Most people here are familiar with modern feminism's take on porn. In short, the claim is that almost all pornography is targeted at men, and that it leads us to hold crude and violent views of sex. In particular, 'hardcore', 'rough' and 'gangbang' porn are often singled out as violent, degrading, and damaging to their viewers. Anyone interested can quickly find a thousand rants on the topic.

Enter PornHub. These sex-loving folks do a lot of data collection and blog about their findings. Yesterday they addressed male and female viewing habits. The whole post is interesting (for instance, women's top preferences are gay sex of either gender), but one thing caught my eye.

There's a breakdown at the end of section one identifying the categories women view more often than men. The first few are unremarkable ('for women', 'solo male'), but then we get into some intense topics. Women visit the 'hardcore' category twice as often as men. They visit 'rough sex', 'double penetration', 'gangbang', and 'bondage' about 80% more often than men. These are not small differences.

What to make of this? Well, it would appear that the kinds of porn feminists decry as most man-centric and degrading are most eye-catching to women. If PornHub decided to 'feminize' their site and dispose of these categories, a higher fraction of women than men would miss out. Above all else, women do take an interest in this male-centric content, even more than men do.

In short, feminist's problem with 'violent' porn is not that it appeals to and corrupts men. It's that women might like it, and they shouldn't be allowed to. Most guys with any alpha in them know that nervous, questioning, 'consent-at-every-stage' sex is a huge turnoff to women - it's not pushed because it's what most women want but because it offers the most control to women.

I suspect many people here assumed that something in this vein applied to porn as well as sex, but it's interesting to see numbers backing it up.

edit: I'm seeing the same few critiques too many times to answer. One is that not enough women watch porn to make this valid: I answer that here. The other is, more broadly, that this data is too weak to support my point. I point to reinforcing data and and explain why I feel justified (I'm disproving an absolute claim, not asserting that all women like this) in my argument here. Finally, a bunch of people are saying that since most porn use is by men, this point is meaningless. Either you mean that there weren't enough women [answer 1], the women weren't representative [answer 2], or you don't understand statistical significance and why ratio isn't relevant.