There goes your Valentine's Day.
Whether you're rifling through vintage valentines on Etsy, selecting the perfect arrangement of flowers, or biting through the suspicious nougat chocolates preemptively, you're probably scraping the barrel for inventive Valentine's ideas. So, here, I have an easy and quite possibly free gift for you: porn. Cam4, a camming site for exhibitionists, swingers, and voyeurs, teamed up with the IFOP survey institute for a revealing study on just how much porn consumption has changed in the past 20 years, especially for couples.
The survey of over 1,000 Americans 18 and up found that 90 percent of men and 60 percent of women watch porn. But, resoundingly, those who admitted to watching porn always corresponded with those who had the most partners or were the most sexually active in the last year. Despite preconceptions, porn watchers aren't fapping losers in the their basement dungeons, and in fact, their appetite for porn is indicative of a sexually exploratory and open nature. All that furious masturbating has simply been a primer course.
Maybe that's why more couples are turning to porn, not as a solitary bathroom distraction from the haunting boredom of their partner's same pair of gray underwear, but as a way of reconnecting with their lovers. According to the survey, 53 percent of Americans have watched adult content as a couple and 66 percent said they'd happily turn on the dirty flicks if their lover asked. Which is probably less effort than when your girlfriend begs you to watch Scandal on Netflix with her. In surveys from 2011, only 45 percent of couples claimed they watched porn together. Keeping your friends and parents (sorry) in mind, today's statistic seems mighty high, but if that's the way the wind is blowing, it's uplifting news for committed relationships.
"By giving couples a way to break their routine, pornography has changed and may now become meaningful in a marital setting, where it appears to be a way of spicing up a couple's sex life," says IFOP Research Director Francois Kraus. The findings show that porn isn't some alien virus incompatible with monogamy, but actually a boon for couples looking to explore their coexisting, private sexuality together. Porn even integrates right into some inidividuals' bedrooms, as the survey found 54 percent of Americans have watched porn while they're actually having sex. As for any couples camming together for a sea of anonymous voyeurs in the name of romance? Well, let's save that for next year's survey.
Image via Flickr.
