The state of Mississippi may be fiercely legislating against LGBT rights, but, boy, does it love its gay porn.
According to a Pornhub Insights data analysis exclusively shared with the Daily Dot, the state drives the fourth-highest traffic to Pornhub’s gay content. Genre most frequently sought after by Mississippi gay porn fans? Porn featuring black guys engaging in hot man-on-man action.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, North Carolina is also on the list of the top states driving traffic to black gay porn. Both North Carolina and Mississippi have dominated headlines recently with laws that attempt to roll back LGBT rights and impose mandates (like the so-called “bathroom bill” H.B. 2) forcing transgender people to use restrooms that correspond to their opposite gender, and both states are currently battling lawsuits from the likes of the federal government and the ACLU.
But who cares about a little legal action when you can spend a hot Southern evening scanning Pornhub for black studs gang-banging each other?
And the overall data analysis presented by Pornhub—gathered from billions of hits and search terms from its range of porn tube sites—reveals that, yes, the vast majority of traffic to gay porn content is driven by the Deep South.
While D.C. and New York did represent the largest amount of traffic to gay porn, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana were close behind. Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Arizona were among the highest-viewing gay porn states. Kansas, Nevada, Massachusetts, and California rounded out the top states as well.
The least likely to view gay porn? North Dakota, followed by Montana, South Dakota, and Idaho. But while lower-traffic states may not have watched very much gay porn, users watched some pretty kinky stuff when they finally did get into the gay genre.
Among top categories relative to other states, Montana’s fave was “creampie,” which was also Alaska’s top preference. [Editor’s note: No, we aren’t going to tell you what a creampie is. You’ll have to google that yourself.] North Dakota and South Dakota may not watch gay porn with the frequency of southern states, but when they do, they search for “twink” and “fetish,” respectively.
Relative categories are one thing, but two categories won out on a national level in terms of sheer overall numbers. While “black” was the most-viewed category across the Deep South, states with more liberal LGBT policies (among them California, Vermont, New Hampshire, Washington, and Massachusetts) tended to seek release with “straight guys.” The grass is always greener, it seems, on the other side.
One disturbing trend Pornhub Insights discovered was the popularity of “bareback” porn (in which actors do not wear condoms). The bareback category was the highest-searched term in Washington, Nevada, and New Mexico—worrisome, considering Washington’s and Nevada’s high rates of HIV transmission among men who sleep with men.
Men aren’t the only ones consuming gay porn, though. In a fascinating twist, Pornhub Insights discovered that a whopping 37 percent of gay male porn viewers are women. As part of the Pornhub-Cosmopolitan collaboration Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, the data team discovered that their female viewers preferred lesbian porn and gay male porn to anything else.
Depending on the age group, tastes regarding gay porn change. Women aged 18–24 were 83 percent more likely than men to watch gay male content on Pornhub. But as men get older, they appear to loosen up—the proportion of female to male viewers decreased with each increase in age.
Both men and women seemed to favor older guys: The search term “daddy” was used more often than its counterpart “twink.”
When it comes down to state-by-state details, though, Pornhub users like to keep their gay porn local. According to data showing the most popular relative search terms (which reveal what users’ more specific and personal interests are, compared to what’s popular among Pornhub’s existing categories), a lot of gay porn consumers are into hot homegrown guys.
In Alaska, the top relative search term was simply “Alaska.” In Hawaii, “Asian” was a clear favorite, and states with large Mexican populations such as Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, sought out the company of “cholos.” West Virginians and Kentucky residents wanted to get down-and-dirty with “rednecks,” and the cowboy-laded states of Montana and Oklahoma unsurprisingly searched for “cowboy.”
But when it comes to brand consistency, nothing beats the Deep South. Not only did former Confederate states like Mississippi and North Carolina show a sweeping preference for the black category, they backed it up with one exceedingly popular search term: “big black dick.”
