Is Porn Misleading Men?

survey results

I often hear people arguing that ‘porn is shaping men’s expectations of what women like in bed’ - and usually this means rough stuff, like ejaculating on her face or calling people sluts or whatever.

So I decided to check. What if we ask men to predict what they think women would like in bed, and then asked women what they would actually like, to see how far off men are in their guesses? And then we can see if the amount that men watch porn influences how accurate they are?

But first, a thank-you: This survey was sponsored by Albert Wenger, who financed the cost of online survey respondents ($1057).

Conclusion summary

Yes, porn is affecting men’s judgment of what women like in bed. Men who watched porn more frequently, reported higher estimations of what women preferred sexually, particularly with violent or aggressive acts.

Men who watched porn more frequently also were slightly more accurate in their predictions about what women liked, since women did in fact report liking those violent and aggressive acts more. In general, men slightly underestimated women’s ratings of what they liked during sex.

If you exclude the women who are least likely to be having casual sex (as they are underrepresented among women having sex with new partners), the “porn makes men more accurate” effect gets slightly stronger.

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How I Did Things

(skip down to “the ratings” if you just want results and fun graphs)

Survey Building

I get the impression that most of the argument I’m checking relies on early sexual experiences. They’d probably agree that obviously if you’ve been married to someone for ten years, porn will have a negligible impact on what you think your wife likes. So the scenario I’m checking is something like you meet a girl on tinder, go back to her place, start having sex, and then you call her a whore and ejaculate onto her face because you saw people doing that in porn.

So ok - we’re asking about initial stages of a sexual relationship. But we start to get confounded a bit by shouldn’t you discuss these things beforehand anyway? This takes all the bite out of the argument - if you’re talking about what you like first, then porn shouldn’t have any impact at all - if you think she’ll like that you call her a whore, and then you ask her, and she’s like “no”, then we have no issue at all.

So the argument I’m checking probably relies on an early sexual experience where you aren’t actually checking in with your sex partner.

But it shouldn’t be too early; even if a woman actually likes being called a whore, if you’re doing this the very first time you have sex without asking, she might not like it simply because you haven’t established trust.

So for this survey, I settled for a scenario where it’s your third time having sex. You’ve already had sex a few times, so you’ve established a scenario where both of you like each other and are returning - indicating openness to trying new things. But it’s still early enough that you’re solidly in the exploratory phase, and maybe that it’s reasonable to not have explicitly discussed things yet.

I also wanted to make sure it was clear that the man isn’t being a dick. If the argument is that men are trying things in porn because porn is teaching them that women will like it, then thinking women will like them is key. Probably women wouldn’t like a sex act they might otherwise like if the guy is doing it maliciously.

So given these limitations, this is the instruction text I used for men:

Imagine: You've recently started seeing a woman. You have a comfortable rapport, you're excited about each other. This is the third time you're having sex. Neither of you have tried anything unusual in the first few times you've had sex, but now you'd like to start exploring what she's into.
The following questions will ask about sex acts given this context - a new partner you're on good terms with and have already had sex a few times.
The questions will ask *how much will the woman like this*.
For calibration, you can ask: "If I started trying this, how likely is she to be happy I'm trying it?" or "How likely is it she'd be aroused by me trying this"? or "How good an idea is it to try this if I want her to leave satisfied with the experience?" or "If I started trying to do this thing, how likely is it she wouldn't stop me?"

And for women:

Imagine: You've recently started seeing a man. You have a comfortable rapport, you're excited about each other. This is the third time you're having sex. Neither of you have tried anything unusual in the first few times you've had sex, but now he's started to explore new things.
The following questions will ask about sex acts given this context - a new partner you're on good terms with and have already had sex a few times.
These questions are about "how much do you like this sex act", "how happy are you he's trying this sex act", "how does this affect your satisfaction about the sex afterwards"
Assume you *have not discussed the sex act beforehand*
Assume he thinks (mistakenly or not) that you are probably going to enjoy what he's doing. In these scenarios, he's *not* doing it because he's being a dick.
Rate the questions strictly according to how much you enjoy the act, not about the way you think you should feel.

I then gave men and women a near-identical set of questions, and had them move a slider to rate it from “I’d/she’d hate it” to “I’d/she’d love it”, on a scale from 0-100.

For example, the woman and man versions:

I kept this survey only to straight, cis people for the sake of simplicity.

I asked about 42 different sex acts. Most people seem to say porn makes men more violent, so I made sure to ask plenty of questions about aggressive, rough, controlling, or humiliating acts. I also included ‘sweet/romantic’ sex acts for balance, some ‘normal’ ones (like various sex positions), and a few absurdly obvious ones for calibration.

Here’s the full list (man version; women got the exact same questions but with the direction swapped):

*You guide her head to your penis and put your penis into her mouth, indicating for her to give you a blowjob
*You are having sex. You pull out and start pushing your penis into her anus for the purpose of having anal sex.
*While having sex, you lightly choke her.
*While having sex, you firmly choke her.
*While having sex, you slap her lightly in the face
*While having sex, you slap her in the face kinda hard
*While having sex, you pull out handcuffs and cuff her hands above her head to the bedposts
*While having sex, tell her she's a dirty whore and a slut
*You're having sex doggystyle, and you firmly grip her hair to pull it and slap her ass.
*She's giving you a blowjob. You intentionally ejaculate onto her face.
*You're having sex, and you make your thrusts very hard and deep; a "pounding"
*Before you begin having sex, you pause to focus on kissing her deeply on the mouth for a few minutes
*She's giving you a blowjob, and you ejaculate into her mouth.
*You have really long foreplay before you have sex, deliberately putting off the actual sex
*You lightly slap her vagina/genitals
*You go down and perform oral sex on her
*While having sex, you tell her she's ugly and disgusting
*You start having sex very quickly, putting your penis into her with only a minute or two of foreplay.
*While having sex, you pull out your camera and start filming her
*While having sex, you pull out your phone and start watching pornography
*While having sex, you are very silent, and don't moan or groan at all
*While having sex, you moan and groan a lot
*You're having vaginal sex. Right before your orgasm, you pull out and scoot up to ejaculate onto her face
*During sex, you pinch her nipples hard
*You rearrange yourselves so that she is riding you in the cowgirl position
*You rearrange yourselves so that you are having sex with her in the doggystyle position
*You're having sex in the missionary position, and you place her legs up on your shoulders
*You spend several minutes kissing her neck and earlobes
*You're performing oral sex on her. You move down and lick her butthole
*She's giving you a blowjob. You slowly maneuver her head so that she is licking your butthole
*You finger her enthusiastically/rapidly, at around 2-3 pumps per second
*You finger her slowly, at around one pump every 3-4 seconds
*You're having sex, and you speed your thrusts up to around 2-3 per second
*You're having sex, and you slow your thrusts down to one thrust every 3-4 seconds
*You have sex, and ejaculate after three minutes of penetration
*You have sex, and ejaculate after 30 minutes of penetration
*While you're having sex, you tell her you'd love to get her pregnant
*You pee on her
*As you are having sex, you spit onto her face
*As you're having sex, you tell her she is beautiful and sexy
*You have mostly normal/vanilla sex, and with each escalation you get explicit consent (for example, by asking "Is this okay?")
*You shove her head into a toilet

I also used the same porn questions from my Big Kink Survey -

How often do you watch or read pornographic/erotic content for the purposes of getting aroused?
The type of erotic content you prefer tends to be: (written/visual spectrum)
How much of the porn or erotica you watch is violent? (Including depictions of nonconsent, struggling, or physical aggression.)
At what age did you begin watching porn or reading erotic content at least semiregularly?
Have you paid for porn/erotic content? (‘no’ to ‘regularly’ spectrum)

I also asked:

How many people of the opposite sex have you had sex with?

Cleaning

I am hesitant to publicly go into details about how I cleaned suspicious results out of my data (don’t wanna give people a handbook), but am happy to share this with other researchers privately.

Who Responded

I posted on my twitter! But this particular question feels a bit more susceptible to selection bias issues than most of my other surveys - the hypothesis of “the types of women who follow Aella are more heavily selected than the types of men who follow her” seems plausible, especially because only ~10% of people who follow me are women.

I also didn’t include results at the end of my survey, which would normally increase natural virality outside of my general audience and sort of “dampen out” the selection issues.

So I paid for survey takers from Positly to check against my own audience.

5394 respondents were from my following of them, 88% male.
878 respondents were paid, of them 48% male.

Important Demographic Differences In Responders

Turns out the theory that women who follow me are different is somewhat true - while there was, on average, only a 0.2 point difference in guesses about women between my-following men and paid men, there was a 5.6 point difference in self-ratings between my-following women and paid women.

(Of course, the questions asked to men and women were asymmetrical! It’s possible that if I’d asked men about their own preferences, that the my-following and paid responders would have a similar gap)

In general, my-following men underestimated how much my-following women were into things by 3 points; the paid men overestimated how much paid women were into things by 2.8 points.

On average, paid men reported having 9 sexual partners; paid women reported 10.
Both my-following men and my-following women reported 14 sexual partners.

My-following men were 35 years old, while the women were 31.
Paid men were 40 years old, while the women were 41.

I asked a political spectrum question, from conservative (-3) to liberal (3). Paid men and women were close, at around 0.68, while my-following men rated themselves .81, and my-following women were at 1.3.

So what does this mean?

This gets into a bit of a thorny tangle around how to interpret the results. Demographically, the paid test takers have genders who are more similar, while my own following has more of a gap; my women are meaningfully younger and more liberal.

But then, which demographic of women are you most likely to have sex with? My-following women are significantly more promiscuous - despite being 10 years younger than paid women, they already on average are reporting 4 more sexual partners.

If you’re a man, out in the world banging ladies in a fashion that results in you having sex with her before communicating about her desires, you’re probably much more likely to have sex with a promiscuous, liberal woman. And promiscuous, liberal women like different things in bed. Should we then weight their results more heavily?

I don’t know what the right answer is here. I’ll be presenting lots of my results on a spectrum of “how many people you’ve had sex with”, which I think helps address this.

In general though, paid respondents of both genders ranked vanilla things slightly higher - having sex for a long time, having faster sex, cowgirl, neck kissing. My-follower respondents ranked power dynamic stuff higher - light choking, calling her a dirty whore, light face slapping, and bondage.

For many of the graphs, I’m going to combine the sources. I’m balancing them to the same ratios (weighting the fewer paid men’s responses harder against the my-follower men until they match the women’s source ratio), which is about 43% paid women to 57% my-follower women.

You can see the raw scores here

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Does Watching Porn Affect Men’s Predictions?

A little bit.

I asked men how often they watched porn, and the strongest correlation (in either direction) between their porn use frequency and predictions about women’s preferences was “calling her a dirty whore and a slut”, which was only r=.12 - or about 1.4% of the variance (LR=996).

Note y-axis shows 50 points out of 100! I’m doing this to better show differences, and because we intuitively think of many things as on a scale between “neutral to positive” (as opposed to full-negative to full-positive), but please be aware that I’m doing this!

But still, small correlations can still be meaningful, and degree of porn consumption is really at the heart of our argument. I’ll do some more exploration but return to porn consumption rates later on.

Early porn exposure?

Ok, but maybe you could argue the degree of porn use isn’t quite what matters. Maybe it’s a formative thing? Maybe viewing porn earlier in childhood is the thing that corrupts men’s perception about women more?

This one is maybe a stronger argument - men’s correlation between “age you started watching porn” and predicting “women like light choking” was a whole -0.16 (LR=1081), or 2.5% of variance explained. Firm choking was r=-0.16 (LR=959), spitting on her was r=-0.13 (LR=738), slapping her face lightly was r=-0.13 ( LR=891), etc.

As in - the earlier you start watching porn, you’re slightly more likely you are to think women like more aggressive stuff like choking, spitting, face slapping.

But my guess is this is confounded by age. The older a man is, the more he reports starting to watch porn later in life, and old men are a bit more conservative in their values.

I actually did not expect this graph to show such a massive difference, for women especially. It’s possible this is an artifact of my data (a 10 year gap on average between my-follower liberal women and paid conservative women, for example), but I would be surprised if it were entirely an artifact.

Actually, let’s check this!

Yeah, looks like the trend continues even controlling for source!

So the older someone is, the more sexually conservative they seem to be, and also the later in their life they started watching porn. Unclear which way causation goes.

Of course, the question is phrased as either “watching porn” or “reading erotic content” - it’s possible that pre-internet men who grew up on something like playboy didn’t feel like this question applied to them?

My python code started shitting the bed for some reason so I switched to google sheets:

So yeah; watching porn earlier is a correlated a bit with both men predicting women’s interest, and women’s reported interest, but my guess is it’s probably just confounded by age (though the causation direction is unclear).

(I don’t think this is a liberal/conservative confounder either; there wasn’t really any correlation between politics and how early you started watching porn).

What about violent porn?

Do men who watch more violent porn, tend to think women like more violent things?

Yes - the question “How much of the porn or erotica you watch is violent?” correlated with men’s prediction that women would like hard face slaps (r=0.22, LR=969), light face slaps (r=0.22, LR=691), their head shoved in a toilet (r=0.22, LR 365), being spit on (r=.2, LR 833), being called a dirty whore (r=.2, LR 603), choked firmly (r=.2, LR=682), choked lightly (r=.19, LR=598), being called ugly (r=.18, LR=620), etc.

These are what I’d consider ‘medium’ correlations, explaining up to 4.8% of the variance.

I’m attempting to keep all the y-axis on graphs a span of 50 for sake of visual consistency, but I’m breaking this when the line gets too wild to be contained

So yeah - the more violent porn a man watches (as a proportion to his total porn intake), the more he predicts women will like violent porn. This isn’t a super strong effect, but I’d consider it meaningful.

It’s also, again, unclear which direction the causality goes. Maybe he’s watching violent porn because he thinks that’s what women likes?

So… which men are right?

You may have noticed that women are regularly a bit freakier than the men.

(Note for correlations and LR I’ve been giving the unadjusted data, since that’s only about men; for graphs I’m showing adjusted data, which is the ratio of source for each gender being weighted to match. This avoids the issue of oversampling my-follower women and undersampling paid men. Even still this isn’t a huge deal - the men are much more similar across the survey source than the women are).

So to know what men are best at predicting women’s preferences, we should look at women’s preferences.

But the big question is - which women?

another slightly expanded y-axis, keep an eye out

Women’s porn use frequency correlates respectably with:

1. Their average rating in all things they were asked to rate (r=.41 LR=7421)

2. Light choking (r=.33, LR 982)

3. Firm choking (r=.32, LR 1033)

4. Light face slaps (r=.31, LR 981)

5. Being called a dirty whore/slut (r=.31, LR 1022)

6. Rimming the man (r=.3, LR=1057)

7. He ejaculates on her face after a blowjob (r=.3, LR=1022)

8. Spread eagle bondage (r=.3, LR=952)

And so on.

So - which women are most representative?

Big gap! But it’s probably age. If I limit the age range, things balance out significantly:

So yeah - heavy porn-using women are much more into freaky sex acts than women who don’t.

But what about…

Sex Partner Count?

I also asked “how many people have you had sex with?”

How do men’s guesses about women, and women’s personal preferences, change as reported sexual partner count goes up?

I divided total sex count by sexable age (years over 14), to get the average amount of sex partners per sexable years. So here I’m really more measuring frequency of new partners instead of absolute partners.

Here’s just a few - most don’t have strong change, but ones that have to do with some form of aggression show an increase in sex partner frequency.

So Which Women Do We Measure?

There’s a clear difference here - promiscuous, high sex drive women (the ones with more sex partners per year, the ones that watch a lot of porn) and the ones who don’t. The former group tends to be younger, the latter older.

So when we ask - is porn training men to be out of touch with what women want, the category of woman matters a lot.

I think one category of woman is more relevant, but let’s first compare both.

How Accurate Are Men’s Ratings?

To explain this slightly confusing chart: Each bar represents a category of prude/slutty woman. On the left we have women who’ve had sex with a new person once every 10 years or fewer; on the far right we have women who’ve had sex with more than one new partner every year.

The y-axis is how off men were at predicting their preferences. So men, on average, overestimated the preferences of women who’ve had fewer partners, and underestimated the preferences of women who’ve had more partners.

But on average, shockingly accurate! The biggest gap is -4 points out of 100!

(Though the above graph represents the sheer average, like did people guess higher or lower? The absolute difference, like “how far off were guys total, in either direction” was about 15-16 points for all groups)

Here’s the same but for how often women watch porn:

Men underestimate how much women like things by a whopping 8 points on average, if by ‘women’ we mean ‘women who watch porn/read erotica every day’.

Choosing The Women Against Whom To Judge Men

I think the ‘right’ answer is to break everything down into a thousand small categories and go ‘huh’ and then say ‘depends on what subcategory you’re talking about’.

But I’m here to answer a question damnit - so I’m going to pick a group of women and then check. Here we get into more subjective choices territory; feel free to take the raw data and make your own calculations!

As discussed earlier, I think the strongest form of the scenario is early into having sex, with good rapport (assumption of positive intent), and no explicit communication.

I think this sorta-necessarily eliminates very conservative relationship styles like the ones that wait several months or even until marriage before having sex. Likely these people will have had plenty of time to communicate, and at that point it would be just really weird if the guy decided to just try random stuff he saw during porn without asking after having a whole damn year of leadup.

(like, I have a hard time imagining a good Mormon boy courting his wife, finally getting her into the honeymoon suite, and then slapping her in the face without asking cause he saw it in a porno.)

So I’m going to not include women who had fewer than one new sexual partner every 6 years.

But maybe we shouldn’t include the total sluts (1+ partner every year) either; wouldn’t they just naturally be weirdo outliers we shouldn’t consider? But I’m going to rescue this group - even if they’re actually outliers, they’re still outliers that you’re much more likely to encounter when having sex, simply because they have sex with more people!

Most women in my sample reported watching porn monthly or weekly. I’m going to eliminate the ones who answered ‘daily’ because that made up only 6% of my lady sample, and I could imagine the steelman of the porn misleads men argument would argue super-porn exposed women are outliers.

(And they are significantly more of an outlier compared to women in my sluttiest category, going by numbers alone, so I’ll allow it)

I’m not gonna eliminate the ‘yearly’ watchers, because you can still easily have sex with a woman who doesn’t really watch porn (and I’m eliminating the non-sluts anyway).

The Ratings

Ok so: eliminating the prudes and heavy porn users from the ladies section, here we go.

(Reminder: all y-axis are sized at 50% of the total range, and men and women are weighted to be an equal ratio by source - 43% paid, 57% my followers)

Men’s Accuracy By Porn Frequency

Here’s general averages, where I just calculated the average distance of each man’s rating vs. the average rating of women in my selected group:

Here’s the absolute distance, which is the total degree to which men were off, ignoring whether it was negative or positive:

The closer to 0, the more accurate (as in, 0 difference in ratings). The gap between ‘yearly’ and ‘daily’ here is 3 points.

And general accuracy per each measured thing:

(also, this still holds true even if I don’t filter the women at all. This is the distance from 0 (a perfect score, which is no distance) that men had per their porn use, in relation to all the women surveyed, unfiltered)

As usual, please doublecheck my work! I’m still learning and it’s not uncommon for me to make small mistakes, and every now and then make bigger ones. I’ll return to update this post if there’s any corrections or clarifications.

You can find the code I used (most of it; some of it I didn’t save) and the raw data (some demographic stuff removed for privacy) here.

And reminder, raw averages are here.