Over 100 quick stats and findings from an ever-growing body of research that details the effects of porn for individuals, relationships, and society.
Research has found that those who enjoy extreme porn tend to prefer porn to real-life sex as a way to achieve sexual arousal.
Some experts have determined four major brain changes common to addicted brains—sensitization, desensitization, hypofrontality, and a malfunctioning stress system— all of which can be found in cases of pornography consumption.
Research shows that even individuals who are accepting of pornography tend to experience psychological distress when their own partners consume pornography.
While many LGBTQ+ youth turn to porn to learn more about their own sexuality, porn often fetishizes, misrepresents, and exploits LGBTQ+ people in damaging ways.
Qualitative research reveals that young women often feel pressured to play out the “scripts” their male partners had learned from porn —they feel badgered into having sex in uncomfortable positions, faking sexual responses, and consenting to unpleasant or painful acts.
A 2017 poll found that the more porn a man consumes, the more likely he is to be dissatisfied with his penis size. And the same goes for women with male partners— the more porn they consume, the less satisfied they are with their partner’s penis size.
Only 4% of women who were casually dating men reported that their partner regularly consumed porn, when in reality, 50% of the men who were casually dating reported that they regularly consumed porn.
1 out of every 8 porn titles shown to first-time users on porn home pages describe acts of sexual violence, according to a 2021 study.
65% of underage victims recruited online in 2020 active criminal sex trafficking cases were recruited through Facebook, while 14% were recruited through Instagram, and 8% were recruited through Snapchat.
Of domestic minor trafficking victims who had been forced into porn production, the average age they began being filmed was 12.8 years old.
99% of the individuals targeted in deepfake pornography are women.
A 2026 study found that across 11 countries, 1.2 million children reported having had their images manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes through AI tools in the past year.
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