Almost everything written about quitting porn is written by men, for men, and the research has the same tilt: data on women are comparatively sparse, and the main instruments were validated on men.
What the data do show is that the mechanics are not gendered. In a nationally representative Australian survey, 84% of men and 54% of women had ever looked at pornography, and among those, 76% of the men and 41% of the women had looked in the past year. That is roughly 64% of all men and 22% of all women. Not a niche.
Men report problematic use substantially more often, by a factor that depends on the instrument: around four times on the broadest screen, around nine times on the strictest. A defensible general-population range for women is roughly 1 to 7%, and the spread comes from which questionnaire and cut-off is used, not from real disagreement about women.
Whether women face greater stigma for use is widely asserted and has not been measured. What is clear is that the habit loop, urges, if-then plans and what to do after a slip work the same way regardless of gender, and that the format is irrelevant: erotica, audio and fanfiction are the same loop as video.
If you are a woman reading a baseline that was designed on men, read it knowing that. The six components still apply. The published cut-offs may not.
Where this comes from
Read the full lesson: This isn't only a men's issue →
Sources and how strong they are (4)
- Mixed evidenceResearch on problematic pornography use has been predominantly male-focused, and data on women are comparatively sparse. In the largest standardised cross-national study — 82,243 respondents across 42 countries, but a self-selected sample that is 74% tertiary-educated and which the authors state is not probability-based — 0.72% of the women who completed the PPCS met its cut-off, 2.96% the PPCS-6 and 7.01% the Brief Pornography Screen, against 6.26%, 18.60% and 28.92% of men. The lower figures quoted for women come from probability samples asking a single self-perceived-addiction question: 1% in Australia and 3% in the United States. So the spread is partly instrument and cut-off, and partly that the low end and the high end are not measuring the same thing. Whether women face greater stigma for use is asserted in the secondary literature but has not been measured.
- Bőthe B, Nagy L, Koós M, Demetrovics Z, Potenza MN, International Sex Survey Consortium, Kraus SW 2024, Addiction 119(5):928-950, doi:10.1111/add.16431, PMID 38413365
- Rissel C, Richters J, de Visser RO, McKee A, Yeung A, Caruana T 2017, J Sex Res 54(2):227-240, doi:10.1080/00224499.2016.1191597, PMID 27419739 — 1% of Australian women, single-item self-perceived addiction
- Grubbs JB, Kraus SW, Perry SL 2019, J Behav Addict 8(1):88-93, doi:10.1556/2006.7.2018.134, PMID 30632378, PMC7044607 — 3% of US women, single-item self-perceived addiction
- Not a source for this entry — Klau et al. 2026, J Sex Med 23(6), doi:10.1093/jsxmed/qdag155: the route by which the "1-23%" figure this register used to carry arrived, and the reason it was dropped. The Polish 23% it passes on is traced in `source`; the Lewczuk 2022 paper behind it could not be resolved to a single record and is therefore not cited here as one.
- Well establishedIn a nationally representative Australian survey, 84% of men and 54% of women had ever looked at pornography. Among those ever-users, 76% of the men and 41% of the women had looked in the past year — which is roughly 64% of all men and 22% of all women surveyed.
- Rissel et al. 2017, J Sex Res 54(2):227-240, doi:10.1080/00224499.2016.1191597, PMID 27419739
- Well establishedMen report problematic use substantially more often than women. The size of the gap depends on the instrument: in the largest cross-national study men were about four times more likely on the broadest screen (28.92% vs 7.01%), about six times on the PPCS-6 (18.60% vs 2.96%) and about nine times on the full PPCS (6.26% vs 0.72%). Single-item self-labelled "addiction" measures give a gap at the low end of that range, around three to four times.
- Bőthe B, Nagy L, Koós M, Demetrovics Z, Potenza MN, International Sex Survey Consortium, Kraus SW 2024, Addiction 119(5):928-950, doi:10.1111/add.16431, PMID 38413365
- Rissel C, Richters J, de Visser RO, McKee A, Yeung A, Caruana T 2017, J Sex Res 54(2):227-240, doi:10.1080/00224499.2016.1191597, PMID 27419739 (men 4% vs women 1%)
- Grubbs JB, Kraus SW, Perry SL 2019, J Behav Addict 8(1):88-93, doi:10.1556/2006.7.2018.134, PMID 30632378, PMC7044607 (~11% vs ~3%)
- Mixed evidenceSexual minority men and women tend to report higher problematic use than heterosexual peers, with exceptions by instrument and subscale. The largest cross-national study to test it found no sexual-orientation differences at all.
- Borgogna NC, Griffin KR, Grubbs JB & Kraus SW 2022, "Understanding Differences in Problematic Pornography Use: Considerations for Gender and Sexual Orientation", J Sex Med 19(8):1290-1302, doi:10.1016/j.jsxm.2022.05.144, PMID 35753890
- Cuts the other way — Bőthe B, Nagy L, Koós M, Demetrovics Z, Potenza MN, International Sex Survey Consortium, Kraus SW 2024, Addiction 119(5):928-950, doi:10.1111/add.16431, PMID 38413365
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