The Stats On Porn Use
Most men are not regular pornography users.
A few weeks ago
posted a long note about pornography use. She thinks that a lot of current political and cultural turmoil is downstream from widespread porn usage since, in Kryptogal’s opinion, nearly all men watch porn and nearly all women find that fact deeply disturbing. She wrote:“It really can't be overstated how much of an impact it's had on women, collectively, to learn precisely what's in the hearts of men, which was previously shrouded and glossed over…”
Kryptogal is wrong about the stats on pornography use.
I don’t mean to be overly combative, but Kryptogal made a number of specific empirical claims which are incorrect, and I will rebut them point by point.
Claim 1: Nearly all men use pornography and most use it frequently.
Fact: 43% of young men have not used pornography in the past year. 25% of young men have never watched pornography.
According to a survey by the Institute For Family Studies 44% of all men and 11% of all women have watched pornography in the past month.
They don’t provide the percentages for women broken down by age.
Claim 2: The country will never give up porn. It would be easier to give up caffeine or alcohol.
Fact: Most Republican states are already moving to restrict internet porn.
Since 2023, twenty-four Republican states have passed laws to require age verification to access internet pornography. As of June 2025 age verification laws have been passed by Louisiana, Utah, Mississippi, Virginia, Arkansas, Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Indiana, Alabama, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota and Arizona. These are nearly all the states with Republican State Legislatures.
Pornography websites have responded to these laws by blocking their services from those states altogether. Tech-savvy people can get around this by using a VPN, but most people aren’t sophisticated enough to use a VPN, so the effect has been to reduce the number of people in those states who use porn. Furthermore, since the age verification check puts a break between the impulse (to watch pornography) and the reward (seeing porn), it will tend to break addictive behavior.
Claim 3: The country will never give up porn because men love porn and they would freak out if it were about to be banned.
Fact: Young women and young men have identical views on the moral acceptability of pornography. Most men and most women support laws to restrict pornography. Gender gaps range from 10 to 20 percentage points.
Men are more supportive of both the legality and moral acceptability of pornography than women are, but the difference is not as big as Kryptogal thinks it is. Looking at this graph from the Survey Center on American Life, it looks like roughly 30% of men say that pornography is morally acceptable and roughly 20% of women say that pornography is morally acceptable.
Opinions vary a lot by age. Young women are just as likely as young men to believe that pornography use is morally acceptable.
When asked about support for laws that restrict access to pornography, there is a gender gap among the 18-29 bracket. Most Americans, including most men support such laws.
Claim 4: Men use pornography for pleasure. Women generally only look at porn out of horror, fear and curiosity.
Fact: Monthly porn use rates for women are 1/4th of the rate for men.
According to the same survey cited above, 11% of women have viewed pornography in the past month, compared to 44% of men. That means that one in nine women has watched pornography in the past month. It’s hard to believe that’s all out of curiosity and fear.
Claim 5: It is only quite recently that some younger men have realized that porn is a problem.
Fact: There has been a robust movement of men who oppose porn use for at least 13 years of the world wide web’s 32 year existence.
The (admittedly grossly-named) NoFap movement (wikipedia page here) became popular around 2012, which was 13 years ago. Internet pornography has only been widely available for about 30 years, so 13 years is not “quite recent.”
Kryptogal claimed that “having any qualms or objections to heavy or regular porn use was basically considered an extremist “sex negative” position for all of the 2010s and up til just recently and people were shamed and shouted out of even mentioning.” I’m sorry to hear that Kryptogal had this experience, but her experience is particular to her own bubble. Liberal subcultures have been hit hard by porn because liberal men don’t admit that it is bad. In conservative subcultures (which make up at least a third of America) porn use has always been universally recognized as a vice.
The public discourse about the negative effects of porn use long predates 2020. I was aware of the Christian anti-pornography organization Fight The New Drug when I was in a secular public high school in 2014. Fight The New Drug was founded in 2009.
As mentioned above, the “NoFap” movement had a robust internet community by 2012. When confronted with the idea that pornography might have negative effects, liberal journalists responded with scorn. The New Statesman described abstention from masturbation as “insidious”. Conservatives have actively worked to reduce porn use for many years. Matt Fradd, one of the most influential Christian commentators, made his fortune by inventing Covenant Eyes, an app to help men quit porn. As Freya India’s recent article in the Free Press demonstrates, even some liberals are now starting to come around on this issue.
Will Society Break Its Porn Addiction?
Cigarettes were invented less than 150 years ago. They quickly became widespread since they are addictive. But people recognized that smoking was a bad habit, and through the slow process of social improvement, carried out by the Matt Fradd’s and NoFap’s and Fight The New Drug’s of the 1900s, smoking has been dramatically reduced, and is still falling, especially among the college-degree class, especially in America. Internet pornography is a new phenomenon. The world wide web didn’t exist until 1993. The liberal attitude on porn will eventually fall out of fashion, because more and more people will realize the obvious: that porn is a vice. Conservative reformers will continue to create software to help people break their porn addictions. Legislatures will curtail the ability of pornographers to give their wares to children. And most importantly of all, porn use will fall out of fashion among the upper and middle class. There will be a growing realization that porn use is undisciplined. Porn-use will become low-class.
Eventually, widespread porn-use will be seen as an aberrant social trend that resulted from a novel technology, much like the wave of cigarette addiction after the invention of cigarettes, or the wave of alcoholism after the improvement of processes to refine hard liquor.
Just as we should criticize the excessive feminization of modern society while being careful not to demonize women, we can also criticize masculine vices like pornography use without sliding into demonization of men. And we shouldn’t despair that our society’s present vices will be around forever. Massive social reform projects have succeeded in the past and will succeed again.
This seems correct. People who openly proclaim themselves fans of pornography and masturbation are few and far between, with good reason
Interesting how some of the men in their 30s and 40s seem to be more into porn than men in their 20s. Is it a generational thing, or is there something else going on?