Porn fans, both men and women, are much more likely to identify as bisexual than the rest of the United States population. In fact, porn viewers are about five times more likely to say they are bisexual than to say they are gay, according to data compiled in a new study run by the porn “tube” site xHamster, and released this week as part of the xHamster Report on Digital Sexuality.
A recent study at the University of California at Los Angeles found that among the general United States population, less than two percent of Americans self-identify at bisexual.
But in the xHamster study of 11,000 U.S.-based visitors to the site who completed a survey about their porn-viewing habits and preferences, more than 110 times that many said they were bisexual: 22.3 percent. Only about two of every three xHamster users, 67.77 percent, definitively identified themselves as “straight.”
Just over four percent identified as gay.
And while women overall are more likely than men to call themselves bisexual, the xHamster results do not appear to have been highly skewed by this disparity. While 38 percent of women who watch porn, according to the xHamster data, say that they are bisexual, more than one in every five male porn fans also say they are bi: 20.1 percent.
In fact, of all the women who watch porn, in the xHamster survey, less than half—46.6 percent—said they were purely straight.
The data also shows that the more porn you watch, the more likely you are to say that you’re bisexual. Of those who said they viewed porn “several times per day,” 27.46 percent were bi.
But on the other end of the spectrum, infrequent porn viewers—those who watch only once per week—showed the lowest rate of bisexuality, at just 13.09 percent. The effect was reversed for self-identified “straight” porn fans. Once-a-week indulgers were 73.47 percent straight, while 61.88 percent of “several times a day” porn binge-viewers said they were straight.
But the percentage of gay viewers varied little regardless of how frequently they watched porn, staying steadily between 3.5 and 4.8 percent.
"Does watching a lot of porn make you gay?" xHamster Vice Preisdent Alex Hawkins said in a statement. "No, but it may make you realize you're not entirely straight."
Watching porn, the study suggests, “opens you up to a broader ideas about human sexuality.”
Photo By Another Believer/Wikimedia Commons
