There is a lot of porn on the internet. But no, really, there’s a lot of porn on the internet. While that’s not exactly breaking news, it really is impressive just how much porn is out there.
According to some studies, up to 30 percent of the entire internet is made up of porn.
While that number may be somewhat overblown, other studies show that porn sites get more monthly traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined, with an average viewing time of 12 minutes. (12 whole minutes?? What are these guys, running a marathon??)
And while the assumption is that the vast majority of porn viewers are guys who are adept at navigating one-handed, you might be surprised to learn that some 76 percent of women aged 18 to 30 watch porn on the regular.
(When surveying men’s porn viewing proclivities, the researchers discovered a new mathematical concept demonstrating that percentages can go significantly higher than 100.)
But when does porn watching become an issue, especially for women and porn? Is there such a thing as female porn addiction?
Women addicted to porn
Is there a problem here?
So. You booted up your girlfriend’s computer and found that she had dozens of browser tabs open to sites with “Big, Black, and Meaty” in the title, and you aren’t any of those things. Is this a cause for concern?
Depends on who you ask.
Like all things sexual, pornography is a complicated topic. There are societal pressures pushing and pulling at us. In some communities, there’s a cultural taboo around the subject.
But in others, there’s a tendency toward openness and acceptance of the reality of sex and frank exploration of what drives our desires.
But, yeah, it’s unavoidable that when it comes to the subject of porn and especially women and pornography, there’s a metric fuck-ton of cultural baggage that comes with it – in addition to all the bodily fluids.
For starters, even the topic of women and pornography and especially the question of whether men or women addicted to porn is even a real thing is troubling to some experts in the field.
Can women be addicted to porn?
The traditional view of addiction is of course generally connected with substances like alcohol and drugs. The clinical definition of addiction is usually something along the lines of this one provided by American Psychiatric Association: “…a brain disease that is manifested by compulsive substance use despite harmful consequence.”
The professional psychiatry organization goes on to state that people with addiction disorders have distorted thinking, and that the addiction – aka substance abuse disorder – causes documented changes in the brain’s wiring related to judgment, learning, decision-making, memory and control over one’s behavior.
So, okay, fair enough. Given that definition, it’s possible to imagine how someone asking can women be addicted to porn might assume the answer points to yes – much the way your mouse pointer magically gravitates toward the PornHub link somehow.
But hold on, not so fast there.
According to some experts in the field like Laurie Mintz, member of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists and author of the self-help book Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters and How to Get It, “addiction” isn’t an officially recognized term when it comes to using porn.
Women and pornography
From addiction to ‘problematic’
Professionals like Mintz say that even framing the issue using terms like “female porn addiction” is troubling as well for the inherent bias and negative judgment embedded within it.
And she’s not alone. According to a study titled “The Emperor Has No Clothes: A Review of the ‘Pornography Addiction’ Model,” researchers demonstrated that calling it addiction when it comes to women enthusiastically using pornography is widely touted in the media and in some dubious clinical settings, but rarely if ever used by actual researchers – you know, the people who actually prove or disprove how things work.
The study’s authors say that addiction is a bad model for understanding how people use visual sexual stimuli (VSS) and straight up say that it fails to meet the standards of addiction.
They go on to add, “Since a large, lucrative industry has promised treatments for pornography addiction despite this poor evidence, scientific psychologists are called to declare the emperor (treatment industry) has no clothes (supporting evidence).”
This suggests that author Mintz’s angle on the issue is perhaps more useful. She suggests we view the issue of how some women and pornography interact and the way they use it as “problematic,” rather than an addiction.
“Problematic” use of pornography as Mintz defines it occurs when a person wishes they could stop doing something but feel like they can’t, or if they feel that it is interfering in their work life, family life, or sexual connections with other people.
How does porn affect women?
That leads to another interesting revelation that researchers are only recently coming to grips with – so to speak, heh heh – that the relationship between women and pornography is actually much more complicated and nuanced than was previously thought.
As we joked about earlier, the assumption when it comes to pornography is that it’s something way more tilted toward men than women.
That is to say, the overwhelming majority of people are likely to have internalized some version of the concept that “men are more visually stimulated than women,” leading them to think that pornography is just a “guy thing.”
Thus many people think that the entire concept of female porn addiction or even women just using porn is a moot topic. But that just isn’t the case, according to studies.
For instance, in one study from 2007 in which women’s genital response to various visual stimuli was recorded directly showed that women were much more likely to have a sexual response to a wider variety of stimuli than men.
What that means is that, for men, whether they have a physiological response to visual stimulus has more to do with their sexual orientation, whereas the women in the study reacted to homosexual sex, solitary masturbation, and more, regardless of their orientation.
The researchers concluded that while many women might prefer not to acknowledge that certain images turned their crank due to societal pressures, their genital response tells a different story.
Normalizing shame
Using ‘women addicted to porn’ as a means of control
Research also suggests that some women may use porn compulsively as a way of exploring aspects of their sexuality that aren’t being met in their relationships, or for which they feel ashamed of, or uncomfortable sharing.
Indeed, social taboos surrounding female masturbation, and especially women watching porn masturbating might lead more women to think of themselves as abnormal or somehow dirty, causing them to view their porn use as something bad and wrong – labeling it an addiction, for instance.
You don’t have to look much further than the people who make money from decrying the dangers of porn to see how this works.
Female porn addiction
Everybody should definitely panic right now
For instance, Norman Doidge, author of The Brain that Changes Itself which is featured heavily on the site ‘Your Brain on Porn‘ offhandedly references “the porn epidemic” as if that were a thing that is obviously happening, and that everyone knows this to be true.
He also claims sexual tastes can be acquired, especially with porn purveyors putting out “new, harder themes” because their customers are “building up a tolerance.”
And while it’s true that the distorted messages that porn sends can give people skewed views of what real sex entails – a phenomenon that has been thoroughly studied in men and boys – women finding themselves turned on by porn, and women watching porn masturbating to more unusual sexual escapades presented in online imagery can feel a more intense sense of shame and guilt, according to researchers.
That’s because while male masturbation is widely normalized and even encouraged, female masturbation is still a tough topic for a lot of people to talk about.
Jacking it is one thing; Jilling is quite another, apparently.
And once you introduce a hot button topic like pornography into the mix, it can cause quite a bit of consternation in some quarters.
Women addicted to porn?
Perhaps not so much
So what’s the bottom line? Do women get addicted to porn, or is having a lovely little flick of the bean while watching strangers going at it actually okay?
As with most things that have to do with human psychology and sex, maybe it just depends on the individual.
And also like most things having to do with sex, it’s almost always going to be better to talk to a professional if you have doubts, or if you find you are carrying confusing layers of guilt or shame.
But really, most sex researchers would likely agree that using visual stimulation to get off is only a problem if you believe it is, and if it is somehow interfering with other areas of your life.
Blitz yourself better!
Now read these:
—Avoid being a victim of revenge porn
—Is there such a thing as ethical porn?