Pornhub's 2017 Report Shows Indians Are Third Largest Porn Consumers, Sunny Leone Still Most...

It’s that time of the year again, when Pornhub takes the wraps off its latest slew of analytical reports and blasts the truth out to the world.

This time around too, the 2017 Pornhub Year in Review has a few interesting things to tell us about Indian and how we enjoy our solo viewings of other people doing the nasty. There are more of us enjoying it now than there were last year, and a very healthy part of those new viewers are women.

Firstly, we climbed up a spot to become the country with the third-most traffic in the entire world, behind only the US and UK, while Pakistan doesn’t even make it into the top 20. Why is that impressive? Because the top 20 countries account for 80 percent of the porn site’s traffic. That traffic was 28.5 billion visits in the year, and 6,732 petabytes of data streamed. That’s enough to fill the memory of every iPhone currently in use around the world.

The cool thing is, Indian women have managed to contribute a fairly decent amount to those porn viewings. We have the highest growth of female porn aficionados in the world, up by 129 percent over last year. That puts us in the fourth highest spot for women to men ratio, behind the Philippines, Brazil, and South Africa. Even the US has only 25 percent of its viewers identified as women, even less for the UK at 24 percent.

There may be a few factors contributing to this. One immediate cause could be the sites newer “Porn for Women” category that’s seen its popularity skyrocket across the world. But it’s not just better content that’s encouraging women to express their sexuality, according to Dr Laurie Betito, a sex therapist and director of the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center. “2017 seems to have been the year where women have come forward to express their desires more openly” she notes.

“From the “Me too” movement to prominent females the likes of Hillary Clinton and Nikki Haley on the world stage, women are feeling more empowered and they have found their voice. This is a sign of things to come.”

After Susan Fowler wrote a blog post about her constant sexual harassment at Uber, multitudes of women came forward to tell their story as well. The exposure of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and his various instances of molestation created a domino effect across Tinsel Town, bringing down a number of household celebrity names. That in turn kicked off the #MeToo movement, bringing together women across social media and emboldening them to tell their stories. All of this, Betito says, has done wonders to empower women across the world with the confidence to explore other aspects of their life as well, including what they want in the bedroom.

Another intriguing aspect from the 2017 Year in Review is how Indians are accessing their pornography. In 2016, smartphones accounted for 70 percent of our traffic, with only 28 percent from desktops (the remaining 2 percent was tablets). But in 2017, smartphone numbers rose to 86 percent of all Indian viewers, pushing desktops down to 13 percent.