Porn is illegal in China, and in fact, it’s so illegal that the government offers a reward of $120,000—about 12 times the average annual wage of a Chinese worker—for informing on porn producers. But none of that has stopped people in China from seeking out and viewing porn anyway, as a groundbreaking new study of Chinese porn habits reveals.
The study was conducted by Yummy, China’s most popular site for women’s sexuality, and found that China’s upswing in porn viewing is driven largely by young city dwellers in the world’s most populous country, a group in which 70 percent of men and half of all women say that they watch porn at least once per week.
“We already know that Chinese people do watch porn,” Yummy founder Zhao Jing told the China news and culture site SupChina. “However, we don’t know much about what exactly they like to watch and how it influences them.”
What the study found, according to Zhao, is that “porn has value.” In fact, it appears that Chinese millennials are turning to porn for answers to their questions about human sexuality. That may be why, the study found, Chinese porn preferences differ in some significant ways from what porn consumers want to watch in Western countries.
While according to Pornhub stats, the most-searched porn terms in 2018 were “lesbian,” “hentai,” “MILF,” and “step mom,” Chinese men said that they “like realistic scenes with active and expressive women, and high-quality productions,” according to SupChina.
Chinese men also show a clear preference for porn produced in China—an interesting finding given that producing porn in China can land the producer in prison. But Chinese men also enjoy porn made in Japan, which has a thriving and long-standing porn—or as it is called in Japan, “AV”—industry.
As for Chinese women, their tastes run to “content tailored to them and gay porn featuring Japanese, Korean, or Western actors.”
Among the top-searched terms in China are “Silk Labo” and “Xart,” which SupChina explains are the distinctly Japanese porn genres that feature, “a dominant man and idealized woman, and emphasize romantic storytelling over sexual action.” But Chinese women were more likely to watch Western-produced porn than Chinese men, who preferred Asian-made adult videos.
Independent porn director Erika Lust is also among the favorite search terms for Chinese porn fans.
But perhaps most significantly, a majority of Chinese porn fans “said that watching porn educated them, inspired their sexual practices, and improved their sex lives,” according to SupChina.
The survey also showed that Chinese viewers had a sophisticated understanding of what they were viewing, as “90 percent said that they were aware that porn and real-life sex were different,” SupChina reported. But at the same time, “nearly half of the men and 30 percent of women said they have tried to recreate, with their sex partners, what they had seen in adult movies.”
Photo By Running Toddler/Wikimedia Commons
