Porn is mainstream? Not so.

I thought this was true, but evidently the evidence says otherwise.

This blogger gathered statistical data to suggest consumption of porn hovers around 58 percent. Broken down by gender, between 30 and 35 percent of men consume porn. That includes porn found online and in print. If you look at print, the numbers show a drastic decline, but that may be because of porn’s prevalence online. For women, not surprisingly, there is little if any change in behavior.

From a blog called Gene Expression: For men, porn-watching declined at least from 1973 until 1980, and increased until 1987. After that, you may be able to see fluctuations up and down but they’re around a pretty steady value of about 35%. The pattern for women is much clearer to see: essentially no trend, but cycles of varying period and amplitude. I interpret these patterns as a decline during the 1970s when porn theaters became unfashionable, an increase during the 1980s as porn became available on VHS, and no change afterward — in particular, no skyrocket due to the availability of internet porn, something I would not have predicted by intuition.