While I was doing research for my book on female sexual empowerment, I kept coming across a statistic online: that cis women take 20 minutes on average to orgasm. It’s in articles with vague citations like “according to statistics,” “some experts say,” and “studies show”; it’s in blog posts and advice columns by sex therapists. Few of these sources say where the data comes from.

I began hunting down this figure’s source after reading Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters and How to Get It by University of Florida psychology professor Laurie Mintz, PhD. Mintz writes that women take four minutes to orgasm through masturbation on average, which was indeed found in sex research pioneer Alfred Kinsey’s interviews and published in his 1953 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. But with a partner, she wrote, women take 20 minutes, while men took two to 10.

Mintz is adamant that the orgasm gap — the tendency for men to orgasm more than women — is cultural, not biological. (Note: Not all women’s bodies have vulvas, and not all bodies with vulvas belong to women. But as I researched this article, I found no data on trans or intersex bodies. This, of course, is its own problem, and has led me to refer exclusively to cis women throughout the rest of this piece.)

Why, then, I wondered, did she believe it took women longer?

Over email, Mintz said the 20-minute statistic doesn’t reflect a lack of sexual responsiveness, and she suspects it would be shorter with a long-term partner who understands the woman’s body. (If that’s the case, I wondered, why is it presented as a property of women’s bodies, not men’s technique? The orgasm gap doesn’t seem to be a problem with lesbians, after all.) Regarding its source, she explained, “That 20-minute stat has been written about by some of the most respected sex educators and therapists and researchers. You can find it, for example, on page 19 in She Comes First (Ian Kerner) and on page 9 of The Orgasm Answer Guide (Beverly Whipple).”

So, I flipped to page 19 of She Comes First. It reads:

“Irony, bigger and cruel, seems to be embedded into our respective processes of arousal: that a woman, so unique in her sexuality…should so often find this vast potential for blazing ecstasy smoldered — a magnificent conflagration left unlit — all for lack of a match that can hold its flame. It’s not a problem with the match, say many men, but rather that a woman’s fuse is too long. Perhaps, but then this raises the question how long is too long? Studies, like those by Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, have concluded that among women whose partners spent 21 minutes or longer on foreplay, only 7.7 percent failed to reach orgasm consistently. … Few, if any, of the world’s problems can be solved with a mere 20 minutes of attention.”

The data Kerner’s citing are from Kinsey successor Paul H. Gebhard’s analysis of interviews conducted by the Kinsey Institute. Women were asked how much foreplay they engaged in and — here’s the kicker — the “percent of coitus resulting in orgasm.” Coitus, as in, intercourse — which most cis women don’t reliably orgasm from at all. A meta-analysis of 32 studies in Indiana University professor Elisabeth Lloyd, PhD’s The Case of the Female Orgasm found that only one in four cis women consistently orgasms through intercourse. Lloyd wrote that since many of these women could be stimulating their clitorises during intercourse, the number of women who orgasm through penetration alone is likely lower.

Casting further doubt on Kerner’s extrapolations from Gebhard’s data, it’s unclear what happened during those 21 minutes of foreplay. Blow jobs? Kissing? Role-playing? We don’t know. Whatever the case, it’s unlikely all 21 minutes consisted of clitoral stimulation, given that many men don’t even know where the clitoris is. Only 44% of college men in one study could locate it on a diagram. And that was in 2013, over six decades after these data were collected.

Along with claiming that “a woman’s fuse” is “perhaps” too long, Kerner goes on and on about how difficult and laborious women’s orgasms are — not exactly helping his mission of encouraging men to give them. After reading that “the female orgasm is a more complicated affair and often takes much longer to achieve” and that it requires “persistent stimulation, concentration, and relaxation,” many men may feel intimidated. Why put in so much work for something that may not even show up?

Per Mintz’s suggestion, I also checked out page 9 of The Orgasm Answer Guide, which indeed reads, “While some women have an orgasm within 30 seconds of starting self-stimulation, most women experience orgasm after 20 minutes.” When I emailed Whipple to ask where this came from, she replied, “I have not conducted or published any research on the average time for a woman to experience orgasm.” She forwarded my question to the book’s coauthors in case they knew. None of them got back to me.

Determined to figure out why people think the female orgasm takes so long, I then emailed Indiana University professor and Kinsey Institute research fellow Debby Herbenick, PhD, author of a Men’s Health article that states, “Studies show that it takes 15 to 40 minutes for the average woman to reach orgasm.” When asked where that statistic came from, she told me she couldn’t even recall writing the article. “If pressed to put a number to it, I am not sure I could, other than ‘seconds of stimulation to more than an hour of stimulation preceding orgasm,’” she replied.

Two experts — sex therapist Vanessa Marin, MA, MFT and Ball State University professor Justin Lehmiller, PhD — actually cited a source: the research of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who observed people having sex and masturbating in their lab beginning in the late ‘50s. (Lehmiller tells me he believes clitoral stimulation would take less time than the 10–20 minutes he cited but doesn’t know of any data; Marin admits her figure of 20 minutes is a “rough ballbark” since there’s “not much research” and that it applies primarily “when you’re first learning.”)

Marin linked to an article in the right-wing UK tabloid The Sun, known for reporting stories based on pure rumor. Lehmiller at least cited a book: Masters and Johnson’s 1966 Human Sexual Response. I also found that 10–20-minute statistic attributed to Masters and Johnson in a textbook: Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century by psychology professors Wayne Weiten, PhD, Dana S. Dunn, PhD, and Elizabeth Yost Hammer, PhD.

At that point, I didn’t trust anything I read about orgasmic timing, so I ordered Human Sexual Response off Amazon. After the hefty thing arrived in the mail, I spent a Sunday night poring over it. And poring over it. And not finding anything on this topic. Wondering if I was just missing it, I returned to the book’s Amazon page, clicked “look inside,” and typed “minutes” into the search bar. I learned some interesting facts (“frequently, the increment in breast volume is retained for five to 10 minutes after the orgasmic phase”), but again, nothing about how long anyone takes to orgasm. There was something in a forward by Sam Sloan written in 2009 — “it is said to take the woman 7 minutes 30 seconds to reach the level of arousal where she has an orgasm” — but he doesn’t cite anyone, and I can’t find that number anywhere else, let alone in the book. I did the same thing for Masters and Johnson’s Sexual Inadequacy with the same results. Baffled, I asked Lehmiller where in Human Sexual Response he got his information, but he didn’t have time to look. Fair enough.

It was Hammer who finally shed some light on this puzzle. When I asked her where the 10–20-minute figure that Psychology Applied to Modern Life attributes to Masters and Johnson came from, she replied, “The specific statement that appears in the textbook can’t be attributed to Masters and Johnson. The initial misattribution occurred a number of editions ago, was not caught, and was carried over through subsequent editions.” The real source? Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, she said. Numerous articles are misattributing Kinsey’s data to Masters and Johnson, who, as far as I can tell, didn’t even study orgasmic timing.

So, it appears that the 20-minute statistic is coming from nowhere, from Gebhard’s data on the length of foreplay before intercourse, or from Kinsey’s data on intercourse. In either case, the numbers are based on intercourse — which means we’ve been judging cis women’s orgasmic ability by an activity they don’t even usually orgasm from.

“The reason we think of men as being more orgasmic involves the ubiquity of ‘sex’ being defined as ‘intercourse,’” sexologist Carol Queen, PhD tells me. “Intercourse doesn’t offer sufficient clitoral stimulation for most women to allow for efficient, easy orgasm.”

But other activities do. As Occidental College sociology professor Lisa Wade, PhD points out, one study found that 90% of cis women orgasmed when their last sexual encounter included oral and manual sex, and another found that 92% did when they engaged in oral, self-stimulation, and intercourse. “The idea that women would have different rates of orgasm depending on what kinds of stimulation that they give their bodies seems almost so obvious that it’s stupid to say out loud,” says Wade. “But we have to do that because the assumption is that women’s bodies are bad at having orgasms.”

Of the 20-minute statistic, Wade says, “There’s nothing there. It’s crazy to me because I hear this said all the time.”

The idea that orgasms come (heh) far quicker and easier to men is one of the most ubiquitously believed gender differences, yet it’s been known since the ‘50s that this is only true during intercourse. Given that intercourse tends to favor male orgasms, it’s telling that our male-dominated society has defined it as “sex.”

When we look at masturbation, gender differences almost entirely evaporate. Kinsey found that 45% of cis women took one to three minutes to orgasm through masturbation, 25% took four to five minutes, 19% took six to 10 minutes, and only 12% took over 10. He wrote in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female:

“Many of those who took longer to reach orgasm did so deliberately in order to prolong the pleasure of the activity and not because they were incapable of responding more quickly. These data on the female’s speed in reaching orgasm provide important information on her basic sexual capacities. There is widespread opinion that the female is slower than the male in her sexual responses, but the masturbatory data do not support that opinion. The average male may take something between two and three minutes to reach orgasm unless he deliberately prolongs his activity, and a calculation of the median time required would probably show that he responds not more than some seconds faster than the average female. It is true that the average female responds more slowly than the average male in coitus, but this seems to be due to the ineffectiveness of the usual coital techniques.”

Sex researcher Shere Hite similarly found that 95% of cis women who masturbated “could orgasm easily and regularly, whenever they wanted.” She didn’t determine the average time, but she wrote in 1976’s The Hite Report that Kinsey’s findings were “similar to the women in this study.” She elaborated, “It is, obviously, only during inadequate or secondary, insufficient stimulation like intercourse that we take ‘longer’ and need prolonged ‘foreplay.’ But this misconception has led to a kind of mystique about female orgasm.”

Even today, the authors of widely used textbooks endorse this view. “During masturbation, 70 percent of females reach orgasm in four minutes or less,” psychologists Dennis Coon, PhD and ‎John O. Mitterer, PhD write in Psychology: Gateways to Mind and Behavior. “This casts serious doubt on the idea that women respond more slowly. Slower female response during intercourse probably occurs because stimulation to the clitoris is less direct. It might be said that men simply provide too little stimulation for more rapid female response, not that women are in any way inferior.”

There hasn’t been much research on this topic since Kinsey, but I’d venture to bet that women might be even quicker if the data were collected today, given that 53% of American women in one 2009 study had used vibrators, compared to less than 1% in the ‘70s, according to Shere Hite’s research. A 2015 study of 100 users of the Womanizer vibrator found that half orgasmed in a minute or less using the toy. Toys aren’t necessary to make women as sexually responsive as men, as some companies would have you believe. They put us ahead of them.

I’m not saying that orgasm should be the goal of sex or that those who can’t orgasm are in any way inferior or unworthy (stigmatization of those who are anorgasmic is a serious issue). Nor am I saying that those who need more time have inferior sex lives. They may actually enjoy sex more, since they get more pleasure before they crash. They should ask for however much time they need unapologetically. And lastly, I’m not saying women’s partners should give up after four minutes. Everyone’s different, and it can take a while to get to know a partner’s body, regardless of gender.

But here’s why the 20-minute statistic pisses me off so much. As Wade puts it, deeming female orgasms more difficult “naturalizes the orgasm gap.” She explains:

“It makes it seem like the orgasm gap is inevitable and acceptable and just, and it makes women feel guilty for wanting to have orgasms and asking for orgasms from their partners because if their bodies are so bad at it and it’s just a burden, women don’t want to be a burden on their partners. And it also gives men an excuse to not try.”

She’s right: Fake statistics about orgasmic timing do get used to naturalize the orgasm gap. The website for Promescent, an anesthetic penis spray that claims to close the orgasm gap by prolonging erections, claims:

“Today, far too many people believe that when they have good sex, men and women are supposed to orgasm around the same time. But, like many other common misconceptions, the science just doesn’t back it up. On average, men take about five minutes to orgasm, while women take much longer, which means that men climax a lot more often than women do. This difference between the male and female orgasm is what we call the Orgasm Gap. Believe it or not, science is to blame. Because men and women are scientifically different. But the best way to beat science is with better science. And that’s where Promescent comes in.”

On Twitter, insecure dudes talk about how it’s not worth the effort to get women off, while women themselves often complain about men making these damaging assumptions.

There’s also another, deeper reason this stat pisses me off. Supposed gender differences in orgasmic timing are often considered God’s cruel joke on humanity, with women the butts of the joke — the unlucky ones. Female multiple orgasms have been deemed the great equalizer in this equation, but in reality, most cis women have refractory periods like men. “I am suspicious that ‘multiple’ is not really multiple in the way Cosmo has traditionally written about them,” sex researcher Nicole Prause, PhD tells me. “Rather, it seems likely that some women have a relatively short refractory period, just like some men.”

Or, we’re supposed to feel comforted by the “fact” that the clitoris has twice as many nerve endings as the penis, another baseless statistic that’s somehow made its way around the internet without any study ever cited. The clitoris and penis develop from the same structure in the womb, so they likely have around the same amount of nerve endings, says Queen. These supposed advantages are typically cited in praises of women, yet they’re often framed as consolations for not having the supposedly superior male body.

This is part of a larger narrative that says that being a woman is a disadvantage, a curse. It dates back to God punishing Eve through the pain of childbirth. He supposedly made the “female body” an unpleasant place to live in, and the idea that we have less access to sexual pleasure perpetuates that notion. From normalizing painful sex and painful periods to lamenting the “elusive female orgasm,” we learn that men’s bodies work for them while ours work against us. We learn that they’re built for pleasure while we’re built for pain. And when we learn we’re built for less pleasure and more pain, we come to accept lives where we experience less pleasure and more pain. Being taught you were born unequal on a physical level instills a deep-seated inferiority complex.

Spreading a false statistic about women as a group reflects and perpetuates the idea that women are poorly built — and that intercourse is the most valid type of “sex.” It also reflects and perpetuates the notion that female masturbation is threatening — hence the constant omission of that four-minute figure.

Consider this parallel: The clitoris is frequently omitted from medical textbooks. Scottie Hale Buehler, CPM, MA, a PhD Candidate in UCLA’s Department of History who studies this very phenomenon, tells me: “The clitoris embodies many misogynistic fears about sexual pleasure: that penetration and penises may not even be necessary for orgasm.” When asked whether the erasure of female masturbation statistics could reflect the same fears, Buehler told me, “I think your hypothesis sounds convincing,” adding that heteronormativity also likely plays a role.

So, perhaps it’s threatening for men to know that women’s own hands are far better at getting them off than a penis. As psychologist Manfred F. DeMartino wrote in the 1974 book Sex and the Intelligent Women:

“As more women become liberated sexually and thus more confident, aggressive, and demanding in their heterosexual relationships, and because of their ability to reach several orgasms in a short time interval, men may well experience a greater sense of threat with respect to their feelings of virility and masculinity — they may find it increasingly difficult to sexually satisfy women. Past and current research clearly indicate that the majority of women in our society are able to attain an orgasm much easier and faster from clitoral self-manipulation than from sexual intercourse.”

That said, I don’t believe that those who cite the 20-minute statistic are driven by misogyny or fear of the clit. They’re just trying to convince women’s partners to spend some goddamn time on them for once. They want to close the orgasm gap. We share that mission.

But achieving orgasm equality is not empowering if it’s framed as a way of overcoming cis women’s shitty biology. In that case, it’s only feeding the idea that women are inherently defective. Claiming that women need toys or vaginal treatments or extra time to gain equality implies that they’re innately unequal. True orgasm equality means abolishing this hierarchical thinking altogether.

Think about it: We’ve relegated the activities that give most women orgasms to “foreplay,” mere preparation for the main event that produces male orgasms. We need to adjust our definition of “sex” to accommodate women’s bodies, not judge women’s bodies based on a patriarchal definition of “sex.”

All we really need is more respect for the vulva and more accurate information about how it really works. Because, trust us: Contrary to popular belief, it works just fine.

But while this is biological fact, there’s something about mixing sexual pleasure with birth that seems to rub people the wrong way. The same can be said about intercourse during pregnancy, which can be awkward due to both physical and emotional logistics.

What is it about childbearing that seems to necessitate de-sexualization? There are, of course, the physical and emotional realities of pregnancy and new motherhood that often change dynamics and interest in sexual relationships.

But need they?

It may well be that for some, pregnancy and sexuality can complement one another beautifully. When one considers anatomy, and the reliable presence of the immovable clitoris, sexual pleasure becomes a possibility not just throughout pregnancy but also during childbirth. If it seems counterintuitive, ask yourself why. Anatomically speaking, it shouldn’t exactly be shocking that women have experienced orgasms while giving birth. The head of a baby passing through the birth canal is likely to bump against the clitoris more directly than anything ever has before, given the angle. There may even be a palliative effect to this contact; studies that sought to prove the existence of the vaginal orgasm found that the pressure of the baby’s descending head through the vagina may have pain suppression qualities due to its proximity to the clitoris, whether it’s experienced as sexual or not.

But given that many women labor and deliver babies in spaces that afford them very little privacy, and they are overwhelmed by feelings of shame if they so much as defecate on the bed, it’s not surprising that these fleeting moments of conflicting sensations are stifled. Perhaps even more so if they do provide relief from pain.

There are certainly people who have sex throughout pregnancy, as well as others who have embraced the art of the “orgasmic birth.” But popular culture still seems to be unaware of the phenomenon. Even though many contemporary writers and filmmakers have set out to talk to mothers about the experience, it’s still referred to as women’s “best-kept secret.” However, it’s hardly a new concept. Ina May Gaskin, the pioneering midwife whose book Spiritual Midwifery is regarded as a seminal text on the topic, has written extensively about the phenomenon of sexuality in pregnancy, including orgasmic births, since the 1970s.

So maybe this “secret” is one being kept out of shame. Many doulas, including Gaskin, argue that orgasmic birth is possible for anyone, and that it comes down to creating the right environment, both internally and externally, to facilitate the experience. A woman in England recently made headlines when she admitted that not only had she orgasmed during the births of all four of her children, but that the most recent one left her with orgasmic sensations for three weeks, postpartum. She said hypnobirthing, a technique that employs self-hypnosis to control pain, allowed her to fully experience the more pleasurable aspects of labor and delivery.

Many women, however, balk at the idea and wonder why anyone would even be thinking about sexual pleasure while giving birth — if not due to the inherent conflict of sexuality and motherhood, then due to the often grueling nature of childbirth itself.

“I was in excruciating pain for 12 hours, sex never crossed my mind,” said a 37-year-old mother of one in a response to an anonymous questionnaire. She added, “I didn’t feel comfortable with my body during the whole pregnancy.” This is a sentiment echoed by many who responded to this online survey, administered through Typeform, which asked participants about age, number of pregnancies, and their sexual preferences and behaviors during pregnancy, which can often be a taboo topic.

“I hated it, to be honest,” said one 26-year-old mother of one. “I felt like my body wasn’t my own and experienced dysphoria so crippling that I dissociated and still don’t remember 90% of my pregnancy that led to me giving birth.”

“I felt physically, mentally, and emotionally impaired,” said a 36-year-old mother of one, who reported that for her the changes weren’t just physical, but emotional. “I imagined I would be active and glowing, but I couldn’t think clearly, I was too exhausted to accomplish anything, and I felt like my brain was underwater all the time.”

But some wrote that they actually felt great throughout their pregnancies, maybe even better than before. “I loved my body during pregnancy more than I usually do,” said a 26-year-old mother of two. For some, pregnancy can feel pretty good overall due to an elevated dose of progesterone, a hormone that’s produced in smaller amounts throughout the menstrual cycle, but skyrockets during pregnancy, bringing along all its PMS symptom-reducing benefits.

Of course, how one feels physically paired with how they feel about themselves emotionally certainly can have an impact on sexuality. Many women who responded to the questionnaire said that they had sexual intercourse throughout their pregnancies, and one woman, a 27-year-old mother of two, said her second labor started directly after intercourse (à la Rachel in that episode of Friends). While sex drives waxed and waned for many, those physical changes of pregnancy definitely impacted whether sex was going to happen. As that 27-year-old mom put it rather succinctly, she felt, “Sometimes drained, sometimes really horny.”

This begs the question of masturbation. Some women have discovered that even if their partner is unavailable, or unwilling, to participate in sexual activity throughout pregnancy, solo sex can provide a temporary reprieve from the discomfort. Masturbation can also be used as a form of relief during labor and delivery. Angela Gallo made headlines earlier this year when she penned a blog post explaining why she masturbated throughout labor. And why not? As Gallo pointed out, masturbation not only provides a flush of feel-good sensations, it also directs focus to the vagina, where all the action is. In the same vein as self-hypnosis, anything that can redirect the focus from the chaos of childbirth, whether it be external or internal, to the center itself seems like an incredibly useful technique, even if it might freak some people out.

It’s also one that is probably far more innate than we realize. Some studies have found that the neurobiology of pain and pleasure are remarkably similar, and much of this relates to motivation. The motivation to pursue pleasure versus the motivation to avoid pain can be at odds but often overlap, and the hierarchy will change, given the circumstance. Sometimes, in order to survive, the avoidance of pain will outrank the pursuit of pleasure. But sometimes, in the face of pain, the analgesic effect of pleasure can be worth the risk.

Viewed in the context of labor and delivery, which is a well-known painful but temporary experience, it doesn’t seem so outlandish for that pleasure center of the brain to be stimulated in multiple ways, not just with medications or anesthetics. While these pain-relieving tactics, like epidurals, are relatively commonplace in hospital births, they don’t always appeal to every patient, and they may not work for every birth. Neither, of course, would masturbation during labor be appealing or possible for everyone, but unlike epidurals, which are just part of the childbirth lexicon now, many probably don’t even realize they have the option.

When asked if they would consider using masturbation or intercourse as a pain relief technique during labor, one 17-year-old respondent said, “I’m giving birth in a few weeks, but honestly, it’d be too weird for me to masturbate or have sex during labor. I’d only masturbate if I knew the orgasm would help ease my pain.” The majority of the respondents said they would not masturbate, even if they were given the privacy to do so.

While many found the question jarring, one mother seemed to get to the root of the resistance. “I feel that most people tend to compartmentalize their bodies’ many functions, but I feel comfortable that we are sexual beings at the same time that we are mothering/fathering/feeding/caring/washing/needing beings,” she wrote, adding that while she and her partner didn’t engage in intercourse throughout her pregnancy or delivery, she would hardly begrudge anyone who wanted to give it a try. “For couples who are more open and comfortable, I think it’s great.”

The orbiting questions of sexual morality, shame, biology, social mores, and purpose continue to define the experience of childbirth, whether it be orgasmic or not. But wouldn’t it be marvelous if, one day, a woman could define the experience for herself?

By Anna Pulley

Nothing perplexes people quite like the combined topics of women and pornography. Do ladies love porn or hate it? Do they hate it but still watch it? What kind of woman gets into porn? What kind of woman gets off to it? Can Fifty Shades of Grey be blamed? Or Sasha Grey? Porn has been a hot-button issue for years now, but what do we actually know about the roles, consumption and viewing habits of women? Once you get past the heated rhetoric and moralizing, it turns out we know a lot.

10. Women Watch Porn…

This should be a resounding “doye,” or if you’re feeling emphatic, “Doyes ‘R’ Us” or “Doye Story III.” Some women have been consuming and enjoying porn for a long time. And not just a fringe minority. One in three adults browsing Internet porn sites are women, according to Nielsen ratings. In 2007, almost 13 million were watching porn on a monthly basis. Despite this, the myth persists that all women hate porn (and certainly many do). But their Internet habits tell another story.

9. They Just Don’t Like to Pay for It

According to the neuroscientists who wrote A Billion Wicked Thoughts,women do not often pay for porn. Authors Ogas and Gaddam write: “According to CCBill, the billing service most commonly used by the online adult industry, only 2 percent of all subscriptions to pornography sites are made on credit cards with women’s names. In fact, CCBill even flags female names as potential fraud, since so many of these charges result in an angry wife or mother demanding a refund for the misuse of her card.”

8. Porn Origins

Porn has been around since the Paleolithic period, and yes, it was conducted on cave walls. In addition to woolly mammoths, engraved images of nude women and crude vulvas (think Pac-Man meets ice cream cone), and doggy-style drawings exist as early as 10,000 BCE. Granted, some of them look like they’ve been drawn by sexually precocious first-graders, but hey, we can’t all be Vincent van Ho.

7. Porn Stars Have Higher Self-Esteem Than You

The stereotype that all female porn stars are damaged goods, come from backgrounds of abuse, and have poor self-images is finally being put to bed. According to findings in the Journal of Sex Research, porn stars have higher self-esteem, are more spiritual, and feel better about their bodies than women not in the adult industry. The study also found that porn stars were far more likely to identify as bisexual (67 percent, compared to the match group’s 7 percent), that they had sex at an earlier age (15, compared to the match group’s 17), had more sexual partners (on average, a porn star has more sex partners in one year than a non-porn star has in her lifetime, and this doesn’t include their work partners), enjoyed sex more, and were more concerned about contracting STDs.

6. The Average American Female Porn Star Looks Like…

Picture a porn star in your mind. What do you see? Blonde? Triple-D rack? Stilettos, tans and talons that would make most lesbians recoil in terror? According to writer and researcher Jon Millward’s study of 10,000 actors in the Internet Adult Film Database, your average porn star has brown hair, is from California, has a 34B cup, is 5’5″ and is probably named Nikki Lee. The stereotype of the busty blonde bombshell turns out to be just that, a stereotype.

5. The Most Popular Female Roles in Porn

Millward’s study also looked at the most common female roles in porn and found that “teen” won by a landslide; the word appeared in 1,966 titles. Curiously, “MILF” came in second, with 954 titles. (If you haven’t seen How I Banged Your Mother 6, you simply must!) This seems like a curious age gap — women in porn are desirable as teenagers and then not again until motherhood? — until you realize that “fuckable moms” in porn are on average 33 years old, and many are far younger. The third most common role in porn is “wife” at 499 titles, which would be sweet except that every film title that had “wife” was actually about the concept of fucking someone else’s spouse.

Authors from A Billion Wicked Thoughts came to similar conclusions. They analyzed a year’s worth of terms entered into search engine aggregators, and found that, of the searches that were sexual, the term “youth” was №1, “MILF” was №3. and “cheating wives” was №5.

4. What Kind of Porn Women Like

You’ve no doubt heard the expression “different strokes for different folks,” and this applies to the porn-watching habits of women, which are just as diverse as the habits of men (except when it comes to teen MILF wifes, obviously). But as with anything, some trends have emerged. If you’re trying to get your ladyfriend to watch porn with you, you should avoid cum shots above the neck, overt fakeness (women tend to like porn that looks/feels “real”), porn with no storyline (though please, no more Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Bone), and porn with no foreplay. While softer images, lighting and music are a theme, this isn’t to say women can’t get down with more hardcore action. According to sex columnist Violet Blue, female director Candida Royalle’s hard-core erotic videos, which are made for women viewers, sell at the rate of approximately 10,000 copies a month.

3. Female Porn Stars Outearn Male Peers

Porn is one of the few professions where women make more money than men do. “While female performers often earn between $600 and $1,000 for a scene, men are usually only paid less than $150 for a scene,” according to All Time 10s, and The Guardian. Take that, wage gap! Way to stick it to the man…by sticking it in yourself.

2. Women Get Aroused by … Everything

A 2008 study by Meredith Chivers, detailed in the New York Times, found that straight women showed signs of physical arousal when shown images of just about everything — masturbation, straight sex, girl-on-girl action, guy-on-guy action, and even footage of bonobo chimps mating. What didn’t turn them on, you ask? Pictures of naked men. However, even though women showed strong signs of arousal, there was a marked disconnect between what was happening to their bodies and what was happening in their brains. Meaning they were turned on, but didn’t know it.

1. Don’t Know What Porn to Watch? Ask Oprah

Porn makers and distributors are tuning into the fact that women are getting on the porn bandwagon. Nothing speaks truer to the mainstreaming of porn than the fact that Oprah Winfrey has porn recommendations, filtered through the wisdom of Violet Blue. She recommends sites like SugarDVD.com and GreenCine.com, Comstock Films’ Real People, Real Life, Real Sex Series (which focus on an actual couple), vintage erotica, and one Jenna Jameson flick with her husband for good measure. There’s no word on whether the recommendations will continue, but I think we can all agree that’d be a club we could get behind.

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This story originally appeared at Alternet.

Lead Image: flickr / Yuliya Libkina