Top Porn Trends of 2018 - Part #1

Porn - it’s been around, in one form or another, since cavemen first painted boobs on rock wall with red ocher.  Obviously, trends have changed with the times! If you’re curious what the hottest, latest porn trends are for 2018, this list is for you! This week, we’ll be kicking off a multi-part blog series discussing porn trends over the past year.  This week and next, we’ll lay out some of the biggest macro trends in the industry - 5 trends this week, 5 trends next week. Then, in the coming weeks, we’ll dive into some of these trends a little deeper showing you exactly what they mean for the future of porn and how these trends impact one another.  So, in no particular order, here’s what’s huge in porn right now:

 

1) 2018 - Year of the Woman.  

While, obviously, some women have always watched porn, the target audience has been men.  Now, every year the porn industry sees an increase in female viewership - according to XHamster it was 2.4% increase globally in 2017 alone. XHamster expects women to outpace men as a growth market in the industry beginning this year and likely continuing… indefinitely.  

The biggest driving force for the increase in female viewership is thought to be easy, private access to the internet so that women can browse without stigma. Changing social attitudes mean that many women may also feel less stigma to begin with. There is also an increase in popularity for sites like PornHub that allow amateurs - usually women - to produce and upload their own porn.  It’s thought that this increase in female created content is [gasp] resonating with female viewers more than traditional porn, which was almost always produced by men. Now that the industry knows there's an audience there, you might expect to that start to change. 

So what does porn for women even look like? Well, it turns out female customers are already influencing what gets made in porn and - spoiler alert - several of the trends below are already affected by the ladies.  Women have had a profound impact on popular search terms this year. It turns out that, in spite of stereotypes about the male gaze, currently the dominant consumers of lesbian porn worldwide are actually women. While that makes a certain amount of sense, here's another category you might not expect to be dominated by women; Incest porn. Which brings us to our next trend...

2) Incest Porn

Incest porn is having a moment.  Well, ok technically speaking it’s more like “fauxcest” because the relationships portrayed are almost all “step” family - step mothers, step fathers, step sisters, etc.  In fact, there are some legal issues in a number of states in seeming to portray actual incest in porn (even if the actors are not related in real life) so legal department encourage screenwriters to work in work-arounds. Porn star Whitney Wright, who stars in a number of these “fauxcest” films for production company Pure Taboo, explains to Esquire Magazine,  "I think you legally have to say, 'This is crazy, you’re my step-brother' a certain number of times, You also have to somehow fit in there that both are over the age of 18, like, 'Now that so-and-so's back from college.'"

Demand is so high right now that, according to XHamster, “Mom” is the #2 search term of 2018.  It is the #1 search term amongst men. Care to guess the number #1 search term for women? It’s Daddy.   

It seems that new viewers are, in part, driving this particular trend - and there are more of those than ever, largely thanks to new global markets and an increase in female viewership (see above).  These viewers often go through an experience where they seek out increasingly hardcore, intense and taboo types of porn, and what is more taboo than incest?

3) BDSM

Ok, maybe BDSM is a bit less taboo than incest, but it seems to be part of the same trend in which new viewers seek out more intense thrills.  BDSM porn has been around for decades, but it’s popularity as a search term has skyrocketed this year. According to XHamster, visits to the their content labeled BDSM has increased 104% globally over the past 12 months.  That is the single largest increase of any type porn! What came in 2nd you might ask?

4) BBW

XHamster registered over a 54% increase in traffic to their BBW porn, second only the increase in viewership of their BDSM porn.  What exactly is BBW porn? It stands for Big Beautiful Women and features curvy, ample bodied gals. It wasn’t a fetish I was aware of until I met BBW porn star Karla Lane irl a few years ago. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who discovered this type of porn in the past few years.  According to PornHub, the search term has increased by around 50% each year since since 2013. Increases in the body positivity movement, anthems like “All About the Bass” and curvy-but-fit stars like Kim Kardashian have helped the search term skyrocket in popularity - and marketability.  

5) Brown Skinned Babes

Body type diversity isn’t the only new phenotypical trend in porn this year.  There is also a movement towards a wider array of ethnicities. While fairer skinned European and Japanese pornstars once dominated the market, there has been increasing demand for middle eastern and Latina actresses. The US, one of the biggest markets in porn, saw a 121% increase in “Arab” searches on Xhamster. “Mexican” increased nearly 48% and “Brazilian” increased over 16%. “Japanese” still remains the #1 ethnic search term, despite decreasing 39%.  French, German and other European ethnicities also decreased in popularity.

Be sure to catch the second half of our list next week, where we dive into how divisive politics and new technologies are pushing porn into the 21st century!