7 Things You Didn't Know About Porn

As skin flicks grow increasingly ubiquitous, thanks to the ease of steamy streaming on the internet, X-rated entertainment has also become a hot research topic. Check out the shocking facts these studies uncovered.

By Carolyn Kylstra


1. Women get turned on by monkey sex
Think guys are aroused by just about anything? It's actually the other way around. Researchers from Northwestern University showed men and women videos of nude actors exercising, masturbating, or having sex. They found that men have pretty clear "targets" - straight dudes got hot looking at ladies, while gay dudes were turned on by men. It's fuzzier for chicks, though. Even if they didn't report feeling in the mood, straight women experienced physical arousal after viewing pretty much any kind of sexual stimuli - guy-on-guy porn, girl-on-girl action, and even bonobo monkeys getting frisky.


2. Utah is the perviest state
A Harvard study found that Utah had the most online porn subscriptions per every 1,000 broadband users. (The state with the lowest rate of porn subscriptions? Montana.)

3. The body part that men focus on when watching porn is the woman's - wait for it - face
You read that right: eyes and lips win out over boobs and a badonkadonk, according to an eye-tracking study from the Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana. The researchers speculated that guys look at women's faces to gauge how turned on they are.

4. The pill affects whether you go for the money shot
More from the Kinsey Institute study: Women not on hormonal birth control (like The Pill) zoned in on people's genitals when shown a pornographic pic. But women taking The Pill were more interested in contextual elements such as the background, or what the actors are wearing. Researchers hypothesize it's because Pill-free women have a higher sex drive.

5. All - literally all - men watch it
A researcher from the University of Montreal wanted to study whether pornography has an impact on guys' sex lives. There was just one teensy problem though: To form a control group, he searched for men in their twenties who'd never consumed porn...and he couldn't find a single one.

6. Most guys get into it before puberty
The majority check out porn for the first time at age 10, according to the same University of Montreal study.

7. Presidential elections put people in the mood
Talk about dirty politics. After President Bush won the election in 2004, red states saw a jump in porn-related Internet searches. And after President Obama won in 2008, blue states went on a porn-search frenzy. Researchers from Villanova and Rutgers University believe it's because being on the winning team creates a surge of testosterone, which spikes sex drive.

Source: Carolyn Kylstra