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on Sex Statistics and Porn Percentages…

Because my job is better than your job, I spent all day reading about sex and looking at porn. Awesome huh?

Ok, So I’m currently reading Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacida Jetha. It’s an anthropological history on sexuality, monogamy and non-monogamy… because my job is awesome.

Anyway, they’re talking about human male predisposition to enticement by group sex fantasies (yeah… yeah… yeah…  I know…  not YOU… of course… you’re all evolved and sophisticated and shit…  I’m talking about the rest of us savages). So anyway… at the point in the book where I am now, they’re talking about preoccupation with group sex porn and they said something that kind of surprised me:

“Researchers have confirmed what porn producers already know: men tend to get turned on by images depicting an environment in which sperm competition is clearly at play (though few, we imagine, think of it in quite these terms). Images and videos showing one woman with multiple males are far more popular on the Internet and in commercial pornography than those depicting one male with multiple females. A quick peek at the online offerings at Adult Video Universe lists over nine hundred titles in the Gangbang genre, but only twenty-seven listed under Reverse Gangbang. You do the math. Why would the males in a species that’s been wearing the shackles of monogamy for 1.9 million years be sexually excited by scenes of groups of men ejaculating with one or two women?” (231)

In other words, at least according to their research MMF porn is more common than MFF porn. That surprised me. I expected it to be the exact opposite. So I decided to look into it myself. Luckily, I live in 2017, decades after Al Gore decided to invent a global network of computers with the main purpose of delivering porn on demand right to my screen without even having to leave the house. And so to the Pornhub machine!

Pornhub is actually pretty good about tagging their content. They also publish a lot of stats and stuff on their special blog at https://www.pornhub.com/insights/. Unfortunately, they’re not great about just leaving a ton of raw data around for you to look at. So I decided to pull a few things myself. I made a list of categories that I could search for that implied group sex. and counted the videos that were available for each:

Category Videos
Threesome 66872
Orgy 27763
MMF 1057
MFF 841
Gangbang 23717
Reverse Gangbang 1059
FFM 1058
FMM 1112
2 girls 1 guy 868
2 guys 1 girl 1033
1 guy 2 girls 1153
1 girl 2 guys 1180
All M+ 4382
All F+ 3920
Threesome M+ estimate 5350(23405)
Orgy M+ estimate 24848
Threesome F+ estimate 61522(43467)

Since the videos are tagged by users at upload time, it’s hard to get standardization. For the most part, if someone bothers to tag something MMF, MFF, FMM, FFM, or some combination of 2+1, you get exactly what it says, so you can kind of aggregate them together (M+ or F+). The threesome category is MUCH harder. I wasn’t about to go and watch 66,872 porn videos in a single afternoon to figure out what the gender breakdowns were. So instead I sorted by most viewed videos and counted penises in the most recent 400. SCIENCE!!! Turns out that 8% of the threesome videos have two or more penises. Or if I use the most recent videos, 35%. All things being equal, that means between 5350 and 23405 of those are M+ threesomes and the other 43466-61,522 being F+ threesomes. As a note, only 3% of those I surveyed were FFF threesomes. None happened to be MMM but I know for a fact that there are around 2227 all male group sex videos tagged on the site. I just didn’t hit any in my sample (I actually think it’s possible you can’t see gay MALE porn unless you specifically ask for it). It’s also worth noting that a LOT of things labeled threesome aren’t. They’re just straight up one on one heterosexual porn. Maybe 10 percent of them. I guess people are just trying to game their views by tagging them threesome when they aren’t,

So is there validity to this? Is porn hub representative? There’d still be significantly higher F+ than M+ but not nearly as much as I’d expect, and certainly not when it’s well tagged.

om

34 comments for “on Sex Statistics and Porn Percentages…

  1. April 4, 2017 at 3:11 pm

    If i watched porn *cough cough* i’d prefer to watch porn where there was no M junk involved, and thus no sperm for there to be competition… but hey, that’s just a theory….. you know… if i watched porn.

    1. April 4, 2017 at 3:18 pm

      Well. Part of his point is exactly that. You’d think that there’d be a much higher incidence of FFF and MFF tagged content than MMF by a lot for that reason. An assumption to keep sperm competition down. In reality though, it appears we, as a species LIKE sperm competition.

    2. April 4, 2017 at 3:19 pm

      i guess i’m just freaky… i mean the hypothetical me of course.

  2. April 4, 2017 at 3:19 pm

    So I have never heard the term “reverse gangbang” and could not have come up with the right answer if you asked me what that was.

    Which, I suspect, means all the videos in that label are ffm bcs it’s a specific label, while some videos in the gangbang label could be both

    1. April 4, 2017 at 3:21 pm

      Oh. I meant to comment on that. As far as I could tell… not really. There does not appear to a significant MF+ presence in the gangbang category.

      I also should have pointed out that the threesome category on the other hand DOES appear to also contain foursomes and moresomes. So it’s basically a superset of orgy.

  3. April 4, 2017 at 3:19 pm

    Or equal and people just switch around

    1. April 4, 2017 at 3:22 pm

      Under gangbang you mean? Not as far as I could tell in a couple hours of research. Those go under orgy (and threesome even though there are four or more)

    2. April 4, 2017 at 3:27 pm

      Yeah, I guess orgy is more egalitarian

  4. April 4, 2017 at 3:24 pm

    I’m curious about the sperm competition idea, though. Like, does it make the viewer want to compete to prove he is more virile than the porn stars?

    1. April 4, 2017 at 3:27 pm

      Maybe. They’re not big on assigning motivation because they’re sociologists and not psychologists. More they’re just showing that analytically a lot of what we assume about the sexual proclivities of our species appears to be false.

  5. April 4, 2017 at 3:25 pm

    Oh. And I should remember to modify this post when I get home and am not using a phone. The reason I left out an orgy F+ estimate is that 90+% of the orgy videos appear to have 2 or more females. Regardless of the number of males.

    1. April 4, 2017 at 3:51 pm

      Btw: you seem to have orgy and reverse orgy listed 2x’s

    2. April 4, 2017 at 4:24 pm

      Thanks. I’ll fix that when I get home.

  6. April 4, 2017 at 3:28 pm

    I would posit a theory to that. — i actually have several, so I just picked one. ( and i have theories both pro and con)
    Competition between men (armwrestling, my cock is bigger, flicking bottle caps across a room at a target) is normal to men.
    In grand societal sweep, competition between men and women, not so much.
    In sex, man vs man for the attention of a woman would be normal. But a man vs a woman for that? Yeeegods… How can that be? How can a male compete? Women have those strange modes of communicating and she can understand?
    Is it a conscious thing? Probably not, but there are lots of things that men are conditioned for.

    1. April 4, 2017 at 4:25 pm

      But that only works if the sex is competitive. How do you distinguish between competitive and cooperative M+ porn?

  7. April 4, 2017 at 3:30 pm

    Did you weight by number of views or just by number of videos? Those would of course measure very different things.

    1. April 4, 2017 at 3:30 pm

      I didn’t weight them at all. What would your recommendation be?

    2. April 4, 2017 at 3:34 pm

      If the theory you are proving (the testing definition) is that men prefer scenes of multiple males with one female, then I think the measure should be strictly based on number of views each type of video gets.

    3. April 4, 2017 at 3:37 pm

      of course, you don’t know how many of those views were male, and how many female. so all you can conclude is a species preference, not male preference.

    4. April 4, 2017 at 3:38 pm

      Ah. Yeah…. I actually did think of that. But it’s a harder calculation to do.

      But I did check and yes if you sort by views rather than most recent then M+ threesomes drop from 35% down to like 8

  8. April 4, 2017 at 3:41 pm

    I would posit my own theory of why this may be the case, if true: I can come up with a simple/practical explanation. If males enjoy watching the…conclusion… of male effort, then each male is limited to more or less one per film. So as a practical matter, a viewer gets more “bang for his buck” this way.

    To see if males want this as their own reality, I don’t think you need to look too much further than the content of harems and setups of other folks with a free hand to do what they want. You could also presumably look at other primates since lots of research on competition probably exists there.

    1. April 4, 2017 at 4:27 pm

      So not the quote that I referenced. But a majority of the book is actually looking into behavioral patterns of other primates and various types of communities.

    2. April 4, 2017 at 4:36 pm

      If I remember correctly, bonobos are rather interesting in that department.

    3. April 4, 2017 at 4:36 pm

      Yep. And they’re a near constant example in the book.

  9. April 4, 2017 at 3:50 pm

    Theory #2.
    It ain’t sperm competition, it’s about power.
    The same sort that leads to rape fantasies. The animalistic brain of a human which leads to gang rape.
    No I’m not saying every man fantasizes that way.
    But if we’re talking about societal scope not individual….

    Theory #3.
    Latent homosexuality by men preconditioned to not have those trends. (Also subconscious)
    They wouldn’t look at MMM, but MMF is okay because there’s a woman involved.
    Seeing two penises, with that naughty hint of possible incidental contact or splashzone.

    1. April 4, 2017 at 4:30 pm

      So theory 2 is addressed in the book in great detail. Theory 3 not so much. At least not yet, but I’m not done.

    2. April 4, 2017 at 4:33 pm

      Sonofabitch I could be an academic

  10. April 4, 2017 at 5:51 pm

    I just like to watch all of the above combinations equally so uhm yeah…..?

    1. April 4, 2017 at 10:04 pm

      for science of course. 🙂

  11. April 5, 2017 at 3:22 am

    “So I decided to pull a few things myself.”

    Wakka wakka

    1. April 5, 2017 at 6:47 am

      Thank you folks, I’ll be here all week.

  12. April 5, 2017 at 4:07 am

    I’m confused by the math. You said that 35% were M+ (across the 400 videos). You then extrapolated that to 5450 M+ and 61522 F+.

    That is where I am confused. 5450 isn’t 35% of 66872. Did the phone create a weird typo somewhere? Am I not understanding something or missing something?

    1. April 5, 2017 at 6:45 am

      Good eye. It’s because I actually did the calculation twice. Once with most popular videos and once with most recent. I meant to make that clear and just forgot. Fixed now.

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