflated, because questions about porn exposure were only asked of teens who reported that they had ever had sex (21% of the total sample). This is a biased subsample, because these teens are likely already more sexually advanced than their peers. 

• Important: studies nearly universally show that parents underestimate whether their kids have been exposed to porn. In the U.K. study, for example, only 25% of parents thought their teens had seen porn, when 63% actually had. 

That’s…a lot. But wait, is porn actually bad for teens?

Let’s start with the punchline. Then we’ll talk about the data.

For younger children and tweens—those under age 12 or so—it seems clear, from both from a research and common sense perspective, that exposure to porn can be distressing and harmful. 

For teens, this question is a bit more complicated. We don’t have conclusive research on the topic—likely, in part, because this is not an easy thing to study³—and the extent of harms caused by teens’ viewing pornography may be somewhat overstated in the alarmist headlines that pop up when you Google “effects of porn on teens.” 

But my takeaway is this: We do have some evidence that adolescents’ viewing pornography can be harmful, and for this reason, I think we need to take it seriously. We can be “sex-positive”—recognizing that teens’ sexual exploration is a natural and healthy part of their development—while also recognizing potential problems with mainstream porn.

Here’s what we know:

• A 2016 systematic review, covering two decades of research and 58 studies, suggests that adolescents’ porn use is associated with more more sexual objectification of partners, more stereotypical beliefs about gender roles in sex, and more sexual aggression.

• This speaks to some of the primary concerns about porn: that it can create unrealistic ideas about sex; send confusing messages about consent; encourage degradation of women, racial minorities, and other groups; and depict unhealthy (or total lack of) communication and safe sexual practices. 

• However, the review also finds methodological shortcomings in these studies—namely, the vast majority are unable to determine cause and effect. That is, we don’t know whether teens who are already more prone to, say, engage in sexually aggressive behavior are simply more likely to seek out porn, or whether viewing porn caused them to act in sexually aggressive ways.

• Some longitudinal evidence suggests that teens’ intentional exposure to violent porn—but not nonviolent porn—is associated with later sexually aggressive behavior. This is important because much of the porn that’s freely available online can be aggressive, violent, or derogatory.

• Porn may influence teens’ (and adults’) sexual behaviors through the development of “sexual scripts,” or ideas about how people should act in sexual situations. The 3AM Model suggests that this can happen in three ways: Acquisition (porn users ‘acquire’ sexual scripts they didn’t know about before); Activation (sexual scripts that users already knew about get reinforced), and Application (sexual scripts are encouraged by normalizing and reinforcing them).

• Remember, porn isn’t addictive in the same way as drugs, but a small number of teens may use it compulsively. A 2021 study of 14- to 17-year-olds who had used porn in their lifetime (note: not a sample of all teens, just those who have already used porn) found that 10% of them experienced “problematic” porn use (i.e., porn use that is uncontrollable, distressing, and interferes with daily life). Teens who were first exposed to porn at a younger age were more likely to develop problematic use. 

So what do I do?

For younger children and tweens (and maybe early teens), it’s a good idea to set parental controls on any devices or browsers they use to avoid exposure.

As teens get older, it gets more complicated. We just saw that prevalence rates for exposure to porn, especially for older teens, are high, and parental controls won’t work forever. 

Porn sites themselves should, in my mind, be doing a lot more to prevent youth from accessing them. In the meantime, if you’re looking for concrete steps you can take, the most effective thing we can do as parents is talk to our kids about porn, helping them to develop “porn literacy,” so that if and when they are exposed, we can mitigate potential harms.   

• The good news: parent communication about porn with teens can make a difference. Studies suggest parent communication can limit negative effects of teens’ porn-viewing, such as risks of engaging in unprotected sex.

• The bad news: very few parents are actually communicating with their teens about porn. In one study—full disclosure: I co-authored this one—nearly 60% of teens reported having viewed porn in the past year, but only 17% reported having talked to their parents about porn.

• These low rates of communication are understandable. These can be really tough, uncomfortable conversations, and parents get virtually zero guidance on whether and how to have them. Plus, as parents in the digital age, online porn is a new thing we have to deal with (add it to the list!), so we don’t have our own parents as models in having these conversations. Ugh.

• Note: there’s robust evidence that abstinence-only sex education does not work. When it comes to porn, the same principles likely apply. Though you might share with your teen your views, and these views might include something like I don’t want you watching porn, this is probably not going to be enough. We need to provide them with information on what they might see, why it might be problematic, and how it fits (or does not fit) into our larger understanding of healthy sexual relationships. 

And that’s all we have for Part One. In Part Two, we’ll get into the specifics on how to talk to kids about porn. What age should you do it? What should you say? We’ll even discuss ideas for exactly what words to use—because I know the thought of having this conversation can be even scarier than Puberty Night.

Til next time, techno sapiens!

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Further Reading

• What porn does to teen brains—and how to keep it off their devices by Julie Jargon in The Wall Street Journal. This week’s Family & Tech column covers what we do and don’t know about porn and the teen brain. Plus an overview of how to set parental controls.

• More tips for blocking inappropriate websites and setting parental controls from Common Sense Media.

• The fight to hold Pornhub accountable by Sheelah Kolhatkar in The New Yorker. A detailed look at the legal battle aiming to stop Pornhub from allowing nonconsensual videos on the site.

• What teenagers are learning from online porn by Maggie Jones in The New York Times. A deep dive on the ways that porn may be influencing teens’ ideas about sex, and how Porn Literacy classes can make a difference.

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1. How does one explain to colleagues that the appearance of Pornhub in their search history was, actually, to review the company’s statistical analyses on user traffic and search? Asking for a friend.

2. Some countries have taken legislative action to require porn sites to verify users’ age. For example, the UK’s Online Safety Bill would legally require porn sites to ensure that visitors are at least 18 years old.

3. More on why porn use in teens is a difficult topic to study: 1) Teens aren’t exactly thrilled to openly discuss their porn-watching habits with a stranger; 2) Parents aren’t exactly thrilled to agree to allow their teens to discuss their porn-watching habits with a stranger; 3) Experimental studies—in which a group of teens is, for example, randomly assigned to watch porn—are obviously out of the question; 4) Researchers are humans, and not all humans feel comfortable detailing popular porn categories to a room full of their colleagues.