Cue the sad trombone.
Cosmopolitan released a survey recently highlighting the differences between how men and women watch porn. And to the surprise of only shut-ins, it was found that the very-straight men who were surveyed watch porn more frequently (and more compulsively) than very-straight ladies. The 32.5 percent of men watching porn on a daily basis compared to the 3.8 percent of women is hardly newsworthy, but the one Cosmo statistic that gave me pause was that three out of four men say their physical preferences for porn actresses are the same as their real life sex partners.
The real world women men like to date lining up with their projected porn fantasies wouldn't be bad news, as long as men's most preferred porn stars were as individual and diverse as the women they're in relationships with. After all, there are plenty of successful adult performers rocking different body types and alternative looks. But, according to the survey, men mostly want young (47.4 percent), large breasted (40.1 percent), skinny (38.9 percent), and large butted (30.8 percent) types moaning across their screens. This monochromatic preference for the "ideal" porn star has been talked about before. Writer Jon Millward famously studied over 10,000 adult performers and composited an image of what is considered by the industry as the "most popular woman in porn." She's thin, white, big-eyed, brown-haired, and large-breasted, and she certainly doesn't look like everyone's girlfriend and wife.
Studies have been done about the negative impact men's porn habits have on women's self esteem and sexual satisfaction. The more women felt their significant others were comparing their bodies and their sexual habits with those of professional actors, the worse their real life sexual appetite and confidence became. The Cosmo survey backed this common line of thinking that 57.7 percent of women think men watch too much porn. The troubling part about men wanting to date porn star doppelgangers isn't that they're watching porn — that's normal behavior — it's that the expectations that stunt sex leaves in men's minds aren't realistic standards for everyday women. They're not. And if 7 out of 10 men are watching things in their porn they wouldn't dare do in real life (fisting, pegging, BDSM), they shouldn't think women's bodies can live up to that same fantasy.
[h/t Cosmopolitan]
Image via Jon Millward and Flickr.