Could it be that men consider some sorts of pornographic imaging as non-violent wheras woman would consider it to be violent? Was that accounted for in some way in the survey? Like making participants rate phornographic content in terms of violence.
I.e as a cis woman I consider some ganbangs to be violent when a lot of force/choking/roughness is applied, but could it be that cis men have another way of seeing it?
Just wondering since this results suprised me, and I would like to know more in order to draw my own conclusions. As always very insightfull content, thank you for putting it out and making us think / exploring taboo topics.
1. Transmen (and possibly tomboys) are more sex-craved than women, as seen by content use frequency. Contrary to public opinion, transwomen (and possibly femboys) are slightly less erotic than men. Trans are more likely to match in erotic frequency than their cis counterparts. As for proclivity towards paid content as a proxy to valuing erotica, AFAB likes free content whilst AMAB would not mind paid content, since AMAB are both more likely to have higher disposable income, and that they are more likely to pay for custom designed items e.g. OCs. The same "systematizing" and "object-oriented" bias can be seen with NFTs and collectables.
2. Men prefer visual content, AFAB prefer illustrated novels or comics, but transwomen (and possibly femboys) prefer Ben-Garrison-esque visual-narrative content with sparse text. It is purely speculative, but that "wordcel" or "Verbal Tilt" bias may be involved with this phenomena, which states that abnormally wordy people are more likely to be mentally dethatched. The inverse can be said for visual-preferring AFABs as a type of autism-like allocentrism and object-orientation. https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/the-verbal-tilt-modelhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-009-0795-3
3. A pattern can be said for Nonconsent and sadomasochism, where there is both a trans bias for extreme forms and a feminine bias for moderate forms, while men are more likely to find it distasteful. Transferred to bondage, men are the least likely to desire bondage, and women has preference for light bondage over radical bondage, as it is more trans-biased. Women are more likely to conditionally and selectively "dip" in subordination (a "Christian Gray Effect"), rather than giving up full agency for the pleasure of the act when compared to transpeople.
4. Transmen (and possibly tomboys) desires violence the most, but men desire violence the least. Feminine-identifying peoples strike somewhere in the middle. BUT Brutality and humiliation are strictly a trans-bias activity with weak involvement of femininity in women. The distinction between violence and brutal humiliation can be seen through the perspective of the prestige-power continuum, as prestige-biased "reactive" violence hints at sexual brinkmanship and/or sportsmanship, whilst power-biased "proactive" brutal humiliation are more implacable. Men would much prefer sportsmanship over these alternate forms. It can be speculated that this is why sports fetishes (e.g. baseball and wrestling) are more favorable to (gay) men but less so for others. https://kevinbinz.com/2020/02/22/the-domestication-of-sapiens/https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/the-distinctiveness-of-human-aggression
5. Paradoxically the likelihood to desire violent behavior are tied to ones submissiveness, where men are across-the-board most dominant and least submissive. Men tolerate being switches the most, followed by AFABs, and transwomen (and possibly femboys) the least. AMABs are the most likely to desire gentle power dynamics, trans are more likely to desire brutal power dynamics, BUT women desires 50-50 dynamics the most followed by masculine-leaning individuals, and transwomen (and possibly femboys) desires 50-50 dynamics the least. It is unknown as to why (a) men desire gentleness in a dominant sphere, (b) transwomen find ambiguous power dynamics distasteful, and (c) why transmen (and possibly tomboys) desire brutal domination.
6. MAABs have consistent sexual discovery bell curves around ages 12-14, which is not surprising. For women, the fat tail is on the later stages of adolescence around 12-16, whilst for transmen (and possibly tomboys), the fat tail precedes adolescence at around 11-14. This runs contrary to male variability hypothesis, which suggests men are more diverse in most physical and mental traits. A possible observation to make is the conservative mythos of "r/K selection" or "life history", and is reinterpreted by Andreas Hofer with a liberal lens. Early onset of puberty and sociosexuality are tied to conflict-centric risk-oriented thinking, whilst a late onset of puberty and hyposexuality are tied to art-centric risk-averse thinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesishttps://archive.ph/3p9D5https://archive.ph/q4Ze6https://archive.ph/GrPVJhttps://archive.ph/G90oY
Sorry for the bad speculation, but it would be great of these respondents can be clustered based on some of the related questions, there might be some relationship yet to be seen.
- With the exponential rise in young people coming out as transgender, suspect non-cis people in your survey might have much younger age distribution than cis people.
- It appears to be the case that each new generation is on average attracted to more extreme and boundary-seeking forms of pornography than their parents.
Would be interesting to see if the notably higher non-cis preference for violence and non-consent is wholly or partly an age-preference.
Some part of the reason is likely age effects. but even the female agegroup that watches the most porn only 22.6% of women report watching porn more than once a week over the last year.
Some part of the explanation has to be the inclusion of erotica, but there probably is some selection effect going on.
The conclusion is a bit tainted by the source of your dataset, since it comes from a crowd who is probably already more openminded about sexuality. but the results still speaks for that crowd, and it still shows that it isn't a massive devise between the genders in that regard.
That's my concern too. And I would say it's probably more than a bit tainted when compared with research that doesn't have this sampling bias. Unfortunately, the conclusions are presented as being about all women/men when they really only apply to this sample.
Very interesting and insightful results! Definitely challenge conventional perceptions of gender preferences. Should we be worried about possible divergence between self-report and actual behavior? Would be interesting to compare reported preferences with, if it were possible, viewing data collected by porn websites (probably very difficult to access).
if you're proposing a world where "males have greater preference for violent porn than females, but lie about it on surveys to the extent that they register as having lower preference for violent porn than females", vs a world where "women have greater preference for violent porn and women and men lie about it at roughly similar amounts", I think the latter world is more plausible.
(fwiw i also asked people a question about how honestly they answered the survey, and deleted people from this datset who said they weren't very honest. I also deleted people who gave contradictory answers to a few specific question sets).
I agree, the latter world is more plausible. This is an impressive survey & we have good reasons to accept the results. I was thinking of something more subtle than lying about preferences. More along the lines of people’s estimates of “how often” and “how much” being inadvertently influenced by, say, the implications they think this has for the sort of person they are. This is pure speculation. I doubt this would invert the results but could possibly bring the genders closer.
I'm worried that this would make selection bias a lot worse. The people who want to watch porn in a lab with electrodes stuck to their genitals are quite an unusual subpopulation. Even more unusual than people who want to fill out long online surveys about their porn preferences.
And of course there's the issue of how to compare biometrics between different people. For example, I can't think of a good way to compare genital biometrics of cis men and cis women.
I know the thesis is that women prefer violent content, but what I glean from this information is that trans folks are MUCH kinkier than cis folks (in most of the discussions of violence/brutality/humiliation/etc, trans folks trended up rather than down with their cis counterparts, which is FASCINATING to me as a trans folk [but not necessarily surprising as I am also kinky lmao])
Hypothesis: Cis-women like (receiving) dominance within limits, while the somewhat related trans-men (also AFAB) might like to adhere to a stronger power dynamic as part of their identification with a traditionally more dominant sex (my speculation). Cis-men enjoy more lighter dominance (or not at all, according to their definition of dominance), while trans-women (also AMAB) might be attracted to a weaker power dynamic as part of their identification with a traditionally less dominance-related sex (my speculation). Some cultural norms just might be at work as role models for these four groupings.
Nevermind, I read about the survey. But given how it was done, this conclusion, "Are men more interested in sexually violent content than women? According to my data, absolutely not" is really inappropriate.
The most you can conclude is that men in this particular survey are not more interested than women in this particular survey in violent content. Making generalizations to the overall population is not warranted for so many reasons, even if it is a "big" survey.
There is so much I want to say about how much I love this article and that reading it I find that the results don’t surprise me. Although I had always thought of violent porn as the cruel, brutal type. I didn’t before consider the rest violent, rather just bog standard fantasy. Particularly the non consent. Being taken and ravished or thrown in the mud and saying no, what are you doing and struggling for instance seem quite old fashioned but I guess that would be considered non consent vanilla brutal fantasy. Technically old movies contain plenty of steamy violent erotic content apart from you don’t actually see nudity, maybe some clothes being ripped. I personally feel weird about studio porn because I don’t know how regulated it is. But then one could say the same for the regulations of old movies. I have skimmed the surfaces of it though and read erotic content occasionally.
If the conclusion ‘More women report interest in violent porn than men’ I don’t understand why the title of the article doesn’t correlate more closely. I don’t see in the data that Women prefer more violent porn. Unless all women prefer more violent porn. Sorry to be so picky about semantics. The survey is fucking impressive though! I looked up this article after watching the Benjamin Boyce podcast and you made is so interesting!
"Only 1% of cis women and 3.3% of cis men pay for porn regularly, which is a bit lower than I expected." I didn't expect so few people to pay for porn. I guess people pay when they want access to niche stuff that's not available on mainstream porn sites. It's interesting how porn is similar to other content on the internet: if you can satisfy a niche, you can make money.
> Transwomen and transmen are closest in porn consumption rates to others of their birth sex, but both edge towards the middle.
The first bit is not consistent with the immediately following numbers. Trans men at 6.6 are closer to cis men (7.1, difference 0.4) than to cis women (5.9, difference 0.7).
This seems to explain the f out of fifty shades of grey popularity. I wonder if the violence attraction trails back to the brutality of our ancestors. An epigenetic echo perhaps...
Was listening to a convo last night about WW1 and the brutality of it. It’s only recently humans haven’t had to deal with violence at scale.
I found the big nose-dives from "not erotic" to "slightly erotic" followed by a slow creep back up to be interesting. I suspect there's a lot of social desirability bias driving people to round "slightly erotic" and "somewhat erotic" off to "not erotic" for very taboo categories. I'd expect, if you extended the range of options out to "slightly disgusting/actively turn-off/whatever" all the way out to "extremely disgusting/whatever", it would form a normal distribution around "slightly disgusting". With everything left of "neither disgusting nor erotic/not erotic" getting compressed to "not erotic", it should be a steady downward slope. Other than social desirability bias, I'm not sure what would generate the observation.
Did you collect data about attendance at kink events or self-ID as kinky or a member of the kink community? My suspicion is that, around the "moderately erotic" level, people start considering themselves "in the community" and society people are biased towards being desirable in changes quite a lot.
Could it be that men consider some sorts of pornographic imaging as non-violent wheras woman would consider it to be violent? Was that accounted for in some way in the survey? Like making participants rate phornographic content in terms of violence.
I.e as a cis woman I consider some ganbangs to be violent when a lot of force/choking/roughness is applied, but could it be that cis men have another way of seeing it?
Just wondering since this results suprised me, and I would like to know more in order to draw my own conclusions. As always very insightfull content, thank you for putting it out and making us think / exploring taboo topics.
Some patterns within this research:
1. Transmen (and possibly tomboys) are more sex-craved than women, as seen by content use frequency. Contrary to public opinion, transwomen (and possibly femboys) are slightly less erotic than men. Trans are more likely to match in erotic frequency than their cis counterparts. As for proclivity towards paid content as a proxy to valuing erotica, AFAB likes free content whilst AMAB would not mind paid content, since AMAB are both more likely to have higher disposable income, and that they are more likely to pay for custom designed items e.g. OCs. The same "systematizing" and "object-oriented" bias can be seen with NFTs and collectables.
2. Men prefer visual content, AFAB prefer illustrated novels or comics, but transwomen (and possibly femboys) prefer Ben-Garrison-esque visual-narrative content with sparse text. It is purely speculative, but that "wordcel" or "Verbal Tilt" bias may be involved with this phenomena, which states that abnormally wordy people are more likely to be mentally dethatched. The inverse can be said for visual-preferring AFABs as a type of autism-like allocentrism and object-orientation. https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/the-verbal-tilt-model https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-009-0795-3
3. A pattern can be said for Nonconsent and sadomasochism, where there is both a trans bias for extreme forms and a feminine bias for moderate forms, while men are more likely to find it distasteful. Transferred to bondage, men are the least likely to desire bondage, and women has preference for light bondage over radical bondage, as it is more trans-biased. Women are more likely to conditionally and selectively "dip" in subordination (a "Christian Gray Effect"), rather than giving up full agency for the pleasure of the act when compared to transpeople.
4. Transmen (and possibly tomboys) desires violence the most, but men desire violence the least. Feminine-identifying peoples strike somewhere in the middle. BUT Brutality and humiliation are strictly a trans-bias activity with weak involvement of femininity in women. The distinction between violence and brutal humiliation can be seen through the perspective of the prestige-power continuum, as prestige-biased "reactive" violence hints at sexual brinkmanship and/or sportsmanship, whilst power-biased "proactive" brutal humiliation are more implacable. Men would much prefer sportsmanship over these alternate forms. It can be speculated that this is why sports fetishes (e.g. baseball and wrestling) are more favorable to (gay) men but less so for others. https://kevinbinz.com/2020/02/22/the-domestication-of-sapiens/ https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/the-distinctiveness-of-human-aggression
5. Paradoxically the likelihood to desire violent behavior are tied to ones submissiveness, where men are across-the-board most dominant and least submissive. Men tolerate being switches the most, followed by AFABs, and transwomen (and possibly femboys) the least. AMABs are the most likely to desire gentle power dynamics, trans are more likely to desire brutal power dynamics, BUT women desires 50-50 dynamics the most followed by masculine-leaning individuals, and transwomen (and possibly femboys) desires 50-50 dynamics the least. It is unknown as to why (a) men desire gentleness in a dominant sphere, (b) transwomen find ambiguous power dynamics distasteful, and (c) why transmen (and possibly tomboys) desire brutal domination.
6. MAABs have consistent sexual discovery bell curves around ages 12-14, which is not surprising. For women, the fat tail is on the later stages of adolescence around 12-16, whilst for transmen (and possibly tomboys), the fat tail precedes adolescence at around 11-14. This runs contrary to male variability hypothesis, which suggests men are more diverse in most physical and mental traits. A possible observation to make is the conservative mythos of "r/K selection" or "life history", and is reinterpreted by Andreas Hofer with a liberal lens. Early onset of puberty and sociosexuality are tied to conflict-centric risk-oriented thinking, whilst a late onset of puberty and hyposexuality are tied to art-centric risk-averse thinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis https://archive.ph/3p9D5 https://archive.ph/q4Ze6 https://archive.ph/GrPVJ https://archive.ph/G90oY
Sorry for the bad speculation, but it would be great of these respondents can be clustered based on some of the related questions, there might be some relationship yet to be seen.
@Aella Loving this! A possible flaw / correction:
Have you checked for any correlations with age?
- With the exponential rise in young people coming out as transgender, suspect non-cis people in your survey might have much younger age distribution than cis people.
- It appears to be the case that each new generation is on average attracted to more extreme and boundary-seeking forms of pornography than their parents.
Would be interesting to see if the notably higher non-cis preference for violence and non-consent is wholly or partly an age-preference.
Your response population (especially of women) seems much more likely to watch porn (especially recently) compared to the sample from the danish sexual census https://files.projektsexus.dk/2019-10-26_SEXUS-rapport_2017-2018.pdf (mostly not available in english)
Some part of the reason is likely age effects. but even the female agegroup that watches the most porn only 22.6% of women report watching porn more than once a week over the last year.
Some part of the explanation has to be the inclusion of erotica, but there probably is some selection effect going on.
The conclusion is a bit tainted by the source of your dataset, since it comes from a crowd who is probably already more openminded about sexuality. but the results still speaks for that crowd, and it still shows that it isn't a massive devise between the genders in that regard.
That's my concern too. And I would say it's probably more than a bit tainted when compared with research that doesn't have this sampling bias. Unfortunately, the conclusions are presented as being about all women/men when they really only apply to this sample.
absolutely wild. glad you are out here asking the weird questions. i'd definitely wondered about this, and it maps onto my (limited) experience.
Very interesting and insightful results! Definitely challenge conventional perceptions of gender preferences. Should we be worried about possible divergence between self-report and actual behavior? Would be interesting to compare reported preferences with, if it were possible, viewing data collected by porn websites (probably very difficult to access).
if you're proposing a world where "males have greater preference for violent porn than females, but lie about it on surveys to the extent that they register as having lower preference for violent porn than females", vs a world where "women have greater preference for violent porn and women and men lie about it at roughly similar amounts", I think the latter world is more plausible.
(fwiw i also asked people a question about how honestly they answered the survey, and deleted people from this datset who said they weren't very honest. I also deleted people who gave contradictory answers to a few specific question sets).
I agree, the latter world is more plausible. This is an impressive survey & we have good reasons to accept the results. I was thinking of something more subtle than lying about preferences. More along the lines of people’s estimates of “how often” and “how much” being inadvertently influenced by, say, the implications they think this has for the sort of person they are. This is pure speculation. I doubt this would invert the results but could possibly bring the genders closer.
Ideally, we'd get genital biometrics while exposing participants to various types of material but good luck getting that past an IRB.
I'm worried that this would make selection bias a lot worse. The people who want to watch porn in a lab with electrodes stuck to their genitals are quite an unusual subpopulation. Even more unusual than people who want to fill out long online surveys about their porn preferences.
And of course there's the issue of how to compare biometrics between different people. For example, I can't think of a good way to compare genital biometrics of cis men and cis women.
I know the thesis is that women prefer violent content, but what I glean from this information is that trans folks are MUCH kinkier than cis folks (in most of the discussions of violence/brutality/humiliation/etc, trans folks trended up rather than down with their cis counterparts, which is FASCINATING to me as a trans folk [but not necessarily surprising as I am also kinky lmao])
You say this proves women are more into violence than men are, but what I gleaned from these graphs is that trans people are kinkier than cis people
Hypothesis: Cis-women like (receiving) dominance within limits, while the somewhat related trans-men (also AFAB) might like to adhere to a stronger power dynamic as part of their identification with a traditionally more dominant sex (my speculation). Cis-men enjoy more lighter dominance (or not at all, according to their definition of dominance), while trans-women (also AMAB) might be attracted to a weaker power dynamic as part of their identification with a traditionally less dominance-related sex (my speculation). Some cultural norms just might be at work as role models for these four groupings.
Could you explain the sampling technique? That is, how were respondents selected to participate in the survey?
Nevermind, I read about the survey. But given how it was done, this conclusion, "Are men more interested in sexually violent content than women? According to my data, absolutely not" is really inappropriate.
The most you can conclude is that men in this particular survey are not more interested than women in this particular survey in violent content. Making generalizations to the overall population is not warranted for so many reasons, even if it is a "big" survey.
There is so much I want to say about how much I love this article and that reading it I find that the results don’t surprise me. Although I had always thought of violent porn as the cruel, brutal type. I didn’t before consider the rest violent, rather just bog standard fantasy. Particularly the non consent. Being taken and ravished or thrown in the mud and saying no, what are you doing and struggling for instance seem quite old fashioned but I guess that would be considered non consent vanilla brutal fantasy. Technically old movies contain plenty of steamy violent erotic content apart from you don’t actually see nudity, maybe some clothes being ripped. I personally feel weird about studio porn because I don’t know how regulated it is. But then one could say the same for the regulations of old movies. I have skimmed the surfaces of it though and read erotic content occasionally.
If the conclusion ‘More women report interest in violent porn than men’ I don’t understand why the title of the article doesn’t correlate more closely. I don’t see in the data that Women prefer more violent porn. Unless all women prefer more violent porn. Sorry to be so picky about semantics. The survey is fucking impressive though! I looked up this article after watching the Benjamin Boyce podcast and you made is so interesting!
Very fascinating findings, especially because they are so un-intuitive (or so counter the narrative in our culture).
Thank you for your work!
"Only 1% of cis women and 3.3% of cis men pay for porn regularly, which is a bit lower than I expected." I didn't expect so few people to pay for porn. I guess people pay when they want access to niche stuff that's not available on mainstream porn sites. It's interesting how porn is similar to other content on the internet: if you can satisfy a niche, you can make money.
Nit:
> Transwomen and transmen are closest in porn consumption rates to others of their birth sex, but both edge towards the middle.
The first bit is not consistent with the immediately following numbers. Trans men at 6.6 are closer to cis men (7.1, difference 0.4) than to cis women (5.9, difference 0.7).
You're right; I was going off the graph but the way I phrased it wasn't consistent, will fix now, ty for the catch!
This seems to explain the f out of fifty shades of grey popularity. I wonder if the violence attraction trails back to the brutality of our ancestors. An epigenetic echo perhaps...
Was listening to a convo last night about WW1 and the brutality of it. It’s only recently humans haven’t had to deal with violence at scale.
Fascinating work.
It's a good thing we don't do large brutal wars anymore. Oh wait. 😭
I found the big nose-dives from "not erotic" to "slightly erotic" followed by a slow creep back up to be interesting. I suspect there's a lot of social desirability bias driving people to round "slightly erotic" and "somewhat erotic" off to "not erotic" for very taboo categories. I'd expect, if you extended the range of options out to "slightly disgusting/actively turn-off/whatever" all the way out to "extremely disgusting/whatever", it would form a normal distribution around "slightly disgusting". With everything left of "neither disgusting nor erotic/not erotic" getting compressed to "not erotic", it should be a steady downward slope. Other than social desirability bias, I'm not sure what would generate the observation.
Did you collect data about attendance at kink events or self-ID as kinky or a member of the kink community? My suspicion is that, around the "moderately erotic" level, people start considering themselves "in the community" and society people are biased towards being desirable in changes quite a lot.