Another related point that becomes quite clear when reviewing PornHub data: there’s someone out there for everyone. Women, not surprisingly, often search for “tall” guys, “dark” guys, and “handsome” guys. But they also sometimes search for “short” guys, “pale” guys, and “ugly” guys. There are women who search for “disabled” guys, “chubby guy with small dick,” and “fat ugly old man.” Men frequently search for “thin” women, women with “big tits,” and women with “blonde” hair. But they also sometimes search for “fat” women, women with “tiny tits,” and women with “green hair.” There are men who search for “bald” women, “midget” women, and women with “no nipples.” This data can be cheering for those who are not tall, dark, and handsome or thin, big-breasted, and blonde.*
What about other searches that are both common and surprising? Among the 150 most common searches by men, the most surprising for me are the incestuous ones I discussed in the chapter on Freud. Other little-discussed objects of men’s desire are “shemales” (77th most common search) and “granny” (110th most common search). Overall, about 1.4 percent of men’s PornHub searches are for women with penises. About 0.6 percent (0.4 percent for men under the age of thirty-four) are for the elderly. Only 1 in 24,000 PornHub searches by men are explicitly for preteens; that may have something to do with the fact that PornHub, for obvious reasons, bans all forms of child pornography and possessing it is illegal.
Among the top PornHub searches by women is a genre of pornography that, I warn you, will disturb many readers: sex featuring violence against women. Fully 25 percent of female searches for straight porn emphasize the pain and/or humiliation of the woman—“painful anal crying,” “public disgrace,” and “extreme brutal gangbang,” for example. Five percent look for nonconsensual sex—“rape” or “forced” sex—even though these videos are banned on PornHub. And search rates for all these terms are at least twice as common among women as among men. If there is a genre of porn in which violence is perpetrated against a woman, my analysis of the data shows that it almost always appeals disproportionately to women.
Of course, when trying to come to terms with this, it is really important to remember that there is a difference between fantasy and real life. Yes, of the minority of women who visit PornHub, there is a subset who search—unsuccessfully—for rape imagery. To state the obvious, this does not mean women want to be raped in real life and it certainly doesn’t make rape any less horrific a crime. What the porn data does tell us is that sometimes people have fantasies they wish they didn’t have and which they may never mention to others.
Closets are not just repositories of fantasies. When it comes to sex, people keep many secrets—about how much they are having, for example.
In the introduction, I noted that Americans report using far more condoms than are sold every year. You might therefore think this means they are just saying they use condoms more often during sex than they actually do. The evidence suggests they also exaggerate how frequently they are having sex to begin with. About 11 percent of women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four say they are sexually active, not currently pregnant, and not using contraception. Even with relatively conservative assumptions about how many times they are having sex, scientists would expect 10 percent of them to become pregnant every month. But this would already be more than the total number of pregnancies in the United States (which is 1 in 113 women of childbearing age). In our sex-obsessed culture it can be hard to admit that you are just not having that much.
But if you’re looking for understanding or advice, you have, once again, an incentive to tell Google. On Google, there are sixteen times more complaints about a spouse not wanting sex than about a married partner not being willing to talk. There are five and a half times more complaints about an unmarried partner not wanting sex than an unmarried partner refusing to text back.
And Google searches suggest a surprising culprit for many of these sexless relationships. There are twice as many complaints that a boyfriend won’t have sex than that a girlfriend won’t have sex. By far, the number one search complaint about a boyfriend is “My boyfriend won’t have sex with me.” (Google searches are not broken down by gender, but, since the previous analysis said that 95 percent of men are straight, we can guess that not too many “boyfriend” searches are coming from men.)
How should we interpret this? Does this really imply that boyfriends withhold sex more than girlfriends? Not necessarily. As mentioned earlier, Google searches can be biased in favor of stuff people are uptight talking about. Men may feel more comfortable telling their friends about their girlfriend’s lack of sexual interest than women are telling their friends about their boyfriend’s. Still, even if the Google data does not imply that boyfriends are really twice as likely to avoid sex as girlfriends, it does suggest that boyfriends avoiding sex is more common than people let on.
Google data also suggests a reason people may be avoiding sex so frequently: enormous anxiety, with much of it misplaced. Start with men’s anxieties. It isn’t news that men worry about how well-endowed they are, but the degree of this worry is rather profound.
Men Google more questions about their sexual organ than any other body part: more than about their lungs, liver, feet, ears, nose, throat, and brain combined. Men conduct more searches for how to make their penises bigger than how to tune a guitar, make an omelet, or change a tire. Men’s top Googled concern about steroids isn’t whether they may damage their health but whether taking them might diminish the size of their penis. Men’s top Googled question related to how their body or mind would change as they aged was whether their penis would get smaller.
Side note: One of the more common questions for Google regarding men’s genitalia is “How big is my penis?” That men turn to Google, rather than a ruler, with this question is, in my opinion, a quintessential expression of our digital era.*
Do women care about penis size? Rarely, according to Google searches. For every search women make about a partner’s phallus, men make roughly 170 searches about their own. True, on the rare occasions women do express concerns about a partner’s penis, it is frequently about its size, but not necessarily that it’s small. More than 40 percent of complaints about a partner’s penis size say that it’s too big. “Pain” is the most Googled word used in searches with the phrase “___ during sex.” (“Bleeding,” “peeing,” “crying,” and “farting” round out the top five.) Yet only 1 percent of men’s searches looking to change their penis size are seeking information on how to make it smaller.