Porn: Most Consumers Are Men

Talk Back Northampton prominently quotes literature from the Feminists for Free Expression that asserts “that half the adult videos bought or rented in the US are done so by women or women in couples”. TBN seems to be suggesting that since lots of women buy porn, it’s OK that much of porn exploits and abuses women. We question both sides of that suggestion. Just because some women buy harmful material doesn’t make it less harmful. See our review of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. And let’s see if FFE’s assertion about who buys porn matches up with other statistics…

MediaPost, July 2005
According to University of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann’s 1994 “Sex in America” survey, 23 percent of men and 11 percent of women watch x-rated movies or videos; 22 percent of men and four percent of women have visited a club with nude or seminude dancers; and 16 percent of men and four percent of women look at sexually explicit books or magazines.

MediaPost, July 2005
36.9 percent of the respondents [to a Ball State University survey, 2004-2005] acknowledged visiting a porn site within the last month or more frequently. The percentages were 49 percent among men, and only 17 percent among women.

Nielsen/Net Ratings, September 2003
More than 32 million unique individuals visited a porn site in Sept. of 2003. Nearly 22.8 million of them were male (71 percent), while 9.4 million adult site visitors were female (29 percent).

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After we put up this post this morning, Talk Back Northampton wrote to NPN to say,

“This passage [in its original version] insinuates that TBN made the assertion, not a feminist research organization to which many of your readers may accord more credibility, and it fails to mention that, as we have informed you, we have requested the organization to provide supporting documentation.”

We apologize if any of our readers were confused about the source of the assertion. Since TBN placed this assertion prominently at the top of a post on October 11, we assumed they stood by it fully. Here is how the assertion appeared at TBN:

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Our essential point remains. TBN has prominently publicized a fact the ultimate source of which is not yet clear and does not correlate with several other facts on this subject that we have been able to discover. We’re glad that TBN is attempting to document its posts further. As always, we encourage readers to read TBN’s complete post to judge the merits for themselves.