Porn Facts.

“Pornography satisfies every one of the prerequisites for neuroplastic change. When pornographers boast that they are pushing the envelope by introducing new, harder themes, what they don’t say is that they must, because their customers are building up a tolerance to the content.”
- Norman Doidge. M.D.

11% of American men and 3% of American women self-reported in 2019 that they considered themselves addicted to pornography.
Regarding personal feelings for or against pornography, a separate study from 2019, showed that 14% of Americans agree or strongly agree that pornography is morally wrong, while 51% disagree or strongly disagree.
When asked if individuals believed pornography is “very bad” for society, 37% of baby boomers agree, whereas only 14% of today’s young adults agree, which reveals a 23 percentage point decrease between the generations.
21% of men agree that pornography is “very bad” while 39% of women agree.
In the 1970s, an average of 29.6% of men and 45.2% of women believed that pornography should be illegal. In 2012, those percentages dropped to 18.4% and 35% respectively.
According to one website, Pornhub is the fourth most visited website in the United States behind Google, Youtube, and Facebook. Pornhub totaled over 2.14 billion visits during a single month in 2023—more than Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest, and Tiktok combined.
Results from two separate surveys, one in Australia and one in the US, can be taken together to conclude that 70–80% of men and 32–42% of women in both nations watched pornography in the last year.
58% of Americans have watched pornography at least once in their lifetime, and 27% watched it in the past month.
1 out of 3 Americans seek porn at least monthly.
In the United States, a survey found that the most active pornography users are 18–34 years old. It also showed that 57% of young adults actively seek out pornography frequently (monthly or more often). In comparison, only 29% of adults older than 25 seek pornography as frequently.
Children are first exposed to pornography between the ages of 9 and 13.
In 2019, Pornhub shared its annual statistics: 42 billion visitors in a year, 115 million a day, 5 million an hour, and almost 80,000 a minute.
A significant body of research does show that pornographic content has the potential to stimulate a user’s brain in ways that resemble addictive brain patterns.
20% of all mobile searches are for pornography.
The porn industry has experienced a 12.6% increase in revenue per year between 2018 and 2023.84 In contrast, the sports industry only had a constant 6% increase in revenue during the same time period.
Top content creators on Onlyfans are earning anywhere from $6–20 million a year. As such, people are using their content: Onlyfans has 500,000 new users daily and 15 million new users monthly.
When asked about their sex life satisfaction, approximately 41% of men who had not watched pornography the day before reported high satisfaction, whereas only 26% of men who had watched pornography during the same time period reported the same.
For young women, the research found that watching extensive amounts of sexual content on TV correlated with an increased chance of teen pregnancy. The survey specifically concluded that participants who were in the 90th percentile for watching sex on TV were twice as likely to experience teen pregnancy as participants who were in the 10th percentile.
One recent US study analyzed a sample of pornography videos for themes of male aggression and female submission. Results showed that 88.2% of the videos involved some type of rough sex (spanking, gagging, and so forth), and 49% of the videos showed the female actor complying with and enjoying the aggression.
A 2019 study found that participants who reported a higher frequency of viewing pornography were more likely to have a history of engaging in rough sex and to report a higher desire for participating.
In a 2018 study, without pornography, a 20-year-old had a 6% chance of getting divorced or separated; with pornography, they had a 51% chance.
40% of female porn performers had experience with rape.
These adult film performers were also 5 times as likely to be placed in foster care and twice as likely to live in poverty.