No, Pakistan Does Not Consume the Most Gay Pornography Per Capita
There is a story that periodically circulates the internet on an annual basis: that Pakistan watches the more gay pornography than any other country.
The Redditors in these threads typically take the attitude that this is obvious on priors. One theory is that homophobia is caused by sexual repression, which actually elevates rather than suppresses homoerotic desire. Another more plausible theory is that homophobia reduces the amount total amount of gay sex, which in turn causes homosexuals to rely more on pornography. I think it is likely that neither of these theories are true, and I will sketch out some arguments later in this post. First I want to examine the source of this claim about Pakistani gay porn consumption and evaluate its plausibility.
Sometimes these Reddit posts will link to a Daily Mail article, or a New York Daily News article, but the actual content all sources from this one article from Mother Jones and builds off this one piece of evidence:
As of this writing, Pakistan is by volume the world leader for Google searches of the terms “shemale sex,” “teen anal sex,” and “man fucking man,” according to Google Trends. Pakistan also ranks second in the world (after similarly gay-intolerant Kenya) for volume of searches for the search term “gay sex pics.”
This metric is very odd for a couple reasons. First, the result is not stable. If we look at the Google Trends data now, Pakistan ranks below the 30th for both of the homoerotic searches.
Even if we constrain the data to 2013 (when the article was written) or earlier, the result does not replicate, which suggests to me that original result was noisy and got perturbed by changes in how the Trends score is computed:
The second issue is that “man fucking man” just seems like a very odd Search term. In fact, googling directly for pornography in general seems to be the sort of thing that would be much more common among populations that are newcomers to the internet. I imagine that most internet users just go directly to porn aggregators like Pornhub or X.
This data also seems not to bear out the hypothesis that a country’s rate of homoerotic Google searches is proportional to its intolerance of homosexuality. Across various columns in the tables above, Pakistan appears right next to Norway and Thailand for instance.
Speculations on Porn Consumption and Demography
It would be very useful to be able to go to a single, definitive source that systematically answers questions like:
How much pornography is consumed in a given country?
What categories of pornography is most consumed in a given country?
A cursory glance at the literature on pornography suggests that this systematic source does not exist. Much of the work on porn consumption trends is focused on “problematic pornographic use”, which is not what I’m interested in. For studies that attempt to summarize general trends (such as Rowland and Uribe’s chapter “Pornography Use: What Do Cross-Cultural Patterns Tell Us?”) it seems like the state of the art is to summarize statistics from Pornhub. This is reasonable insofar as Pornhub is the clear leader in internet traffic of pornographic content, but it could be that Pornhub alone does not capture a representative view of porn consumption outside of North America and Europe.
In any case, look at Pornhub’s data:
Americans consume just way more pornography than everyone else. In general, this data supplies a case against “repression” models of porn consumption (i.e. that public sexual repression causes increased private consumption of pornography). I suspect that the evidence overall will suggest (if anything) that per capita porn consumption is correlated with permissive attitudes towards casual sex.
Why are people so attached to repression models? I think it is because it is rhetorically attractive to accuse one’s political opponents of hypocrisy, so it is tempting to say that your enemies are sexually repressed, sexually confused, are hornier than you, and are horny for you. Both progressives and conservatives do this quite frequently I’m sure you have noticed.
Methods in the study of pornography need to improve. None of the statistics I’ve looked at try to correct for the issue of VPNs (namely, how much of American porn traffic is really just people outside of the United States who are using VPNs). This matters as many countries have constraints on the consumption of pornography that can be easily circumvented by VPNs. Another major consideration is that there is increasing evidence that a majority of internet traffic is from bots. If these bots are disproportionately American, this would distort the PornHub data above.