University | 8:22 pm | December 16, 2012 | By Rosa Nguyen

Q Mag releases early findings from porn survey

Two weeks after its online debut, the preliminary results of Yale’s most comprehensive porn survey have been exposed.

From Victorian-era role-playing to tentacle porn, over 1,000 Yalies anonymously revealed their sexual fantasies last month in a survey conducted by Q Magazine, the University’s LGBT publication. The survey, which analyzed student attitudes toward pornography, has yielded a range of unexpected outcomes, particularly regarding differences between ethical values, real-life sexual preferences and pornographic fantasies.

“Tons of people who identify as straight women say they almost always watch lesbian porn made for men, and plenty of lesbians surveyed watch gay male porn,” said Rachel Lipstein ’14, managing editor of Q Magazine. Although 57 percent of participants claimed their pornographic preferences coincided with their moral and political values, 23 percent said their porn preferences violated their beliefs, and another 20 percent were unsure or ambivalent.

Intended to be representative of Yale College, the survey appealed to a varied demographic. Of the Yalies who contributed to the survey, 52 percent were male and 47 percent were female, while 16 students selected the “genderqueer” option and seven selected “other.” Twenty-five percent of participants have never watched porn, while 39 percent said they stream explicit footage onto their laptops multiple times a week, according to survey results.

Amateur pornography ranks as the most popular genre among Yalies, with nearly 90 percent of the vote. However, between 10 and 20 percent of porn-watching students have chosen alternate categories, including two participants who professed a mutual fetish for “tentacle porn.”

“We’re interested in understanding [this data],” Lipstein said. “A mere survey won’t allow us to get into the psychology or nuance of the phenomenon, but it will let us gauge its prevalence and demographic.”

The remaining results of the survey will be released in the next issue of Q Magazine in January 2013.

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