‘Porn for women’ revealed as Pornhub’s top search of 2017

Women are seeking out female-friendly porn in record numbers, according to the internet’s most popular porn site.

Pornhub’s end of year round-up reveals that searches for “porn for women” soared in 2017.

Female users searched for the phrase 359% more frequently than in 2016, the site found, while overall searches increased by 1,400%, making it the top trending search of the year.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The trend towards porn aimed at female viewers is reflected in other major porn websites. Rival site xHamster reported a 2.4% overall increase in female users accessing the site.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the deeply conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia saw an 11% rise in the amount of women seeking out X-rated videos.

When it comes to particular preferences, Pornhub’s statistics showed that male users seek out “Milfs and step moms” while the female viewership inclines towards “celebrity sex tapes and lesbians”, TechCrunch reports.

This is reflected in the UK, where the most-searched terms of 2017 were “lesbian” - also the worldwide number one - followed by “Milf”, “step sister” and “step mom”.

Other insights from Pornhub’s end of year review reveal that viewers’ preferences are not what you might expect. After “porn for women”, the searches which underwent the biggest leap in popularity were “Rick and Morty” and “fidget spinner”.

The company’s VP, Corey Price, admitted he was baffled by the inclusion of the popular gadget. “It’s unimaginable why people in our audience are looking for videos that include [it]," he said.

The amount of porn being consumed by both male and female visitors is staggering. In 2017, Pornhub users streamed 3,732 petabytes of data, says Campaign Live, “enough to fill the storage of every iPhone in the world”.