A couple of hundred years ago, the invention of photography forever changed the way the world masturbated. The Dark Ages of jerking off to one’s own imagination faded away, and the relatively novel concept of “pornography” as we know it today flourished. Fast-forward to the dawn of the internet, and porn was reinvented all over again. Suddenly, it was possible to find, with relative immediacy, the exact depraved scenario you needed to get off, faster and easier than ever.
But which type of porn, exactly, gets people off the fastest? To find out, we got in touch with the folks over at Pornhub, who’ve been analyzing data about pornography since 2013. Like the fact that, on St. Patrick’s Day, searches for “leprechaun” shoot up over 9,000 percent. Or that Rwanda’s favorite porn star is Kim Kardashian. Or that women in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus really like anal porn.
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What’s the average length of a porn video?
We asked Pornhub to compile a list of porn categories—like “anal” and “MILF”—and rank them by the average length of time videos in that category were viewed. This produced a list organized from shortest- to longest-viewed videos, with the shortest clocking in at about seven minutes and 37 seconds, and the longest at 11 minutes 13 seconds.
Of course, there are two reasons someone might not spend much time watching a particular porn clip: Best-case scenario, it was so hot that the viewer got off right away and, having been satisfied, stopped watching. Worst-case scenario, the video was so disgusting and bad that the viewer clicked away immediately. To separate the second category from our results, Pornhub cut out outliers—both either extremely short or extremely long viewing times.
The top porn categories people like to watch
According to the remaining data, the longest watched category was “old/young,” meaning porn involving an older man, usually over 45, having sex with a woman in her teens or 20s. Unsurprisingly, Pornhub correlates this category with their over-45-year-old viewers, which is also true of the “mature” category (porn featuring older people). According to Bryant Paul, a professor at Indiana University who works with the Kinsey Institute, this falls in line with previous research about sexuality. “You’d expect old guys to take a little longer,” he told VICE. Plus, we can assume that as with all other technology, elderly masturbators are probably not great at skipping through a video or turning it off right when they’re done.
The shortest viewed porn categories were redheads, Hentai, blond, college, small tits, POV, ass, brunette, big tits, and threesomes. Most of those have something to do with physical description. On the other end of the spectrum—old/young, mature, gay, amateur, interracial, ebony, casting—were search terms that had more to do with situational context.
“The type of content that would likely make people get off the fastest would be the most fertile looking bodies, the most nubile—a combination of high mating and high reproductive value,” Paul explained. That’s just basic biology.
Men and women prefer different types of porn
Male and female viewers preferred different types of porn. Looking at the list of clips viewed by women, terms like handjob, solo male, Asian, and college had the shortest view time. That would mean porn featuring college-aged Asian men jerking off seems to be the secret formula to making women orgasm quickly. Paul had no idea why that would be the case.
He did point out that the categories with longer viewing times, like Hentai, involved more situational context. “Hentai tends to be for those that are interested in stories more than sexual content,” said Paul. “There’s more fantasy in stories.” Some research shows women are more aroused by stories than visuals, which would suggest that women might actually like these videos better and are just more patient about how long it takes to get off (as opposed to men, who might get bored after a while and click away). Some women are drawn to stories in porn for the same reason(s) people enjoy erotic novels. The concepts are arousing and enhance the sexual experience. Women may prefer feminist porn.
There’s also a difference in the buildup of desire for women, according to research from Rosemary Basson. Her research found that many women start their sexual experiences from a point of neutrality, which then builds up to desire during foreplay or the act itself. That might explain why, on average, women spent longer viewing individual videos than men.
Cultural identity and porn
Lastly, PornHub looked at the data for ethnic search terms. Paul suggested that people were primarily searching for terms that matched their own cultural identity (and indeed, Pornhub confirmed that terms like “Japanese” are most popular in Japan, and so on for other terms). With few exceptions, it seemed like porn relating to cultures known for their sexual openness (Latin America, Italians) got viewers off faster than those relating to more sexually repressed cultures (Arab, Japanese).
“In our research, we’ve found that Japanese, Arabic, and even Indian content tends to be a lot less hardcore, a lot less explicit. They don’t show as much penetration, there’s not mutual or reciprocal oral sex,” Paul explained. “Meanwhile, Brazilian and Latina porn tends to be some of the most explicit content out there. And we know that increased explicitness does lead to more sexual arousal.” And more sexual arousal leads to coming more quickly.
Everyone gets off differently
While that all seems logical, Paul pointed out that it’s hard to draw any concrete conclusions from the data without jumping into someone’s computer and actually watching them jerk off. In a simpler time, before the internet, people watched a few scenes from whatever video they had on-hand. But now, “what we find when we watch how guys view pornography is that they watch multiple videos per session to orgasm,” Paul explained. So the shortest-viewed videos might not actually be the ones leading to an orgasm; instead, it might just be the appetizer in a multi-video masturbation session where they may need to load up on lube.
So do we definitively know what type of porn gets people off the fastest? No. But if we had to guess, we’d put our money on porn featuring lesbian redheaded Latinas. Something like that.
Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.
This page was updated to improve clarity on the topic on April 22, 2022.
