Why Is No One Talking About The Female Porn Epidemic? |
Men usually get the brunt of the fingerwagging about porn use.
For good reason, too. Men are (unsurprisingly) more likely than women to watch porn. And those who consume porn to the point of obsession and ruin — as Daniel Kolitz chronicled for Harper’s Magazine — are overwhelmingly male.
An asterisk for that last assertion: Men are more likely than women to become addicted to porn in video form. Millions of American women are cripplingly fond of porn in written form.
Women have long been the target audience for romance novels. As the 20th century drew to a close, the “chick flick” found a counterpart in “chick lit”: Formulaic, commercially successful fiction, identifiable in bookstores by a cartoon woman on the cover. These books were usually silly, not smutty.
Then occurred some synthesis between zero-calorie “chick lit” and sordid fanfiction. Fanfiction, fiction written by an amateur author based on an existing work of fiction, became enormously popular thanks to the internet. FanFiction.Net was launched in 1998, permitting those inclined to publish their own stories and read the stories of others. It saw over 69 million visits in November 2025, according to digital marketing platform Semrush. Wattpad, another fanfiction sharing site, claims to have over 90 million users. Highly sexual pulp fiction predates the internet, of course, and was popular among men (often those stationed overseas).
The real reason is that most books *are* a waste of time. The idea that reading is inherently virtuous became a joke when last........