MONTREAL – In my current state of mind, I don’t know quite how to make it sound more professional, journalistic or erudite, so I’m just going to say what I feel: If I read one more article trumpeting the latest release of data from Pornhub or another study based on Pornhub’s most popular videos like such things are the fucking Rosetta Stone of deciphering the tastes, proclivities and habits of all porn viewers, I’m going to lose my shit.
Here’s a news flash for all you academics, mainstream journalists and random know-it-all blogging fuckwads: Pornhub isn’t the only, or the definitive, source for porn or data about porn and/or the habits of porn viewers.
More to the point, seeing it treated as such is irritating enough to make a relatively reasonable, occasionally sober fellow like me think that instead of writing this post, I should be out in the streets screaming, setting shit on fire and rending my shirt.
Yes, Pornhub is very popular. So is Lady Gaga but, for some strange reason, nobody looks to Lady Gaga’s audience if they want to know what’s trending among metalheads, jazz fans or bluegrass listeners.
Pornhub’s traffic numbers and brand recognition seem to have blinded an entire generation of academics and journalists to the fact there’s more to the online porn industry than one site — and more than one kind of site, for you rare scribes and sociology-practicing eggheads who manage to find other tube sites in your extensive 12-plus minutes of research into the porn industry prior to writing about it.
The latest Pornhub-based research to irritate me is a study from the University of Quebec at Montreal that looked at “PornHub’s 50 most-viewed videos of all time,” which were “viewed and coded for the frequency of male and female orgasm, orgasm-inducing sex acts (and whether activity inducing female orgasms included some form of clitoral stimulation), and auditory (verbal, vocal) and visual (bodily) indicators of orgasm.”
“Only 18.3% of women, compared to 78.0% of men, were shown reaching orgasm,” the abstract states. “Results support the male performance script as evident in pornographic depictions of orgasm, as well as coital and orgasm imperatives. As a result, representations of male and female orgasm in mainstream pornography may serve to perpetuate unrealistic beliefs and expectations in relation to female orgasm and male sexual performance.”
Do I really need to point out that on a platform like Pornhub, on which users decide what to watch based on their own desires and tastes, this data more likely reflects an existing bias on the part of the viewers, not the imparting of “unrealistic beliefs and expectations” to said viewers?
To me, this is a bit like looking at the top-50-rated sporting events of all time based on U.S.-only television ratings and concluding American football is the world’s most popular sport. Hell, considering the tendency of many people to believe their own tastes are representative of the broader world of humans, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a lot of Americans assume the Super Bowl is the most-watched sporting event. (They’d be wrong, of course — spectacularly so.)
Yes, I understand Pornhub’s numbers are global, so you might reject the analogy to American TV ratings, but consider this question: Do you know what Pornhub’s market share is of total daily porn site visits? The real, honest answer is no, you don’t, because nobody does. Real metrics regarding porn viewership are not like television ratings, which are published, measured and dissected by any number of different ad agencies, academics, broadcasters and others.
Porn site metrics, on the other hand, are self-reported, and only a small percentage of porn sites will ever make their numbers public, or will ever be asked to do so, for that matter. Since very few sites will ever reach the level of brand visibility enjoyed by Pornhub, their brands are basically invisible to reporters and researchers, who peer only shallowly into the vast sea of porn sites on the web.
In my experience, all the published estimates of the total number of online porn viewers and total number of sites visited, videos viewed, etc., are so badly flawed and unreliable, it’s not even worth referencing any of them here. As near as I can tell, they’re all what some folks call a SWAG, or “Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.”
In other words, if you’re a journalist or academic looking for a definitive source for porn data, not only won’t you find such from Pornhub, you won’t find it at all.
I don’t say this so dismissively for nothing, by the way. I spent the better part of three fucking years — between 2008 and 2012 — trying to compile reasonably accurate global porn stats from a wide variety of sources as part of a project I was working on before finally abandoning the task as utterly hopeless.
There are other problems with this latest Pornhub-based study, of course (including the rather substantial question of why these researchers think they’re so good at discerning real orgasms from faked ones without even being in the presence of the persons doing the climaxing), but the self-selecting criteria and extremely narrow data sample is fatal to the credibility of the study’s conclusions by itself, in my view.
Yes, Pornhub is popular, but it’s not the only porn site in existence, nor does its admittedly vast selection of videos serve as a comprehensive representation of the larger universe of content available to porn consumers.
Most importantly, though, if we are going to start interpreting video viewers’ individuals’ choices in what to watch as reflective of a message being sent by the materials they’re watching, which is then absorbed by the viewer, influencing them in some negative way, someone is going to have to explain to me what message was being sent and received via all those goddam “unboxing” videos a few years back and why in God’s name anyone would watch that shit.
If you need to find me to explain, I’ll be in the kitchen … making Molotov cocktails.
Image © Mats Jentoft.
