These Porn Categories Are Most Popular With Female Viewers, According To xHamster (Bustle)
Read the full article by Léa Rose Emery at Bustle.com
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?
Léa is a writer and comedian based in London, UK. She writes and speaks about a range of topics including sex, dating, feminism, politics and addiction. Outside work she can normally can be found running, reading, doing yoga, or eating bagels. She has a BA in Political Rhetoric from the Gallatin School at NYU, as well as an LLB and an LLM in Public International Law from the London School of Economics.