How many women watch porn, how many struggle with it, and how many ask for help

The question

Porn is usually talked about as a men's problem. We wanted to see how far the research backs that up. How many women watch porn compared with men? How many of them have a problem with it? And how many go looking for help?

The short answer is that men outnumber women at every step. The longer answer is more interesting. The gap is widest for problem porn use and narrows for compulsive sexual behaviour in general. It is wider again in research trials and online forums, and smaller on one anonymous self-test.

Who watches

In a survey of 2,075 US adult internet users matched to the 2010 census, published in 2019, 47% of men and 16% of women had watched porn at least once a month¹. A YouGov panel of 2,518 US adults in August 2019 put the figures at 59% of men and 21% of women². Different panels, different wording, the same ratio. Men's rate is about three times women's¹².

The first survey also asked people whether they saw themselves as addicted. About 11% of men and 3% of women agreed at least slightly with "I am addicted to pornography"¹. 3% of men and 1% of women agreed strongly¹. One number in that paper stood out to us. Asked whether porn use is morally wrong, women and men who had ever watched it did not differ on average, 3.04 against 3.02 on a 7-point scale¹. The paper's text reports no sex difference on this item, though its table shows the spread of answers did differ¹. Women called themselves addicted far less often.

Who has a problem with it

The International Sex Survey ran online in 26 languages from October 2021 to May 2022³. It reached 82,243 adults in 42 countries, 46,874 women and 32,549 men³. About 75,000 of them answered three published scales of problem porn use, each with its own cut-off³.

On the strictest, the 18-item Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale, 6.26% of men scored at risk and 0.72% of women³. Men's rate was close to nine times women's³. On the 6-item version it was 18.60% of men and 2.96% of women³. On the Brief Pornography Screen, the loosest of the three, it was 28.92% of men and 7.01% of women, about four to one³. The looser the test, the smaller the gap.

The same survey also screened for compulsive sexual behaviour disorder, which covers poorly controlled sexual urges and behaviour of any kind, porn included⁴. Here 8.17% of men and 2.42% of women were at high risk⁴. The gap is smaller again.

A US study found the gap narrower still. In November 2016 the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior asked 2,325 adults aged 18 to 50, drawn at random from all 50 states, a 13-item screen for distress or impairment from difficulty controlling sexual urges and behaviour⁵. 10.3% of men and 7.0% of women scored at or above the clinical cut-off⁵. Women made up 40.8% of everyone who did⁵.

Why would the gap shrink as the question widens from porn to sex in general? A small Swedish study gives one clue. Among 80 people, 64 men and 16 women, who answered adverts and articles about a treatment program for hypersexual behaviour, 82% of the men named porn use and 88% of the women named sex with consenting adults⁶. Half the women named porn too, and the authors call their sample small, particularly for women⁶. In that sample, counting only porn would have missed much of what the women reported.

So what share of people with a problem are women? In the International Sex Survey, women were 297 of the 2,378 at risk on the strictest porn scale, 12.5%³. On the loosest they were 2,872 of 12,441, 23.1%³. Among the 3,966 at high risk of compulsive sexual behaviour they were 1,133, 28.6%⁴. Women made up most of that survey, so these shares run higher than they would in a population with equal numbers of men and women³.

Who asks for help

Here the gap opens back up. In Poland, Lewczuk and colleagues recruited women seeking treatment for porn use through 23 therapists⁷. It took them almost 18 months to find 39 women⁷. An earlier study by the same group had found 132 men in 12 months⁷⁸. The authors work out from this that men seek treatment for porn use about 5 times as often as women⁷.

Online programs look the same. Hands-off, a six-week web-based self-help program for problem porn use, recruited 264 people for its first trial⁹. 10 of them, 3.8%, were women⁹. A 2022 review of 24 treatment studies for compulsive sexual behaviour found 94.83% of participants were men¹⁰. On Reddit, NoFap has over a million members, and an estimate cited by Zhang and Silva puts women at only 5% of its users¹¹.

Then there is one source that looks different. From July 2014 to July 2018 a Dutch help website ran an anonymous self-test for people wondering whether they were addicted to sex¹². It did not record IP addresses¹². The authors analysed 33,160 completed tests from people over 21, and 7,427 of them came from women, 22.4%¹². That is about six times the share of women in the Hands-off trial⁹¹².

Fewer of those women wanted help. 12.9% of the women said they would like therapy or an online training, against 25.7% of the men¹². Women made up 958 of the 7,583 who wanted help, 12.6%¹². That is almost exactly their share of the people at risk on the strictest porn scale in the international survey, 12.5%³¹². The Dutch test asked about sex in general, though, and among people at high risk of compulsive sexual behaviour in that survey, women's share was 28.6%⁴¹².

What brings women in

The Polish study also asked what separated the women who sought treatment from those who did not⁷. In men, how much they watched porn explained 1% of the difference⁸. The negative symptoms tied to their use explained 42%⁷⁸. In women, the amount they watched did predict seeking treatment, even after negative symptoms were counted⁷. Then the researchers added religious practice to the model. The link with amount of use dropped to 0.01 and was no longer significant, and religious practice became the strongest predictor, though not significantly stronger than negative symptoms⁷. The more time a woman gave to religious practice, the more likely she was to seek treatment. Only women who called themselves religious were asked about practice, and 15 of the 39 seeking treatment answered⁷. The authors call their treatment group small and their analysis exploratory, and their sample came from Poland, which they describe as conservative and religious⁷.

That fits the US result above. Women's average moral judgement of porn did not differ from men's, yet they saw themselves as addicted far less often¹. For a religious woman, the reason to seek treatment may be what she believes about porn, more than how much she watches⁷.

What it adds up to

Men outnumber women at every step, among people who watch porn, people at risk and people who seek treatment¹³⁷. Women are fewer, though not as few as the forums suggest. Their share grows when the question covers sexual behaviour in general rather than porn alone, and on an anonymous self-test³⁴⁵¹².

The Quran does not treat this as a men's problem either. It tells believing men to lower their gaze and guard their chastity, and gives believing women the same command in the very next verse¹³. Fewer women may struggle with porn. The command is the same for both.

How they found it

• The two US surveys were online panels matched to the US population, 2,075 adult internet users through Qualtrics in a paper published in 2019, and 2,518 adults through YouGov in August 2019. Each asked people how often they had watched porn.
• The International Sex Survey ran online in 26 languages from October 2021 to May 2022 and drew 82,243 adults in 42 countries. Each porn scale was scored with its own published cut-off, and about 75,000 people answered each one.
• The US screen for compulsive sexual behaviour used the 13-item Compulsive Sexual Behavior Inventory, with a cut-off of 35 out of 65, in a random sample of 2,325 adults aged 18 to 50 recruited in November 2016.
• The Polish study surveyed women online from March 2014 to September 2015. 39 had been referred by 23 therapists after seeking treatment for porn use, and 676 answered social media adverts. The paper's counts by sexual orientation add up to 719, not 715. Path analysis tested what predicted seeking treatment.
• The Dutch self-test ran on a help website from July 2014 to July 2018. 33,160 completed surveys from people over 21 were kept. Wanting help meant answering yes to wanting therapy or to wanting an internet-based training.
• Women's shares in the third and fourth charts are worked out from the counts each paper gives. They are not printed in the papers as percentages.

What it cannot tell you

• No study we found reports the sex of people using porn recovery apps. The online figures here come from one research trial and one forum estimate.
• The International Sex Survey took volunteers, not a random sample, 57% were women and 74% had tertiary education. That pushes women's share of the at-risk groups above what an even population would give.
• Scoring at risk on a screen is not a diagnosis. The Swedish authors warn that tools built to find sex addiction in men may miss it in women, though the International Sex Survey scales showed no sign of measurement bias between genders.
• None of the treatment questions in the International Sex Survey papers are split by sex, so we cannot say how often women at risk had sought help compared with men.
• The Polish estimate that men seek treatment 5 times as often comes from how long recruitment took. It is a rough ratio, not a measured rate.
• The Dutch self-test asked about sex addiction in general, not porn only, and the women who took it may have had different problems from the men.

In P-Minus

P-Minus is written for Muslim men and Muslim women. It asks your sex once, at the start, and the lessons are written in the second person, so nothing assumes the reader is a man. It asks for a username and an email address, not your name.

Sources

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7. Lewczuk K, Szmyd J, Skorko M, Gola M. Treatment seeking for problematic pornography use among women. J Behav Addict. 2017;6(4):445-56.
8. Gola M, Lewczuk K, Skorko M. What matters: quantity or quality of pornography use? Psychological and behavioral factors of seeking treatment for problematic pornography use. J Sex Med. 2016;13(5):815-24.
9. Bőthe B, Baumgartner C, Schaub MP, Demetrovics Z, Orosz G. Hands-off: feasibility and preliminary results of a two-armed randomized controlled trial of a web-based self-help tool to reduce problematic pornography use. J Behav Addict. 2021;10(4):1015-35.
10. Antons S, Engel J, Briken P, Krüger THC, Brand M, Stark R. Treatments and interventions for compulsive sexual behavior disorder with a focus on problematic pornography use: a preregistered systematic review. J Behav Addict. 2022;11(3):643-66.
11. Zhang X, Silva DE. "I feel like a fraud who acts like a feminist": the discussion themes and sexual scripts in the Porn Free Women online forum. Arch Sex Behav. 2024;53(6):2189-203.
12. van Tuijl P, Tamminga A, Meerkerk GJ, Verboon P, Leontjevas R, van Lankveld J. Three diagnoses for problematic hypersexuality; which criteria predict help-seeking behavior? Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020;17(18):6907.
13. The Quran 24:30-31. Translation by Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran.

Sources checked October 2026.