Does porn have an effect on sexuality? Or does sexuality create the porn we watch? What can bisexual porn habit tell us about?
Some headlines have recently been devoted to the fact that Bisexual Porn is on the rise. Moreover, it’s been discovered that the more porn you watch, the more likely you are to identify as bisexual. So, it kinda begs the question: Does porn create bisexuals? Or do Bisexuals create porn? Sort of a chicken or the egg situation.
While it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that the more porn you consume (hetero, homo, bi, or something entirely different) the more likely you are to be open to the idea that sex is pretty great— regardless of who (or what) is having it. Where it’s also equally reasonable to believe that there’s a huge community of bisexual people who just really like porn. Ones that were bisexual before they found their favourite streaming site.
Well, it’s a question that’s being chewed over by a number of researchers, psychologists, and journalists who have no scientific qualifications (me). Sexual identity has long been one of those beautiful mysteries of the universe that we desperately try to label and categorize. Frankly for myself, (as a mere journalist with zero claim to any beneficial scientific field of study) I’m not entirely sure why. While I do appreciate that sexuality is a wonderful, often fluid, and genuinely beautiful thing— I’m not entirely sure that your sexuality, or my own, is really relevant to scientific inquiry.
Why, you ask? Because I’m a firm believer that sex is sex, and as long as we’re all happily consenting adults, what we do in our bedrooms, board rooms, or any other environment with our genitals is our business.
But, soapbox aside, I have to admit, the statistics that have been released regarding porn in general and bisexual porn viewing habits and sexuality are really, really interesting. While these statistics don’t actually go as far as to prove any one thing (correlation isn’t causation and all that), they do spark some pretty interesting food for thought.
Frequency and Sexuality
While the online poll given to users of a relatively popular streaming porn site brought out the usual reports that we would expect to see (i.e. most viewers are straight males) there are some newer correlations, and higher numbers in a number of populations and habits that, most people apparently, didn’t see coming at all. Like the incidence of heavy porn users (those that are watching porn more than once a day) are more likely to be bisexual.
Again, while straight people still predominate the airwaves, there is a much higher occurrence of those identifying as bisexuals that consume porn multiple times per day as opposed to any other frequency. While straight people tend to most often consume porn once per week, and homosexuals report most often consumer several times a day (albeit in much, much, lower numbers) nearly 28% of all consumers identifying as bisexual watched porn more than once per day.
To help put this into perspective, of the 11,000 people interviewed, about 68% identified as straight, 22% as bisexual, and only about 4% as homosexual. So, while it makes sense that straight male individuals would dominate all categories— amassing over 71% of all people polled), the concentration of the bisexual population that watched porn at least once per day was relatively high (nearly 51% of bisexual respondents). Where about 20% reported watching porn a few times a week, and only 13% saying they watched porn less than that.
Now, this definitely doesn’t mean that all bisexuals are porn fiends, or that porn magically turns you into a bisexual— as the figures could be skewed because these results only come from one source (maybe there’s a platform that straight females prefer, or homosexual males go to instead), what it does do is suggest that pornography might just be opening up some fluidity in our inherent sexualities.
Sexuality, Comfort, and Bisexual Porn
The poll also goes as far to corroborate the currently held assumption that women are more likely to identify as bisexual than men— as of the total women questioned, about 38% of them identifies as bisexual, where by comparison only 20% of the men polled identifies as the same.
What really brings the entire study together however, is how the respondents report feeling about porn in general, and bisexual porn, as to whether they believe it has value as a sexual medium and outlet. Which huge margins of those polled were happy to say that they thought porn to be a positive outlet in their life.
Which to me, the lowly journalist, is the real clencher here. It seems that nearly every article I read that discussed these statistics, did so through a lens of bisexual porn being the tempestuous drug, reeling people in and demanding that they take their heathenistic ways to deeper, darker depths at any given chance.
Instead, what I was to glean from the data is that there is an entire generation that is blossoming into a serene comfort with who they are and the in-born sexualities that they hold. To which, porn is just a portal into fantasy, and not some craven drug, doomed to destroy humanity.
Also read: Sex Toy Sales on Soar: Thanks to COVID-19
Also read: 9 of The Unusual Places To Have Sex With Your Husband Other Than The Bedroom
