First, we need to determine if the percentages of married couples doing this with the full knowledge of the other spouse, spouses doing this without the knowledge of their companion and singles.

Second, we need to break down what the prevalence is with regards to sex of the subscriber.

Third, what porn is each demographic looking at?

My own guess is that the vast majority of this [paid] porn is couples viewing mostly straight sex videos that is only one step removed from your standard Cinemax soft-core erotica (some of which is pretty good for the purposes of getting things heated up.) I’m not exactly being a braniac here; I’m just looking at where the bulk of material is being produced.

A second reason for my prediction is that single men know how to get the stuff THEY want for free and don’t really have the money to pay for it anyway and married men and women who are hiding their consumption from their companion are also getting it free because they don’t want to get caught.

One last prediction, among couples, men are the primary drivers of using porn in an attempt to find intimacy that is missing in their marriage. The church repeatedly blunders in emphasizing the matriarchal aspects of relationships and demonizing the patriarchal. This greatly affects many men who find the rejection and demonization of their sexual desires to be emotionally painful. It also affects a lot of women who also want more, but are made to believe that such desires are wicked. A big point is that once they see quality porn, many women realize they enjoy it and that at the very least, isn’t an awful thing so why not if it makes their man happy?

(Sidebar: repeated studies have found that women respond physiologically to porn to the same extent as men, even the hard core stuff. They’ve also found that women respond strongly to depictions of intimacy, regardless of the sexual match up, while men don’t respond outside their own sexual preference.)

PS. For those who scream about “addiction”; give me a break. Even if I accept the use of the word addiction (which I most certainly do not, even for most drugs), you can turn just about anything into an addiction. I know people “addicted” to church. Growing up, there was a man so “addicted” to being Bishop, his wife almost divorced him (though I’ve long suspected he was really just avoiding her, who I suspect was nice to be around, but hell to live with.)

In most other cultures, the threat of having a mistress would