A Study Using Large-Scale, Cross-Platform U.S.-Based Internet Engagement Data
By Brian Waniewski, Gary Barker, Caroline Hayes, Richie Hardcore, and Cody Ragonese, for Harmony Labs, in partnership with Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice. Published August 2026.
Reader advised. This report contains analysis, descriptions, and links to material explicitly depicting sex and other kinds of pornography. Content may be age-inappropriate or disturbing to some readers and is intended for research, educational, or professional purposes only.
The internet ushered in an explosion in availability and access to online material explicitly depicting sex. On this point, the scholarly literature, commentary, and journalism about pornography seem to agree. About everything else, however, evidence and opinions vary.
In the scholarly literature, commentary, and journalism, we find a range of cultural concerns, taboos, stigmas, and ambivalence. There's porn framed as a moral crisis, with prohibition as the only possible solution. There's porn as an opportunity for increasing media literacy, especially for children and teens. There's porn as reproducing the male gaze or the imperial gaze, as reinforcing national and cultural stereotypes. There's porn as a vector for pathologizing male sexuality, with problematic porn usage, porn addiction, porn as substitute for male-female relationship, and porn as a correlate to promiscuity, interpersonal apathy, misogyny, and sexual violence, or as an outlet for impulses that might otherwise lead to these attitudes and behaviors.
The porn industry's exploitation of women is well documented, along with a host of other harms, and the surface area for online interaction with porn is already rapidly increasing under the influence of AI. There's the deepfake porn economy, AI-generated porn, and AI as a tool for fulfilling sexual fantasy, used by 24% of young men and 13% of young women, according to the 2026 State of American Men report.
Two things stood out to us as largely missing in our review of the literature and commentary on porn, informed by other recent reviews and reports, like one from the American Institute of Boys and Men and one from Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice.
1. The first missing thing was knowledge about porn derived from the directly observed behavior of people. Most of the studies about porn we reviewed relied on people describing their own porn use via surveys, or on reporting from a single platform, like Pornhub. The shortcomings of self-report for media behavior are well documented and likely to be particularly pronounced for porn, content that channels a range of cultural concerns, taboos, stigmas, and ambivalence. And because people encounter porn across an ever-expanding array of platforms, channels, and formats — from traditional tube sites to member-only cam sites, private messenger groups, social media, and more — user behavior on any one platform is likely to provide a very partial view of what's happening with porn and people online. There are definitely some studies derived from cross-platform behavioral media data, like this one, but they tend to rely on just a few thousand study participants.
2. The second missing thing was a conception of porn as part of an ecology of media that includes other kinds of content and other types of online activity, that accounts for how people move between content types, intentionally or unintentionally.
If porn is such an integral part of the lived experience of so many people, why do we cordon it off and treat it as a category of media engagement apart from all others? Harmony Labs is guilty of this too. As a matter of policy, we exclude porn from studies of audience behavior. Is this prudishness or shame dressed up as workplace safety? Part of a larger social compact to turn away from our neighbors' bedroom and bathroom behaviors? Something else entirely?
"Online life would not be what it is today without porn."
The fact is online life would not be what it is today without porn. Porn played an important role in the early internet's evolution, from how the construct of privacy gets implemented to the technologies of video streaming and credit card–based payment systems. Given how central sexuality is in the lives of human beings, and the interest and energy humans invest in its exploration and expression, porn will likely persist as a key driver in whatever the internet and our media lives become next. Perhaps we had better start applying research attention to porn in ways that admit its centrality to contemporary human experience and make better use of the same internet-scale behavioral media data that media brands rely on in the development of their offerings?
We intend the report that follows to be a humble contribution along these lines, and we hope that it helps dispel some of the obscurity and shadow pervading all things porn. We begin by summarizing a few of the report's key findings, then offering an overview of research and reporting design choices and methods. We organize the rest of the report by key insights, starting with insights derived from a quantitative analysis of porn engagement behaviors, followed by insights derived from a qualitative analysis of porn and other media content different audiences engage with.
"Porn will likely persist as a key driver in whatever the internet and our media lives become next."
This report stems from a larger project with Equimundo to map audiences of men online: how they participate in media cultures; relate to different masculinities; and see themselves, relationships, and communities; as well as how media engagement contributes to men's flourishing. A primary output of that larger project is an audience segmentation that divides men in the U.S. into five groups along key tensions in flourishing baselines, media behaviors, attitudes to gender, relationships, responsibilities, and more. This report makes use of that audience segmentation in describing the patterns we found in the porn content different audiences engage with. Readers are invited to explore the full report, Men's Flourishing and Media: How Online Media Behaviors Relate to Flourishing for 5 Audiences of Men.
Questions, feedback, and suggestions can be sent to [email protected].
Below are a few of the key findings from this report, explored in more depth in the pages that follow.
Audiences engage with porn is an important part of the media lives of most men. Similar, contiguous, or overlapping themes, concerns, desires, fears, and fascinations show up in their porn and non-porn media.
This suggests that all media, including porn, affords men space for exploring, reflecting on, and/or reinforcing formulations and attitudes about masculinity, relationships, responsibility, care, commitment, and more. For instance, one audience tends to hold so-called "traditional family values." Men in this audience identify as providers and protectors. They are mostly heterosexual, religious, and politically conservative. They strive for confidence, strength, wealth, and respect. They view friendship with women as complicated and believe that, in general, men work harder than women. The non-porn stories they engage with reflect these attitudes and beliefs, with many streaming storylines, for instance, resolving in protagonists successfully taking control in crises and difficult situations to provide for their families. In this audience's porn, infidelity initiated by wives and watched by husbands for their own enjoyment is a key theme. Clearly porn affords this audience a space to explore their fears and fascinations with failing at traditional gender norms and becoming a cuckold — a man whose wife or romantic partner is sexually unfaithful to him. Indeed, more than all other audiences, this audience reports relationship failure as a key change catalyst in their lives.
This suggests that we should view porn as part of the total media ecology expressing and shaping men's sense of themselves and the world around them, rather than as a shadowy category of behavior to be, at best, medicalized and managed.
On an average day in the study period, porn reaches more men than news, at 12% versus 9%, but less than half as many men as shopping websites (28%). Indeed, porn sits in the middle of most men's media engagement, in terms of daily average reach. Content and online activity with a higher average daily reach than porn include search, webmail, social media, YouTube, shopping, and blogs and forums. Content and online activity with a lower average daily reach than porn include news, streaming, education, government, gaming, and food content. This finding for men is more or less stable across age and other demographic characteristics, as well as across audiences. Men aged 51–60 and 18–24 are slightly more engaged with porn than other age groups. And, overall, average daily reach of porn for men (12%) is nearly double what it is for women (7%), a difference that becomes even more pronounced as men and women age. This suggests that if we want to reach men in media and contribute to their views of themselves and the world around them, porn needs to be part of the playbook — which requires confronting long-standing exploitative industry dynamics and how AI is contributing to the emergence of new dynamics.
Porn engagement is time-limited and purposeful. The average duration for a porn session for men in the panel was 10 minutes, across 8 porn pages. Average session duration for young men aged 18–24 was 7 minutes across 13 porn pages, and 12 minutes for men aged 61 or higher across 16 porn pages, with proportionate increases from younger to older age groups. When men in the panel are ranked according to per-user average daily reach and average porn session duration, only in the top 5% to 10% of this distribution do we start to see porn use on more than 50% of days. Other researchers have observed that most men use porn as an aid for masturbation. The biological limit on frequency of engagement and dwell time this use enforces may be what's reflected in this data. The kind of doom scrolling seen with social media or binge-watching with streaming media are not typical, or even occasional, engagement behaviors for most men with porn. The stability of use patterns around porn and the psychology of its use may afford unique engagement opportunities for people looking to reach men in media and contribute to their views of themselves and the world around them.
This study was conducted using large-scale, cross-platform U.S.-based internet engagement data from media measurement companies that maintain nationally representative media panels. Panelists are adults, aged 18 or older, who opt into and are compensated for having their media behaviors observed, click-by-click, minute-by-minute, across all their platforms and devices, including visits to porn sites. There were nearly 300,000 media panelists represented in the data used for the six-month period studied, between June and December 2025.
The study was primarily interested in the porn engagement behaviors of men, although it characterizes overall engagement across men and women for context and comparison.
First, behavior was analyzed across desktop and mobile devices, iOS and Android, as it related to porn and other types of media content. Then a sample was drawn for detailed, qualitative content analysis over 100 porn videos from tube sites and Reddit with high engagement and distinctiveness across 5 audiences, along with 100 YouTube videos, spanning news and entertainment, to understand how audience porn predilections interact with other media choices.
An important caveat about the analysis is that it focuses exclusively on visits to online porn sites using web browsers, mobile and desktop. The media panel data cannot account for porn engagement via social media platforms or private messaging services. Based on research documenting porn distribution networks on Telegram, porn sharing via WhatsApp and Snapchat among youth, nudification app–generated porn content, and entanglement of sexual and social media content more generally, the study likely underestimates overall porn engagement. Even doubling the estimates, however, yields a picture of porn usage that is more moderate than some commentators have seemed to suggest, like as in this piece or this one.
There were few precedents to turn to in putting together and making publicly available a report like this about porn. As a result, the team had many discussions and deliberations, with partners and expert advisors, about how to sample and present data, how to analyze and interpret findings safely, how to communicate what was found in writing, how much source material to include, what to synthesize, what to elide, and what tone to strike throughout. The four design principles that underlie all of Harmony Labs' work came in handy here.
The goal was to produce a frank accounting of what was found that maximizes information utility and minimizes potential harm to the team, partners, the public, and anyone who engages with this report. The careful, principled decisions arrived at may make this report inappropriate for some people, and some people may find it triggering, disturbing, problematic, immoral, or otherwise unsavory. Reader discretion is therefore advised, and this report should be used for research, educational, or professional purposes only.
"Our study relies on large-scale, U.S.-based internet engagement data from adults who opt into having their media behaviors observed, click by click, minute by minute, across platforms and devices."
Language. In general, when describing the content of the porn analyzed, the report defaults to language that is native to and evocative of that porn content. Especially in the sections drawn from a qualitative analysis of porn content, the intention is to deliver readers both an analytical overview and a direct sense of the porn audiences engage with. So rather than use a clinical formulation like "masturbate," unlikely to appear in porn, the report defaults to a more porn-native term, like "jerk off."
Porn-native audience classifications. In sampling and selecting porn content for qualitative analysis, only the top most-distinctive keywords and top most-engaged media per audience per platform were considered. No effort was made to favor a particular distribution of "straight," "gay," or "trans" content — common self-selection criteria upon entry and age verification on tube sites. Rather, analysts analyzed all content in the same way, making structured observations as videos unfolded. (See Appendix for more on methods.)
"Porn sits in the middle of most men's media engagement"
Grubbs, et al.'s 2019 study, "Pornography Problems Due to Moral Incongruence," is indicative of the high rates of porn use that characterize survey self-report, with 91.5% of men and 60.2% of women reporting porn exposure "in the last month." What such numbers and studies don't typically offer is an understanding of how porn fits in with other types of media engagement, in terms of exposure frequency, intensity, and other characteristics — which can make it hard to contextualize and interpret numbers that otherwise feel very high.
In this analysis, looking at web browsing in the media panel data during the study period, the average daily reach for porn is 9.5% (12.4% for men and 6.8% for women). In other words, on average, on any given day in the study period, nearly 10% of people in the panel are engaging with porn.
It's important to note that this study focuses exclusively on visits to porn websites using web browsers. It is not able to account for porn consumption via social media platforms, private messaging services, or offline porn engagement. Based on research documenting porn distribution networks on Telegram, porn sharing via WhatsApp and Snapchat among youth, nudification app–generated porn content, and entanglement of sexual and social media content generally, the study likely underestimates overall porn engagement. Even doubling the estimates, however, yields a picture of porn usage that is considerably more moderate than some commentators have suggested, like this one or this one.
Figure — Average daily reach per different media and online activity types, for men and women (bar chart; y-axis 0–80%)
| Higher average daily reach than porn | Lower average daily reach than porn |
|---|---|
| Search | News |
| Webmail | Streaming |
| Social media | Education |
| Porn (9.5% overall; 12.4% men / 6.8% women) | Gaming |
| YouTube | Government |
| Shopping | Food |
| Blogs, forums |
(Exact per-category percentages are rendered only as unlabeled bar heights in the source chart; only the porn figures and the higher/lower ranking are given as numbers in the surrounding text.)
As noted above, men and women show substantial differences in their porn use: 12.4% average daily reach for men versus 6.8% for women. (Such differences track findings from studies that use self-reported data.) Differences also show up across age groups. Porn has the highest average daily reach among men aged 51–60, followed closely by men aged 18–24, and the lowest average daily reach among men aged 25–30, followed by men aged 61 and over.
This finding may run counter to the prevalent assumption that young people engage with porn the most — but the media panel only includes people aged 18 and older, so including adolescents might shift the picture. Also notable is the consistently lower average daily reach for porn among women, and the precipitous drop-off in porn engagement among women as they age.
Figure — Average daily reach of porn per age group, for men and women (bar chart; y-axis 0–14%, gridlines at 3.5%, 7%, 10.5%, 14%)
| Age group | Pattern described in text |
|---|---|
| 18–24 | Second-highest for men |
| 25–30 | Lowest for men |
| 31–40 | — |
| 41–50 | — |
| 51–60 | Highest for men |
| 61+ | Second-lowest for men; women's reach drops off most sharply here |
(Precise per-bar values are not present as extractable text in the source chart — only the ranking/shape described above and in the caption "Men and women show substantial differences in their porn use.")
"An average porn engagement is 10 minutes across 8 porn pages for men"
Mobile versus desktop. Porn reaches more people via mobile browsers. Average daily reach of porn on mobile was 12.7%, compared to 7.3% on desktop. But extended, multi-page browsing is more likely to occur on desktop, and there is a higher ratio of men to women generally engaging in desktop browsing versus mobile browsing.
Figure — Average daily reach of porn per desktop and mobile browsing, for men and women (bar chart; y-axis 0–16%)
| Platform | Average daily reach |
|---|---|
| Mobile | 12.7% |
| Desktop | 7.3% |
Time on porn. On days when people engage with porn, both men and women spend on average about 10 minutes with it. On days when men engage with porn, older men spend almost twice as much time with it compared to younger men: 11.8 minutes for men aged 61 and over versus 6.5 minutes for men aged 18–24.
Women average 4.2 porn webpages per porn day, whereas men average 7.6 porn webpages — suggesting women have nearly double the dwell time per porn webpage as men. About 41% of porn days entail just a single porn-page visit across men and women. Just as older men spend more time with porn on days when they engage, they also visit more pages: 16 pages on average for men aged 61 or over versus 13 pages for men aged 18–24.
Figure — Porn minutes per porn day by age group, for men and women, with median number of porn webpages per porn day (bar/line chart; y-axis 0–12 minutes, gridlines at 3, 6, 9, 12 min)
| Age group | Porn minutes/day (men, from body text) | Median porn pages/day (men, from body text) |
|---|---|---|
| 18–24 | 6.5 min (7 min avg. session) | 13 |
| Overall (men) | ~10 min | 8 |
| 61+ | 11.8 min (12 min avg. session) | 16 |
(The chart itself breaks this out by six age bands — 18–24, 25–30, 31–40, 41–50, 51–60, 61+ — for both men and women, but only the endpoints and overall average are given as numbers in the source text. Photo credit under this chart: "Photo by Luann...")
Transitions to and from porn. 72% of transitions to and from porn webpages are to and from other porn webpages. The next-largest category of transitions, at 5%, is from search engines. This suggests that people set their intention to engage with porn and, more often than not, head to a known destination. Yet porn doesn't exist in isolation from other media types and online activities. On days when they engage with porn, men switch between porn and non-porn content an average of 6 times, whereas women engage in this kind of context switching 4.8 times on average. Across men and women, in 95% of cases, porn engagement segues into other types of media engagement, with the mix of content people engage with before and after porn sessions being more or less identical. Only 4.8% of online sessions end with porn engagement.
Domains. 26% of people who engaged with porn in the panel visited just one porn domain during the 6-month study period, with pornhub.com, xvideos.com, chaturbate.com, xnxx.com, and xhamster.com as top domains. This may suggest habit, convenience, limited knowledge of available options, and/or brand loyalty. Whatever the case, the dominant engagement behavior is using multiple porn domains.
Seasonality. Not much seasonality was observed in porn usage overall, although there were small lifts around holidays: New Year's Eve (+11.9% men; +8.9% women), Christmas (+8.5% men; +3.9% women), and Thanksgiving (+4.6% men; +4.1% women), and slightly less usage on Halloween (−0.5% men; −0.9% women).
In search of compulsive behavior. The study explored whether the engagement behaviors of the heaviest porn users might be suggestive of problematic porn usage, "defined as one of the most common clinical presentations of compulsive sexual behavior disorder," "characterized by a persistent pattern of failure to control pornography consumption, resulting in significant distress and impairment in daily functioning." Problematic porn usage is a clinical diagnosis that cannot be reduced to media engagement behavior alone, but the analysis looked at what the range of engagement behaviors among the heaviest users looked like.
People were ranked according to two factors — average daily reach while engaged with porn, and average dwell time on porn on porn days — restricted to panelists with at least 60 days of observed activity. The top 10%, 5%, and 1% of this distribution were then examined:
| Percentile | Share of porn users | Threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Top 10% | 1.9% | Engaged with porn on ≥43% of days; ≥5 minutes/porn day on average |
| Top 5% | 0.8% | Engaged with porn on ≥64% of days; ≥11 minutes/porn day on average |
| Top 1% | 0.12% | Engaged with porn on ≥92% of days; ≥90 minutes/porn day on average |
Men are roughly 3.2 times more likely than women to land in the top 10%, and top-decile membership among men rises with age, from 0.7% within the 18–24 age group to 4.4% within the 61+ age group. Men are about 4 times more likely than women to be in the top 5%, and men over 50 are about 10 times more likely to be in this group than men under 25. The top 1% group falls below the study's size thresholds for commenting on demographic characteristics.
"Men favor video-based porn experiences"
To understand the porn formats people engage with, the study used the following content-format classification, derived from the media panel engagement data. These categories are not mutually exclusive, and the lines between them can be blurry — tube sites may host live cam feeds or hentai content, and subscription platforms can also function as image galleries or have recorded content. These categories reflect primary format and business model rather than strict content boundaries.
| Format | Description | Example domains |
|---|---|---|
| Tube sites | Hosts and streamers of free video content, organized by categories and tags; includes .tv and .tube domains | pornhub.com, xhamster.com |
| Cam sites | Live performers, interactive in real time | jerkmate.com, camsoda.com |
| Subscription | Paid, gated content | onlyfans.com, fansly.com |
| Erotica | Text-based literary content, foregrounds reading and imagination over images | literotica.com, nifty.org |
| Hentai, animated | Drawn, animated, comic-based content | nhentai.net, e-hentai.org, rule34.xxx |
| Escort, hookup | Transactional escort directories and hookup platforms | skipthegames.com, adultfriendfinder.com |
| Image galleries | Old-school static image collections | pornpics.com, sex.com |
| Other sites | Miscellaneous domains not captured by other categories, including CDN subdomains, adult chat, and niche sites | omegle.xxx, sexpester.com, robbyporn.com |
Figure — Average daily reach per porn format, for men and women (bar chart; y-axis 0–5%, gridlines at 1.25%, 2.5%, 3.75%, 5%)
Ranking (highest to lowest daily average reach), per the accompanying text: tube sites, cam sites, and other sites dominate for men, followed by hentai and animated, erotica, image galleries, subscriptions, and escort/hookup. Erotica is called out as "more popular with women" — the only format subcategory with higher average daily reach among women than men (except among the 61+ group). (Exact per-format percentages are not present as extractable text in the source chart.)
These different porn formats also distribute differently across men and women in different age groups:
"Porn engagement patterns are largely stable across audiences"
This report is part of a larger project with Equimundo to map audiences of men online: how they participate in media cultures; relate to different masculinities; and see themselves, relationships, and communities; as well as how media engagement contributes to men's flourishing. As part of that larger project, men were segmented into five audiences.
The five audience segments divide along key tensions in flourishing baselines, media behaviors, attitudes to gender, relationships, responsibilities, and more. They are organized according to values, using the Narrative Observatory's values architecture (derived from the work of Shalom Schwartz), arranged along an x–y values axis: a collective focus on the left ("We") and an individualist focus on the right ("Me"); a predilection for stability and tradition at the bottom ("Protect & Preserve") and for creativity and innovation at the top ("Strive & Create").
Each audience is sized according to the percentage of men in a nationally representative survey, and audiences are presented throughout the report in order of size. We encourage you to check out the full report from this work.
Figure — 5 Audiences of Men, 5 Ways of Being (values-map diagram, arranged on a We–Me / Protect & Preserve–Strive & Create grid)
| Audience | Size | Values-map position | Brief description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hold the Line | 29% of men | We / Protect & Preserve | Provider, protector. Service and faith are the way — feeding the homeless, caring for elders, setting up what comes next. Skews older, lower income, likely to have been parents. |
| Locked In | 23% of men | Me / Protect & Preserve | Self-reliant, self-made, competing to make it and build something real. Skews younger, secular, single, non-parents, especially likely to be men of color. |
| In It Together | 21% of men | We / Strive & Create | Community-oriented, empathetic, can't look away from what's broken, though can't always see a path to fix it. Skews college-educated, secular, Democrat or Independent. |
| Mr Fixit | 16% of men | Me / Protect & Preserve | Adaptive problem solvers, thriving in work and family, with a knack for making things better. Everything is figure-out-able. Skews older, heterosexual, church-going, Republican. |
| Sacred Duty | 11% of men | We / Protect & Preserve (Duty) | Provider, protector. Loyalty and discipline are core virtues. Skews older, heterosexual, religious, Republican. |
(Note: the Locked In and Mr Fixit position labels above reflect the general "Me" quadrant as described in the source; the precise x–y coordinates of each audience on the values map are visual-only in the source chart and are not present as extractable text.)
Average daily reach for porn is fairly similar across audiences, though not identical. Average daily reach for porn is highest for Sacred Duty (13.2%), followed by Locked In (12.5%), Mr Fixit (12.3%), and Hold the Line and In It Together (12.0% each**)**. Sacred Duty also has the longest average session duration, at around 12 minutes; Mr Fixit and Hold the Line follow at almost 11 minutes; Locked In and In It Together follow at almost 10 minutes. On days when these audiences engage with porn, they switch between porn and non-porn content about 5 times, which may suggest, again, that porn engagement occurs within a larger media ecology.
Table — Per-audience average daily reach for porn, per-porn-day engagement duration, and number of context switches between porn and non-porn (bar-chart values reconstructed from the accompanying body text — exact bar heights for context-switch counts are not separately given per audience beyond "about 5 times" for all)
| Audience | Average daily reach for porn | Average porn-day session duration | Context switches (porn ↔ non-porn) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sacred Duty | 13.2% | ~12 minutes | ~5 |
| Locked In | 12.5% | ~10 minutes | ~5 |
| Mr Fixit | 12.3% | ~11 minutes | ~5 |
| Hold the Line | 12.0% | ~11 minutes | ~5 |
| In It Together | 12.0% | ~10 minutes | ~5 |
"Different audiences prefer different porn content"
The Equimundo audience segmentation was used to create 5 porn content samples of between 20 and 30 videos each for detailed qualitative content analysis by human analysts.
For each audience, the most distinctive porn-related keywords were identified, drawn from URLs that reflected search terms, video titles, and other metadata. For each of the top 5 most distinctive keywords, the top 5 most-visited tube-site videos within the panel were selected, yielding about 25 videos per audience. This was supplemented with video material from porn-related subreddits, such as r/porn and r/trashyboner. Some videos identified through this process were no longer available at the time of analysis and were substituted with others. Analysts watched the full videos, recording observations related to protagonists, plots, settings, sound, camera work, clothes, climaxes, bodies, women, romance, power, pleasure, and emotional tone, using a method of structured open-ended content analysis we've written about here.
Analysts also analyzed a sample of twenty non-porn, highly distinctive, highly engaging YouTube videos for each audience, recording observations related to key themes, to contextualize porn inside of non-porn content engagement.
In general, audiences are drawn to similar, contiguous, or overlapping themes, concerns, fears, and desires in the porn and non-porn media they engage with. For instance, the Hold the Line audience is drawn to non-porn stories that resolve in protagonists taking control in difficult situations, often as their family's providers and protectors. In surveys, Hold the Line men report relationship failure as a change catalyst more frequently than other men. In the porn they engage with, infidelity initiated by wives and watched by husbands is a key theme. Clearly, men in this audience use the porn they engage with to explore their fear and fascination with failing at traditional gender norms and becoming a cuckold.
"When it comes to porn, the borders between fear and fascination, disgust and desire, are porous and well trafficked."
The patterns described in the following profiles capture what is most prominent and prevalent in each audience, not necessarily the full range of each audience's porn predilections. This may point to an important function porn plays in the lives of the men who interact with it — a private, contained, safe space to explore, transgress, reconstitute, or otherwise play with the boundaries, borders, values, relationships, and goals men use to structure who they are and how they show up in the social world.
The profiles that follow start with the largest audience by size, Hold the Line (29% of men), and move toward the smallest, Sacred Duty (11% of men).
"Long story arcs, detailed situations, infidelity, and family taboo"
Distinctive porn keywords: Underwear, virtual voyeur, story, Hotwife
Hold the Line is the largest audience, 29% of men. They believe that men and women have different strengths and work to do, with men's work centered on a responsibility to provide for, protect, and create joy for family. Hold the Line has a strong sense of agency and favors stories that resolve in protagonists taking control. They were one of two audiences more likely than other audiences to engage with gender-grievance content. They lag most on mutuality, serving and celebrating others' accomplishments, in a world often perceived by them as marked by scarcity and threat. They also lag on the bridging and connection dimensions of flourishing and cite relationship failure as a change catalyst more frequently than other men.
In the sample of other media this audience engages with, there are themes of hierarchy and power, the importance of law and order, and punishment for transgressors. There is a desire for romance, along with mentorship, skill, and the mastery of specific crafts. There is content worrying about the relationship between men and women, ideas that women have it easier, that women can be nasty, along with stories of good men doing their best, trying and failing.
Hold the Line's porn features long, slow story arcs and lots of set-up and dialogue for situations driven by establishing and violating strong taboos, with family, domestic authority, and related social orders as key. There are step-moms seducing step-sons, and vice versa, as well as a rarer, more direct incest situation of parent and child. There are old people getting together with young, doctors with patients, multi-racial coupling.
Settings tend to be domestic, or extensions of domestic settings (e.g., cars, hotels), often playing with boundaries between private and public space. There is a lot of lace and lingerie, underwear and undressing, slowly revealing bodies beneath. Production values are high. The camera is an invisible, omnipresent voyeur.
"Women show up as wives: bored, mischievous, insatiable, seductive, strong, wielding power through pleasure giving."
Women show up as wives — bored, mischievous, insatiable, seductive, strong, wielding power through pleasure-giving. These are women with agency, not submissive figures. Men do not share women, nor interact with each other, except as mediated by women (e.g., a husband watching his wife with another man while jerking off). The fear in the room is clearly cuckolding, infidelity, and failing at "traditional" gender norms.
"The score, the kick, the cumshot and cumpilation"
Distinctive porn keywords: bbc, blowjob, sissy, cumshot, femboy
Locked In is the second-largest audience, 23% of men. They believe men have it harder, and everyone is basically on their own. They have a strong sense of resilience and bridging, but can lack agency, purpose, connections to other people, mutuality, and a sense of service beyond themselves. When asked who benefits from their work, the most prevalent response in this audience is "myself." They favor stories that resolve in shared belonging — an outcast, for instance, finding a fuller expression of himself at the same time he finds his tribe. They're not afraid of navigating conflict but can avoid closeness and commitment. Overall, this audience lags most on flourishing and was one of two audiences more likely than other audiences to engage with gender-grievance content.
In the sample of other media this audience engages with: lots of reaction videos, with big reactions and a fast pace; a lot of gaming play-alongs; women loom large and show up in control, as smarter, savvier, and more strategic than men; stories of rejection and defeat in sports and other contexts; alpha males and other hierarchies of men; confrontations with and flouting of rules-based systems.
Locked In's porn is amateur and close-up, with player point-of-view camera work, often from above. There's lots of self-conscious camera interaction, lots of quick-cut edits, video collage and cumpilations — high-stimulation highlight reels in a visual language native to TikTok or Instagram.
This porn is all about the kick, the score, the cum shot, with partners as props and no-holds-barred action that can feel brutal and forced. It's less about the story or the situation, with dialogue, romance, or foreplay in short supply. There are a lot of blow jobs, and a lot of sound — isolated, close-up squishing, squirting, choking. Men appear with men, women with women, and everything in between, all races, in groups and gangs. Everyone in the scene is participating in and knowingly performing the same transaction of pleasure, including men with men when women are around.
The action unfolds in office settings, on desks, in closets, or too close-up to tell. Women in eyeglasses recur, as an icon of intelligence and perhaps also material prowess. They submit. They swallow. They perform pleasure self-consciously, exaggerated for the camera. Mostly, though, it's all about the bodies, not the situation, the immersion, the dress and props.
[Decorative full-page graphic: a stylized collage/word-art treatment layered over stills, with scattered caption fragments such as "LOCKED IN / BANANA," "CLOSER," "APPEAR," "SCORES!!!," "OFFICE," "OBJECTS," "LOOK CLOSER," and brand-adjacent words like "Fruit," "Sticker," "Colors," "Tender," "PROVOCATIVE." This is a visual/typographic design element evoking the audience's fast-cut, meme-like content aesthetic; it does not carry additional extractable data.]
"Professional authority figures in fantasy role play"
Distinctive porn keywords: gay, cock, casting, straight, fantasy
In It Together is in the middle in terms of audience size, 21% of men. They believe men and women deserve the same power and the same shot, and have similar strengths, rejecting the notion that men have it harder. They genuinely feel for others, especially when those others are in distress, reporting, for example, "I see what's broken and I can't look away. I will use my power to give voice to the voiceless." Their sense of agency and resilience is the lowest of any audience, however, as is their access to broadening emotions, which means they lag on flourishing in the ways that agency and openness typically support.
In the sample of other media this audience engages with: relationship how-to's, with men actively seeking intimacy and tenderness, though under a veneer of irony and cynicism. Women occur as "tougher than iron, hotter than fire," as Chalkeaters put it in their Mario Song Remake. There's worry about competition — who's fittest in terms of body, success, finance. There's music commentary, music videos, book reviews, humor — and there are also the problems that regularly occur in news, especially anti-trans and anti-Muslim actions.
In It Together's porn features professional authority figures — cops, prison guards, military officers, casting directors — in high-stakes, institutional situations and settings, where corruption, power, and ambiguous roles drive a slow progression from undressing to sex that can ripen into a tenderness which includes caressing and kissing. There's mood music, moaning, sometimes humor. The climax is not always the cumming. There are innocent women, seducing women, women masturbating as instructed by authority. There are gay men, straight men, trans people, and "ladyboys." Pleasure experiences are naturalistic.
"The high-fidelity reality constructions can recall reality TV."
There's undoing of straps, and obviously worked-out bodies beneath, cut and made up. Penises are big. Production values are high, with the camera as omnipresent voyeur, and the cameramen sometimes joining in on the action.
[Decorative full-page graphic: a scattered/rotated word-art collage (individual letters and short words rendered at various angles and sizes over a photo), including legible fragments like "Fruit," "Sticker," "Colors," "All Natural," "Role Play," "Spicy," "slightly." This is a visual design texture and does not carry additional extractable data beyond what's described in the surrounding prose.]
"Older ample bodies and parts as fetish and protagonist"
Distinctive porn keywords: amateur, mature, mouth, Homemade, Hairy
Mr Fixit is the second-smallest audience, 16% of men. They believe in God and the transformative power of religion, with 45% reporting a Christian affiliation and 41% attending church. They also believe in long-term commitment, leaders who get things done, and loyalty, especially at work. They are probably the calmest men in the room but can perceive traditional family values and the gender roles that uphold them as under threat. Mr Fixit chooses stories where protagonists form unlikely partnerships and find purpose in protecting others and overcoming the drive for revenge. They lag on agency, resilience, and bridging.
In the sample of other media this audience engages with: a joy in fixing things — guns, cars, appliances; fatherly iconography, man as protector, strong and steady; conspiracy thinking and partisan politics; America-first framing, with "less developed" countries as a foil; older pop culture references (Tom & Jerry, Sponge Bob, Hannibal Lecter).
Older, ample bodies are part of the turn-on for this audience, men and women. Bums, boobs, and whatever's around. There are glory holes in unexpected locations, like classrooms and kitchens, and tables designed for penis penetration, along with all manner of domestic interiors and some outdoor exploration.
Camera work can be amateur, with self-made solos, frontal perspectives, and mirrors. Cameras are often fixed in one position. Interactions are matter-of-fact, even technical, slow and methodical, with little foreplay, story, or romance. There can be dialogue, and there's lots of sound: slurping and kissing. There are everyday clothes to be removed, identified by body parts featured as protagonist and fetish: hairy, wet, carnal, fleshy, fluid-filled.
[Decorative full-page graphic collage: dense, scrambled word-art overlay on photographic collage material — legible fragments include "LOYALTY," "Fruit," "Sticker," "Colors," "Lush," "Special," "Succulent," "Fetish," "All Natural" — a visual texture evoking the audience's domestic/homemade aesthetic. It does not carry additional extractable data beyond the surrounding prose.]
"Pleasure, pain, all the roles and other extremes"
Distinctive porn keywords: 3some, brazilian, dom, fetish, ladyboy
Sacred Duty is the smallest audience, 11% of men. They believe a good life comes from serving something larger than yourself — which can look like God, community, life partners, family elders, or people with disabilities. This is the audience most comfortable with carrying it all, reporting strong access to both narrowing and broadening emotions, and caring, with a lot of flexibility, tolerance, and forbearance in how they meet the world, including in their attitudes on gender. They've seen it all. They have enough. And they're largely flourishing. They choose stories where protagonists channel pain into purposeful community service.
In the sample of other media this audience engages with: cancel culture looms large, as does fame-making online as a kind of mob justice; conspiracy thinking; wilderness survival and elite physical training and competition; science and technology content as a way to make sense of and navigate the world; existential musings on the human condition; gaming tips; manhwa.
The camera work is professional and active, with wide angles, weird angles, and artful cuts to close-ups of bodies in complex contortions. Production values are as high as the artifice generally. The settings are homes, basements, and other close, confining private spaces. The action is slow and meticulous, procedural, with a lot of dialogue and descriptive verbalization, perhaps as a way of checking in on consent. Cunnilingus is a go-to.
There's women punishing women, men with men, women with men, ladyboy with ladyboy — everyone interacting. There's less mixing by race and age. Bodies are worked out, tattooed. Dress is functional and part of the fun: fetish, leather, latex, costumes. There are lots of props: dildos, leashes, paddles, whips. Bestiality makes an appearance, in sex with a horse.
[Decorative full-page graphic collage: heavily scattered/rotated word-art text over photographic material — legible fragments include "STRIKING," "LARGER THAN LIFE," "GROW WITH MORE," "RACY," "Fruit," "Sticker," "Colors," "Flexible." A visual texture evoking intensity/extremity, consistent with the audience description above; it does not carry additional extractable data.]
(a five-column comparison table, reproduced below with audiences as columns)
| Hold the Line (29%) | Locked In (23%) | In It Together (21%) | Mr Fixit (16%) | Sacred Duty (11%) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Theme | Long story arcs, detailed situations, family taboos, infidelity | The score, the kick, the cumshot and cumpilation | Professional authority figures in fantasy role play | Older ample bodies and parts as protagonist and fetish | Pleasure, pain, all the roles and other extremes |
| Distinctive porn keywords | Underwear, virtual voyeur, story, Hotwife | bbc, blowjob, sissy, cumshot, femboy | gay, cock, casting, straight, fantasy | amateur, mature, mouth, Homemade, Hairy | 3some, brazilian, dom, fetish, ladyboy |
| Stories, situations, settings | Long story arcs, lots of set-up and dialogue, driven by establishing and transgressing strong taboos, with family and related social order as central. Step-moms with step-sons. Old with young. Doctors with patients. Multiracial coupling. Houses, hotels, cars, airplanes, street scenes. Playing with boundaries between public and private, inside and outside. | All about the kick, the score, the cum shot, with partners as props and no-holds-barred action that can present as brutal and forced. Not much story, situation, dialogue, romance, foreplay. A lot of blow jobs. A lot of sound, isolated, close-up squishing, squirting, choking. Men with men, women with women, everything in between, all races, in groups and gangs. Office settings, on desks, in closets, or too close-up to tell. | Professional authority figures feature — cops, prison guards, military officers, casting directors — in high-stakes, institutional situations and settings, where corruption, power, and ambiguous roles drive a slow progression from undressing to sex, and toward a kind of tenderness, including kissing. Fantasy role play, with high-fidelity reality constructions, mimicking reality TV. Mood music, moaning, sometimes humor. Climax not always cumming. | Decontextualized, objectified body parts as protagonist and fetish: hairy, wet, carnal, flesh and fluids close up. Glory holes in walls, through tables, at home, in kitchens and bedrooms. Matter-of-fact, technical interactions, little foreplay, story, romance. Some dialogue, lots of sound, dripping in cum, kissing. | Fantasy role plays foreground the real pleasures and pains of pushing past boundaries. BDSM, master and slave, through gangs and groups, loud and moaning, protesting and pleasuring, slap-happy. In homes, basements, and other close, confining private spaces. Slow, meticulous, procedural, lots of dialogue and electro-pop music. Bodies in complex contortions. Cunnilingus. |
| Production and point of view | High production values, voyeuristic, camera as invisible witness. | Amateur, close-up player point-of-view camera work, often from above; self-conscious camera interaction; quick-cut video collage and cumpilations. | High production values, voyeuristic, cameramen included in scene or action. | Fixed camera, amateur, self-made solos, frontal perspective, mirrors. | Most active, professional camera work, wide angles, weird angles, close-ups. High production values, high artifice. |
| Gender | Women as wives — bored, mischievous, seductive, insatiable, powerful, wielding power through pleasure-giving, as in being fucked by two men. Cuckold fear central. | Women with eyeglasses submitting, swallowing, performing pleasure, self-conscious in interaction with camera. Men sharing in the transaction of their pleasure with each other. | Innocent women, seducing women, women masturbating as instructed by authority, naturalistic pleasure experiences, gay men, straight men, trans and "ladyboys." | Older ample bodies as turn-on, men and women, big bums, boobs, cocks. Porn stars. Women at play, in pleasure, having raunchy fun, more parts than faces. | Women punishing women, men with men, women with men, ladyboy with ladyboy. Less mixing by race and age. Everyone in groups interacting. Worked-out bodies in complex contortions. Tattoos. Bestiality. |
| Dress and props | Lace and lingerie, underwear and undressing. Slow reveals. | All about the bodies, dress and props not so much. | Situational dress, undress important, unbuckling, undoing straps, worked-on bodies, cut and made up. Huge penises. | Lingerie and underwear as props, everyday clothes, butt plugs. | Functional dress: fetish, leather, latex, costume. Dildos, whips, leashes. |
| Themes from other media | Women have it easier. Women can be nasty. Stories of good men, doing their best, trying and failing. Focus on hierarchy and power. Importance of law and order, punishment for transgressors. Desire for romance. Desire for mentorship, skill, and craft mastery. | Women as smarter, savvier, more strategic than men. Women in control. Stories of rejection and defeat, in sports and other contexts. Alpha men, and other hierarchies of men. Flouting rules-based orders. Reaction media. Gaming play-alongs, group, side by side, solo. | Women as "tougher than iron, hotter than fire." Strong, responsible women. Relationship how-to's for men. Men seeking intimacy and tenderness, under a veneer of irony and cynicism. Competition — who's the fittest in terms of body, success, finance. Music videos. Humor. Problems in the news: anti-trans and anti-Muslim actions. Book reviews. | The damage and danger of life, imminent attack. Joy in fixing things: guns, cars, appliances. Fatherly iconography, man as protector, strong and steady. Conspiracy thinking and partisan politics. America-first, with "less developed" countries as foil. Older pop culture: Tom & Jerry, Sponge Bob, Hannibal Lecter. | Cancel culture and fame-making as mob justice. Conspiracy thinking. Wilderness survival. Science and technology. Musings on the human condition. Manhwa. Gaming. Elite physical training and competition. |
The study builds an important foundation for understanding what men watch online. But its bigger value may be in what it reveals about how pornography fits into men's wider media lives, their intimate lives, and their understandings of themselves and others. Porn is not a marginal or exceptional form of media consumption. Rather, it is one component of the broader digital ecosystem in which most men spend their time, alongside social media, streaming, gaming, news, and online communities.
This is not to understate the deep, far-reaching effects of porn on sexual norms and mainstream culture. A quick look at almost any corner of popular culture reveals the influence of porn, an effect commentators have dubbed "pornification." Mainstream pop artists from Madonna to Miley Cyrus to Jack Harlow to The Weeknd have frequently incorporated overt adult-industry aesthetics, visual tropes, and direct references into their music lyrics, videos, and stage performances, for instance. A 2019 meta-analysis, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, reviewed 59 studies tracking the impact of mainstream, non-explicit sexual media. It found that regular exposure to such media significantly alters how young people perceive peer norms, leading to more permissive attitudes toward risky and aggressive sexual behaviors, especially among adolescents.
"Many corners of popular culture reveal the influence of porn, an effect commentators have dubbed 'pornification.'"
Understanding pornography therefore requires understanding the wider media environment in which men encounter it, the needs and aspirations they bring to it, and the ways those experiences may intersect with cultural expectations of sex, relationships, masculinity, and intimacy. These questions matter at a moment when relationships and gendered expressions themselves appear to be in flux. Equimundo's upcoming State of American Men 2026, as well as recent State of UK Men 2025 research, suggest that men have not lost interest in love, sex, or partnership. However, young men have begun to question whether relationships are worth the perceived costs and pressures involved and are seeking alternative ways to find intimacy. In the UK, one in four men believe that no one will ever fall in love with them, with 40% suggesting that a "serious relationship is too big of a commitment," and around 15% of UK men reporting having used an AI virtual girlfriend or boyfriend.
If men continue to desire connection, while some are becoming less confident that meaningful relationships are possible, then digital spaces may become even more important as places where men explore sexuality, seek affirmation, manage loneliness, encounter models of intimacy, or construct narratives about what relationships are supposed to look like. Pornography is one part of this landscape, alongside dating platforms, social media, gaming, online communities, and AI companions. The question, then, is not simply whether pornography is harmful or beneficial — it is what role porn plays in a changing ecology of intimacy, what men are learning from it, and what kinds of sexual and relational possibilities the digital environment makes easier or harder to imagine.
This has several implications for how to think about action:
First, pornography should be treated as part of the broader media and cultural environment shaping men's lives, rather than as a discrete behavior to be isolated or managed. Findings suggest that men move between porn and other forms of media fluidly. Porn therefore reflects and reinforces ideas about masculinity, relationships, bodies, sex, power, and desire that circulate well beyond dedicated pornography platforms. This means efforts to promote healthier relationships and more equitable forms of masculinity cannot focus only on what happens within porn itself — they must also engage the broader media environments in which sexual scripts are produced, repeated, and normalized.
Second, the meaning of pornography matters as much as the fact of its use. The audience analysis suggests that men do not arrive at porn with identical motivations, concerns, desires, or expectations. For some, porn use may be primarily about sexual pleasure or exploration; for others, it may intersect with loneliness, relationship anxieties, curiosity, identity, status, or fears about masculinity and sexual performance. Future interventions will need to take these different starting points seriously, rather than treating all consumption as equivalent.
Third, preventing harm is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Reducing exposure to violent, coercive, exploitative, or otherwise harmful content is important. But a digital environment in which harmful content is absent is not necessarily one in which healthy sexuality and intimacy are present. If men are already turning to digital media to explore sexuality, seek information, explore desire and pleasure, or make sense of relationships, we should also ask what positive alternatives they encounter — what it would look like for online environments to make consent, mutual pleasure, communication, emotional intimacy, care, and reciprocal relationships more visible and accessible. This shifts the conversation from simply preventing harmful content toward creating healthier sexual and relational cultures online.
Fourth, sexual and media literacy represent critical investments, particularly for young people. For young people, pornography is one of the places where they encounter ideas about sex and relationships, whether or not it is intended to function as education. They may encounter the eroticization of violence, coercion, exploitation, incest, unrealistic bodies and expectations, and highly commercialized ideas about sex, while having few supportive spaces in which to process what they see. The answer cannot be to tell young people to avoid this material — they need the knowledge, critical skills, trusted adults, and safe spaces to understand what they encounter and develop their own agency around sexuality, relationships, and intimacy.
These implications also raise questions that this mapping cannot answer on its own, meriting further research and experimentation, including:
There is much more to understand and considerable scope for action. The hope is that this research opens a broader conversation about what men and boys need from the digital environments that increasingly shape their lives, and about how researchers, educators, advocates, technology companies, content creators, and others can work together to create pathways for healthy, fulfilling sexuality, relationships, and other forms of connection.
— Brian Waniewski, Gary Barker, Caroline Hayes, Richie Hardcore, Cody Ragonese August 2026
Findings are drawn from an analysis of the click-by-click, minute-by-minute media behaviors of people who opt in to and are compensated for participating in media measurement panels in the U.S. There were nearly 300,000 panelists in the 6-month period studied, from June to December 2025.
Quantitative analysis. Behavior was first analyzed across desktop and mobile devices, iOS and Android, as it related to porn and other types of media content.
Porn websites and apps were identified from within the panel's media engagement through a multi-layer keyword and rules-based filtering approach at the level of the URL and associated metadata. Domains were flagged as pornographic if they contained any of a predefined set of about 200 explicit keywords (e.g., porn, sex, xvideo, erotic, camgirl), including both platform-specific identifiers (e.g., xvideos, xhamster, redtube, onlyfans) and general explicit terms (e.g., xxx, nsfw, hentai, fetish, erotic, bdsm). Additionally, domains ending in the suffixes .tube, .xxx, .porn, .sex, and .adult were flagged, as these top-level domains are predominantly or exclusively associated with adult content. For Reddit specifically, a domain match alone was insufficient; visits were only classified as pornographic if the URL path corresponded to one of 36 curated known NSFW subreddits (e.g., r/gonewild, r/nsfw, r/rule34). To reduce false positives, domains were excluded from flagging if they belonged to government (.gov) or educational (.edu) domains, or if the matched keyword appeared as part of a benign substring, as in "unisex," "essex," "express," or "scams."
The quantitative media analysis uses an average daily reach metric, indicating the percentage of panel users (or a group of panel users) who visit particular content types or engage in a particular kind of online activity on a given day, on average, within the study period.
Qualitative analysis. Porn content distinctive to different audiences was then analyzed via qualitative content analysis of video samples drawn from each of the five audiences' media engagement. For each audience, the most distinctive porn-related keywords were identified, drawn from URLs that reflected search terms, video titles, and other metadata, scored using a log-odds method that calculates how much a keyword over- or under-indexes for a given audience relative to all others. For each of the top 5 most distinctive keywords per audience, the top 5 most-visited tube-site videos within the panel were selected, yielding 25 videos per audience. This was supplemented with video material from porn-related subreddits, such as r/porn and r/trashyboner — for the subreddit videos, the most popular videos were identified by overall post engagement rather than panel visit data, because URL structures do not reveal which specific videos panelists are browsing within a subreddit. Some videos identified through this process were no longer available at the time of analysis. Analysts watched the full videos, recording observations related to protagonists, plots, settings, sound, camera work, clothes, climaxes, bodies, women, romance, power, pleasure, and emotional tone, using a method of structured open-ended content analysis we've written about here.
Analysts also analyzed, for each audience, a sample of twenty non-porn, highly distinctive, highly engaging YouTube videos, recording observations related to key themes. Non-porn YouTube video samples were created using the same approach applied to YouTube — selecting 20 videos per audience from channels that scored high on within-audience distinctiveness and panel engagement. The content of these videos was diverse, ranging from news to entertainment.
This research was made possible with support from Equimundo's Caring Masculinity Fund. Special thanks to project advisors and reviewers, including Richie Hardcore, Rachel Lehrer, and Kaitlyn Tierney.
Harmony Labs is a nonprofit media research lab on a mission to research and reshape society's relationship with media, using science, data, and creativity. For more than a decade, its work has helped storytellers and strategists, decision-makers and dreamers, harness the power of media to shape a positive, pluralistic future and support human flourishing. Harmony Labs recently released a companion report to this one, Men's Flourishing and Media: How Online Media Behaviors Relate to Flourishing for 5 Audiences of Men.
Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice works internationally and in the United States to engage men and boys as allies in gender equality, promote healthy manhood, and prevent violence. Through a research-first approach, Equimundo drives innovative solutions to shift norms, narratives, and policies — in partnership with women, girls, and individuals of all gender identities (equimundo.org).
This is a version of this report built for readability by search engines, generative AI/LLM systems, and answer engines. Humans looking to read or share this report should refer to the online version at harmonylabs.org/project/pornography-research.