It’s been common knowledge for decades that “men like porn more than women.” For proof, many people have simply pointed to the approximate 80%/20% split between men and women when it comes to who’s watching porn, worldwide. Or the fact that most porn is made for male audiences, while romance novels are written primarily for women. Or, hey, how about the old wive’s tale about how men are meant to “spread their seed” while women are picky about sexual partners—that means men like to watch lots of different people going at it, while women are just less interested. Right?
Over the years, scientists have taken it further by studying brain activity while subjects look at porn. And, while some results have backed up the consensus that men like porn more, others haven’t borne out that hypothesis. The findings were, overall, conflicting.
So a recent study published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy for Science) decided to get serious about the issue. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany reviewed the results from 61 neuroimaging studies of arousal, which included scans of 1,850 people’s brains while they looked at sexy images. And, it turns out, we’ve all been pretty wrong all this time.
The new study found “robust quantitative evidence that the neuronal circuitries activated by visual sexual stimuli are independent of biological sex,” the researchers wrote. In other words, everybody is just as turned on by porn as everybody else. “This result challenges not only some of the previous studies but also the common public perception that men respond stronger to porn or even like sex more than women,” Hamid Noori, the study’s lead researcher, told The Independent.
All those old justifications for thinking men like porn more? Well, Noori told the New Scientist, “There are differences in behaviour—the number of men going to porn sites is roughly 80 per cent of the consumers. But men and women respond the same way at the brain level to visual sexual stimuli. What we do with it afterwards is what brings the difference.”
And after all, most porn is made for a male audience, since we’ve all been bumbling around thinking women don’t like it as much. And though plenty of women do watch porn—as study after study after study has shown—the marketplace just isn’t as appealing to women as it is to men after decades of pursuing the male dollar. Furthermore, with all this “common knowledge” about women not liking smut hanging around, there’s been a much bigger stigma against women who do enjoy watching adult entertainment, which holds many back from enjoying porn as much as their male counterparts do.
But, uh, we think it’s important to point out that people who make pornography for women have been telling the world that porn turns everybody on for literally decades. From Candida Royalle to Angie Rowntree to Erika Lust, porn for women has been a thriving subset of the adult entertainment industry since the 1980s. Maybe now it’s finally time to pay more attention to the people making porn for women—and the people watching it.
