Watching porn is a totally normal and healthy activity, whether you're single or in a relationship. And though it's long been considered a male-dominated interest, we shouldn't underestimate the amount of women who watch porn.
According to porn site xHamster, female viewership has risen by 25.1 percent worldwide and 24.2 percent in the United States in the past two years alone. That means that a lot more women are signing on to get off. In fact, female users now make up a total of 18 percent of page views across all of xHamster, leading them to create a fund to support women filmmakers.
"We've been watching the rise in female viewers for years, but the recent growth is pretty phenomenal," Alex Hawkins, vice president of xHamster, tells Bustle. "Other than that, we've have been surprised only by the fact that other companies seem to disregard [women] as consumers. When we first started the company, the conventional wisdom was that women didn't watch hardcore porn at all, or if they did, it was only to please their boyfriends. ... If we weren't dealing with so much stigma, and were creating content that was targeted at a female audience, I think we'd see more women involved."
It's a totally false stereotype that women sit around watching porn that's basically a romance novel. "Women's searches also overturn conventional wisdom in that they are not any softer or story driven than men's searches," Hawkins says. "In fact, they outpace men in categories like 'gangbang' and 'spanking,' and are near parity for searches for 'anal.' We also see them change more over time, as more women come online, and from more places. The male market is much more stable, but as more women come online, the conversation changes. It's an audience in flux, and that makes it exciting. We expect as we bring more women filmmakers online, that will change even more."
So what are women actually watching? These were the categories with the highest percentage of female viewership on xHamster.
1Cunnilingus: 37.8%
Welp, there it is. The highest proportion of female viewers was in the cunnilingus category — a reminder that sex beyond penetrative sex is very important, if not essential, for female pleasure.
2Vibrator: 31.3%
Many of us are using one while we look at porn, so it's probably no surprise that we like watching someone use one as well.
3Eating Pussy: 30.5%
I'm not sure how this is different from cunnilingus, but I'm still here for it.
4Fingering: 30.0%
OK, so there is a stunning lack of penis-in-vagina penetration on the top of this list. There's a lot of porn (and sex) that goes far beyond that — and women are loving it.
5Medical: 29.6%
I was surprised to see medical porn on the list, but maybe that's just because I don't think of it as a large category, at all. But medical sex is often quite intense — and women have been shown to really like rough porn — so maybe it's not so surprising after all.
6Brutal Sex: 26.7%
Since women like rough porn, it's not surprising to see a high proportion of women watching the "brutal sex" category.
7Lesbians: 26.2%
Lesbian porn has long been popular among both lesbian and straight female viewers, so it makes sense that it would make the list.
Watching porn is a regular part of many of women's lives, so it's nice to see more and more data showing how much women enjoy it. A lot of women watch porn — and some women watch a lot of porn — and it's time to celebrate that and make more of what they like.
