“57% of young adults admit to seeking out porn at least once per month. 46% of men admit to the same. Meanwhile, 49% of young adults say that most or all of their friends use porn on a regular basis. Significance: Porn use is rampant across most age categories, but is particularly pronounced among young adults.”
We all know that the world has become pornified, that the internet has made available to all of us an entire universe of pornographic content. Yet many of the statistics we rely on and commonly quote have become outdated. As technology changes and as new generations grow up, the pornographic landscape inevitably changes. I went looking for updated numbers and want to present some of them to you today. All of these are based on credible studies carried out in 2016 or 2017.
4.6 Billion
In 2016, people watched 4.6 billion hours of pornography at just one website (the biggest porn site in the world). That’s 524,000 years of porn or, if you will, around 17,000 complete lifetimes. In that same time people watched 92 billion videos (or an average of 12.5 for every person on earth). Significance: So many people are using so much porn today that it is really impossible to tabulate. But understanding how much is consumed at just one site can at least help us see that this problem is nothing less than epidemic.
11
At age 11, the average child has already been exposed to explicit pornographic content through the internet. 93% of boys and 62% of girls are exposed to internet-based pornography during their adolescent years and 22% of the vast quantities of porn consumed by people aged under 18 is consumed by those aged less than 10. Significance: Parents are nothing short of negligent if they take no steps to protect their children from being exposed to pornography.
70%
70% of teens and young adults define porn by its function, not its form. Pornography is not defined first as nudity or even presentations of sexuality, but as anything intended to bring about sexual arousal. Significance: Young adults do not consider things pornographic if they are not explicitly intended to cause arousal, so sex and nudity in movies or television is not considered pornographic, especially if it is an integral element to a story. As Christians we need to teach a thorough theology of the body and of sexuality.
57%
57% of young adults admit to seeking out porn at least once per month. 46% of men admit to the same. Meanwhile, 49% of young adults say that most or all of their friends use porn on a regular basis. Significance: Porn use is rampant across most age categories, but is particularly pronounced among young adults.
96%
96% of young adults are either encouraging, accepting, or neutral in their view toward pornography. (17% talk about porn in a positive way, 43% in an accepting way as if it’s just a reality of life in this world, while 36% don’t consider the morality of it at all.) That leaves only a tiny minority who consider it a negative thing. Only 1 in 20 young adults say their friends consider porn a bad thing. Significance: Early exposure to pornography and the negligence of parents to adequately address it leaves young adults believing pornography is normal and acceptable and its use unremarkable.
61%
61% of pornography is watched on a mobile phone. In the United States that is as high as 70%. Significance: Parents used to believe that putting a computer in a well-trafficked place and installing Covenant Eyes on it would be sufficient to keep their children from accessing pornography. But today pornography is as mobile as our phones and people consume it in complete privacy. They can access it through the family’s wifi connection, through their mobile data connection, or anywhere else they can get onto the internet.
