It seems like every day we hear about a new headline relating to the world’s porn habits.
Whether it’s Hawaiians rushing to adult sites after learning the recent missile alert was a false alarm, or the guy who called on Pornhub for some help with a best man speech, this sort of thing comes up a lot (no pun intended).
We already knew Google is judging us based on the porn we consume, but did you know there were three types of porn viewer?
More importantly, did you know only one of those three is ‘the good kind’? Well now you do.
Citing a study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, indy100 has shared the three categories of porn viewer: recreational, sexually compulsive or distressed non-compulsive.
You can probably work it out for yourself, but the good one is the first of the three. We say good – it’s the one it’s healthiest to be.
Those in this group watch around 24 minutes of porn per week on average, compared to 110 minutes and “the highest…intensity of efforts to access sexual material” for those considered sexually compulsive.
It’s made up, broadly speaking, of those who “[search] for sexually explicit material out of curiosity, to improve sexual skills and knowledge, or to increase their sexual enjoyment of and interest in sex”.
Furthermore – and this feels like a good thing – it’s the category which more than three quarters of the 830 people polled fell into.
“Recreational users reported higher sexual satisfaction and lower sexual compulsivity, avoidance, and dysfunction, whereas users with a compulsive profile presented lower sexual satisfaction and dysfunction and higher sexual compulsivity and avoidance,” the study reads.
Those in the recreational group were more likely to be women or people in relationships, while men dominated the ‘sexually compulsive’ 11.8%.
The ‘distressed non-compulsive’ group were found to watch just 17 minutes of porn per week on average, but “reported the highest level of emotional distress associated with pornography use”.
With that in mind, the researchers noted that time spent watching this kind of material wasn’t always aligned with the emotional reaction of the viewers.
Still, with a sample size of less than 1,000, we might wait for further studies into the topic.
(Images: Pexels)
