As the UK government is finalizing the implementation of its Age Verification legislation, a Chinese study that came out last week found younger people are reaping the educational benefits from watching specifically female-centric pornography.
Yummy and Taqu (Touch) are the two sexual wellness companies behind the “National People’s Porn Watching and Love Report” study, which surveyed 1,261 under 30-year-olds from Guangdong and Beijing. Zhao Jing, founder of the sex-positive female pleasure app Yummy, spoke to SupChina to explain that even though most adult content is illegal in China “we already know that Chinese people do watch porn,” what isn’t known is “what exactly they like to watch and how it influences them.”
What do the studies say?
In the Yummy and Taqu report, 70 percent of men and 50 percent of women reported watching porn at least once a week, with around 50 percent of those men and 30 percent of those women imitating the sex they’d watched with a partner, with 90 percent aware of the differences between real life sex and adult entertainment.
What is important to note here is that the porn searches in China slightly differed from those found in Pornhub’s 2018 statistics of mostly non-Chinese users, due to the firewall that restricts China’s access to Pornhub. The top searches included, “Silk Labo” and Swedish feminist porn directer Erika Lust, which are both categories that are known to focus attention more on erotic storytelling than sexual action.
“People say watching porn is bad — but the type of content young people view today has improved a lot, it has approached reality, and men who give pleasure to women has become the standard.”
Zhao Jing
Recently, more than 1,000 British 18 to 25-year-olds were surveyed about their porn habits for the BBC Three series Porn Laid Bare and though half of the women surveyed were concerned about the negative impact of pornography on women, this 2017 study found the positive effects of watching female-centred porn on their sex lives.
What does Chinese law say?
As of December 2018, a law called ‘New Measures for Rewarding Reporting on Eradicating Pornography and Illegal Content’ came into effect in China. This rewards people with up to $86,500 for reporting illegal online content in a bid to “clean up” the Chinese internet.
Though this year already saw the overturning of parts of UK Obscenity Laws, a breakthrough in female pleasure (as it was legal female centric sexual acts that were mostly targeted), unfortunately the Government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) continues to finalize its strict Age Verification law, technically block porn from anyone who doesn’t want to share their personal data.
While we are not suggesting anyone underage should have access to porn, sexual education is important across all ages, and even into old age. These studies add value to the conversation around how porn actually impacts our relationship to sex.
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