Women prefer more violent porn (and other data)

survey results

My kink survey is at around 481,000 responses (137k cis men, 345k cis women, 6300 transwomen and 16549 transmen). You can see a breakdown of who took it here, and download most of the raw data I used in this blog post here.

I often hear people saying that porn is full of depictions of smeared-mascara, aggressive blowjob stuff that appeals to men and trains them to treat women horribly. Women prefer gentle stuff - porn marketed towards women often focuses on soft light, good depth of field, gentle kissing and candles.

So - is this true? How do men and women’s preferences around violence in porn and sex differ?

(and for this survey, I’m only including data from cis women and men unless otherwise indicated)

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Porn/Erotica

Well first let’s make sure we’re not accidentally testing a unique subset of women. If only a few women use porn or erotica to get off, maybe you can’t generalize their preferences.

Women watch or read erotic content less than men do, but 93% of women and 97% of men consume erotic content at least a few times a year. 64% of women and 88% of men consume erotic content at least once a week, and 18% of women and 46% of men do it daily.

Average scores from most to least:

7.1: Cis men
6.9: Transwomen
6.6: Transmen
5.9: Cis women

All the following questions about porn were only asked to people who indicated they watched any porn at all, with the people who said “I don’t watch porn” eliminated.

Surprising no one, women reported preferring more written porn than men. Women actually slightly prefer more visual porn over written (25% in ‘mostly visual’ vs 17% in ‘mostly written’).

Transmen seem to match identically onto cis women in their written preferences, while transwomen’s preferences interestingly seem almost exactly in between cis men and women. It is fascinating to me that transness doesn’t seem gender-symmetric here; something about transwomenness affects sexual preferences differently than transmanness does.

I did slightly goof here, because I used the word “porn” instead of “erotic content”. My guess is this doesn’t affect results too much; the question came at the end of a series of questions about erotic content preferences. Maybe women who prefer porn over erotica tend to prefer more violent porn, but I checked and while this is true, the effect is minor.

Here’s the official porn violence rankings:

Transmen: 1.49
Cis women: 1.27
Transwomen: 1.23
Cis men: 0.98

Transwomen very similar in degree to ciswomen here, and transmen not at all similar to cis men.

This one’s fascinating. 61% of cis women and 76% of cis men started watching porn before age 14.

Transwomen’s starting period for pornwatching maps almost exactly onto cis men’s, so close it might as well be the same dataset. Transmen’s deviates from both cis women and cis men - they actually have the earliest porn onset.

Transmen: 11.8
Transwomen: 12.5
Cis men: 12.6
Cis women: 13.7

I don’t know what this means exactly, but it’s fascinating to me - I think this suggests that whatever is causing transness in males vs females is not symmetrical.

Who’s paid for porn at least once?

Cis women: 11.9%
Transmen: 17.3%
Cis men: 37.5%
Transwomen: 39.5%

Only 1% of cis women and 3.3% of cis men pay for porn regularly, which is a bit lower than I expected.

And we also see trans responses mapping pretty closely to those of their birth sex, though they’re slightly more likely to pay for porn overall.

Sexual Preferences

I also asked what sort of stuff people find erotic. In the survey I clarified that this is fantasy-specific, because I wanted to register arousal from things that people might not actually want in real life (e.g., I have a friend who’s really aroused from the thought of getting murdered).

So here’s an overview of some of the preferences that are violence-oriented. I wanted to focus on a few aspects of this - brutal violence (that causes damage to someone, e.g. amputation), vanilla violence (that doesn’t cause damage, e.g. struggling), nonconsent as a concept (e.g., blackmail), and bondage.

Nonconsent

Compared to other things, this has a remarkably similar spread across the board.

I’m not sure how to best present data like this.

% of respondents preferring fully or totally nonconsenting scenarios:

Transmen: 14.2%
Transwomen: 11.7%
Cis women: 9.7%
Cis men: 5.7%

With full nonconsent being -2, even split as 0, and full consent being 2, the average score for each group is a very neat climb:

Transmen: 0.9
Transwomen: 1.0
Cis women: 1.1
Cis men: 1.2

Nonconsent 2

To help calibrate accuracy, I duplicated a few of the questions in different sections of the survey, under different contexts with different question structure. Nonconsent preference was one of them. The above question was about the optimal amount of consent in erotic scenarios. Later in the survey I asked "I find sexual scenarios involving nonconsent to be: [not erotic to extremely erotic spectrum”

Let’s check these to see if we get the same results:

The % of people who selected “moderately erotic” or more:
Transmen: 41%
Transwomen: 40%
Cis women: 32%
Cis men: 26%

Dom/sub

I have a lot more questions on dominance and submission, but that’s another blog post - here’s a brief look (this question below is a single spectrum that doesn’t capture the difference between people who strongly prefer being both dominant and submissive, vs. people who neither prefer being dominant and submissive; still, it’s good for a quick snapshot):

% of people who selected slight to total submission preference:

Transwomen: 63%
Cis women: 59%
Transmen: 50%
Cis men: 19%

% of people who selected slight to total dominance preference:

Cis women: 10%
Transwomen: 12%
Transmen: 20%
Cis men: 45%

Bondage

Women are into bondage more across the board.

%’s of people who selected moderately arousing or higher for “medium bondage”:

Cis men: 46%
Cis women: 59%
Transwomen: 63%
Transmen: 68%

Brutality

6% of cis women, 6% of cis men, 15% of transwomen and 22% of transmen indicated at least some interest in brutality.

On the 0 (not arousing) to 5 (extremely arousing) scale, the average scores:

Transmen: .83
Transwomen: .58
Cis males: .23
Cis females: .21

We finally found a violent preference that men prefer more than women, if only barely! But this one isn’t very popular - most people don’t like this fetish category at all.

Humiliation

Avg humiliation scores (on the 0 to 5 arousal scale)

Transmen: 1.9
Transwomen: 1.7
Cis women: 0.9
Cis men: 0.9

Very similar preferences for humiliation in cis women vs cis men here.

Gentle-brutal power dynamics

I asked a question about power dynamics (data for which I’m not including here because power dynamics aren’t violent); if people marked interest, then I asked them the following question:

% of respondents who marked very, moderately, or slightly caring:

transwomen: 31%
cis men: 25%
transmen: 18%
cis women: 18%

% of respondents who marked very, moderately, or slightly brutal:

transmen: 32%
cis women: 26%
cis men: 26%
transwomen: 26%

The average score, from “very caring” (-3) to “very brutal” (3):
transmen: .2
cis women: .1
transwomen: -0.2
cis men: -0.3

In general, though pretty similar across the board, I award women the higher violent preference here.

Sadomasochism

The % of people who found sadomasochism at least moderately (or more) erotic:

Transmen: 49%
Transwomen: 42%
Cis women: 37%
Cis men: 26%

Average sadomasochism scores (on the 0 (not erotic) to 5 (extremely erotic) scale:

transmen: 2.2
transwomen: 1.9
cis women: 1.6
cis men: 1.1

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Summary

Are men more interested in sexually violent content than women? According to my data, absolutely not.

I looked at reports of watching violent porn, arousal from nonconsent, brutality, bondage, sadomasochism, gentle/cruel power dynamics, and humiliation. Across the board women report more interest in these things than men, and report greater interest in submission than men report being dominant. The sole exception was ‘brutality’ - an rare fetish with slightly more male than female preference.

Trans people had greater interest in sexually violent content than cis people in general, but especially trans men.

I find this all a bit ironic; when pornographic websites ban violent or nonconsent categories, they’re disproportionately reducing women’s access to preferred porn.