According to a 2022 survey of online users in the United States, a significant percentage of men in different age groups reported watching pornography in the past month. Almost *** out of every ** respondents aged between 30 and 49 years stated they watched pornographic content in the past month. Among men aged 18 to 29 years, approximately ** percent of respondents reported watching online adult content in the past month.

According to a survey of users conducted in the United States between September and October 2022, 62 percent of male respondents reported having a habit of watching pornographic content. In comparison, 29 percent of respondents reported having had the habit of watching such type of content, while around eight percent of respondents preferred not to say.

According to a 2022 survey of users in the United States, men who watch pornography tend to report higher levels of loneliness, insecurity, and dissatisfaction with their appearance. Approximately ** percent of men who reported watching adult content in the past 24 hours said they felt lonely and isolated, while only ** percent of men who had never watched pornography reported feeling the same way. Similarly, ** percent of men who had watched adult content online in the past 24 hours said they were unhappy with their physical appearance.

In 2023, approximately ** percent of young men between ** and ** reported watching pornography once per week. In contrast, ** percent of women in the same age group reported to no consuming pornography at all.

With the most popular pornographic site visited by French millennials in 2020 being Youporn.fr, the source wanted to assess the frequency to which French men attracted to other men were watching porn. Thus, ** percent of homosexual, bisexual or "curious" heterosexuals were watching porn almost every day, compared to only *** percent of heterosexual men. Compared to these results, most of heterosexual men (** percent) watched porn more than a year ago

This statistic displays the share of people sometimes watching porn in Flanders (Belgium) in 2017, by gender. In this year, approximately half of the respondents taking part in this survey answered to sometimes watch porn. Watching porn was more popular among male participants than among female participants. Of the female respondents, roughly ********** answered to sometimes watch porn.

With the most popular pornographic site visited by French millennials in 2020 being Youporn.fr, the source wanted to assess the frequency to which French men attracted to other men were watching porn, compared to heterosexual men. Thus, ** percent of homosexual, bisexual or "curious" heterosexuals were watching porn almost every day, compared to only *** percent of heterosexual men.

According to a survey of online users conducted in January 2024 among audiences in Great Britain, almost *** in ** respondents aged between 25 and 49 years reported watching porn most days. In comparison, around ** percent of respondents aged between 18 and 24 reported watching porn content between one and three times per week. Around **** in ** respondents aged between 50 and 65 reported they did not watch porn, although they said they had accessed this type of content before.

As of December 2022, 21 percent of young male teenagers and young adults in England reported watching pornography every day or more often. By comparison, only seven percent of female teens and young adults reported watching pornographic content with the same frequency. Among young women aged between 16 and 21, 34 percent reported not having watched pornographic content at all, while 24 percent reported watching this type of content between two and six times per week.

Is porn consumed only by men? It seems that this stereotype is still partly true in 2021. In Europe, men are the main visitors of the porn website Pornhub. This can indicate that pornographic viewing remains an activity mostly done by men. However, female visitors of Pornhub in Spain and Poland accounted for 38 and 32 percent respectively of all visitors from their countries. Furthermore, more than a quarter of visitors were women in other European countries. In other words, women also appear to consume porn.

A gender-gap in frequency of porn consumption  

In 2014, French men were more frequently visiting pornographic sites than women. A quarter of responding men visited such websites at least once a week in France, whereas only three percent of women declared that they visited one in a week. For this reason, it could be discussed that even though women do consume porn, in terms of frequency men are the main consumers.

Porn consumption parallels the evolution of technology  

Long gone is the reign of magazines, videotapes and even DVDs. Nowadays, pornographic websites, like Pornhub, are leading the industry. With technology evolving, more and more people are visiting these websites on their mobile phones. In the Netherlands, such mobile phone use grew from 51 percent in 2015 to 62 percent in 2018. Similar findings were discovered in France . In spite of this, pornography remains a sensitive topic, at least in the U.S., where over half of Americans stated that porn was morally wrong.

According to a survey of French citizens conducted between ** and 18 September, 2023, ** percent of respondents reported never watching pornography online. In comparison, ** percent of respondents reported watching content on pornographic websites sometimes, while ** percent of French respondents reported doing so often.

How often do Danes watch porn? According to a representative study published in 2019, around a third of the Danish men watched porn two to six times a week in the past year. In comparison, the majority of the women in Denmark did not watch porn at all within the past year. Among the women who had watched porn within the past year, the biggest share of the respondents did so less than once a month.

This statistic presents results from a survey among 40 to 70 year olds from the United Kingdom (UK) in January 2017 on how often they use internet pornography. *** percent of those surveyed stated that they watched internet pornography **** to *** times a week. However, the vast majority said that they have never watch internet pornography.

In a survey conducted in Australia in 2021, over ** percent of young respondents aged 14 to 18 years reported that they had viewed pornography. Close to one-fifth of respondents reported that they viewed pornography weekly in the year preceding the survey.

Getting sexually aroused was the most common reason to watch porn for Danes, according to a survey from 2018. However, men were more inclined to watch porn than women if their partner wanted less sex than they did. In similar vein, nearly one in three of Danish men watching porn did not want to inform their partner, while only ** percent of the women stated the same.

Nearly 37 percent of men and 25.5 percent of women surveyed in Mexico reported an increase in their consumption of pornography during the COVID-19 pandemic, as of May 2020. Meanwhile, 35 percent of women and 23 of men surveyed in the Latin American country said they were consuming less porn during the quarantine. Nearly four out of ten respondents of both genders said that their porn consumption was the same as it was prior to the social isolation caused by the pandemic. Nearly 38 percent of Mexican participants of the survey were sharing more sexual content during the pandemic.

While the government has given up using the public identification platform France Connect to check the age of fans of online pornographic content, organizations like internet service providers and pornographic sites themselves are arousing clear mistrust of the French. Thus, in 2020, the vast majority of respondents expressed their distrust of internet service providers (** percent) or publishers of pornographic sites (** percent) to verify the majority of people wishing to consult this type of content. Likewise, ** percent of French people among regular fans of porn videos online did not trust a private service approved by the state to verify age on the basis of identity documents (like identity cards or passports).

Restriction for minors and effectiveness of measures

As the average age of watching pornography occurs as early as between the age of ** and ** for the majority of French people, the necessity to prohibit such content for minors has become important in the last years, considering the fact that the exposure to porn can be shocking for children and set irrealistic expectations of men and women. While the majority of habitual porn watchers mentioned parental control measures as being the most effective in controlling children's illicit activities, other methods such as entering credit card information proving the age of the viewer were accepted by ** percent of those questioned. Neverthless, the effectiveness of those measures was rated quite poorly, and ** percent of French people would just find another site or use a VPN to bypass the age restriction controls.

Illicit content and the dangers of consumption

One of the major dangers in surfing the web in search for sexual content is to come across child pornography. While the CNIL (National Commission on Informatics and Liberty), which is an independent French administrative regulatory body, whose mission is to ensure that data privacy law is applied to the use of personal data, recorded a whooping *** thousand content removal requests, of which more than five thousand requests were processed and content was removed. France stood in best position compared to its European neighbors in terms of child pornography content removal.

In France in 2019, the source had found a link between greater autonomy in female pleasure and a rise in the use of pornography and sex toys. Here, the sexual freedom and the expression of female autoeroticism appears to be intrinsically linked to greater access by French women to media of sexual arousal, such as films or pornographic images: one in two women (47 percent) had admitted to having already been on a pornographic site.

Pornographic consumption behavior of men

The consumption of pornographic content is much more intense among men who love men than for the rest of the male population: for more than one in ten, porn occupies a daily place in their life with 15 percent of men watching porn almost every day, against barely two percent of straight people. Generally speaking, the virtual activities involving sex are mostly carried out or consumed by exclusively homosexual men, which goes hand in hand with a much more widespread use of other arousal media such as webcams: in 2019, 48 percent of them had already seen someone showing off in front of a webcam (compared to 21 percent among straight men).

Dangers linked to pornography

Not surprisingly, while online security has been an issue increasingly raised in the past years, sexual activities involving the web can come with some dangers. Apart from a possible addiction to porn, which has been expressed by 31 percent of homosexual men, for example, the fear of the exposure of private pictures containing nude content was also a great concern for 51 percent of women. Having private explicit content exposed, which often occurs without the consent of the people involved, is referred to as "revenge porn", an act that 16 percent of people have already come across on the internet.

In 2019, the vast majority of Pornhub visitors in India were adults between the ages of 25 and 34 years old. Furthermore, the majority of the porn website visitors of about ** percent were male.According to the source, the average age of Pornhub visitors in India that year was **.

According to a survey of online users conducted in January 2024, ** percent of women in Great Britain were very unwilling to date potential partners who consumed pornography. In comparison, only ** percent of responding men reporting feeling the same. Additionally, ** percent of male respondents stated they were somewhat willing to date a partner who consumed pornography.