MONTREAL – Perhaps you’ve heard it sung by the Mynabirds, read it in a book by Terry Bisson or maybe heard some version of it in the context of a sports debate on TV: “Numbers don’t lie.”

This may be true, but numbers can’t control the way we use them or account for how we might research them. In other words, while numbers may never lie, they certainly can be misinterpreted.

A recent study by the Dept. of Sexology at the Université du Québec à Montréal puts forward a theory I think is probably correct — namely, there’s an “orgasm gender gap” in porn — but the means of collecting the data researchers used to support their claim is questionable.

“PornHub’s 50 most viewed videos of all time 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,” the researchers state in the study’s abstract. “Content analysis was used to code and analyze the data. Results were analyzed in light of sexual script theory and previous orgasm research. Only 18.3% of women, compared to 78.0% of men, were shown reaching orgasm.”

This all sounds scholarly enough, but here’s the rub (so to speak): The top 50 most viewed videos on Pornhub are, by definition, a function of what the Pornhub audience has wanted to see, historically, not necessarily a broad cross-section of all porn available on the market.

To be fair, conducting research of this sort is difficult in a niche-segmented environment like internet porn, and a general-interest tube site like Pornhub probably seemed like the closest thing to a random sample of porn the research team could come up with.

Had the researchers chosen to focus on the work of Erika Lust or culled their data entirely from Angie Rowntree’s Sssh.com, I suspect they would have encountered a very different result, statistically speaking, but the data would suffer from the same pre-selection defect.

Again, while I don’t doubt depictions of male orgasms are more common in porn than female orgasms, I find the researchers’ bottom line concern here a curious inversion of cause and effect.

“Results support the male performance script as evident in pornographic depictions of orgasm, as well as coital and orgasm imperatives,” the researchers stated in the abstract. “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.”

To me, this is getting things entirely backwards. Porn doesn’t “perpetuate unrealistic beliefs and expectations.” It reflects them.

Look at it this way: Do you think widespread availability of porn in 1989 was the reason the fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally made audiences laugh knowingly, or is it more likely long-existing assumptions and stereotypes having little to do with porn informed the guffawing?

How many of the top 50 Pornhub videos are focused on men receiving oral sex from women? I’m not going to retrace the researchers’ steps to find out, but the answer could speak volumes — not so much about porn in general, but about the kind of porn the site’s visitors choose to watch.

While it’s clear a larger number of women watch porn than people have long assumed, it’s equally clear the vast majority of porn still is created with male viewers in mind. Given this, is it surprising there’s a greater focus on male pleasure and male orgasms than female pleasure and orgasms? Unfair, perhaps, but not something one needs a doctorate (or an analysis of Pornhub data) to figure out.

One certainly can argue plausibly that pornographic depictions reinforce people’s preconceptions about sex and gender.

If I was an academic researching this area of human sexuality though, I might spend more time interviewing porn viewers about their attitudes and notions, and conducting empirical clinical research into the same, and less time crunching numbers from Pornhub.

Image © Maximus117