The second part of the European Observatory of Female Sexuality highlights the trivialization of solitary pleasure among French women in connection with increasingly wide access to mental arousal media such as online pornography, but also to objects of physical stimulation, sex toys.
- Despite this marked increase in masturbation in France, French women (56%) are, after Italians (49%), those who still indulge in it the least often, especially if we compare them to the British (65%) or the Spanish (70%).
According to a new Ifop survey for The Poken Company, the Covid-19 crisis has gone hand in hand with a notable increase in the number of regular masturbation enthusiasts (+ 15 points), at least if we judge by the number of French women who, at the time of the survey, said they had masturbated at least once in the last three months: 56% in March 2021, compared to 41% in June 2017.
And this trend is not specific to France… The number of women who have already indulged in this form of solitary pleasure at least once has increased in all European countries (+ 3 points on average, to 80%), including in countries such as the United Kingdom (+ 1 point, at 79%) or Germany (+ 1 point, at 83%). The tendency nevertheless remains a sort of “catching up” Latin countries in this area (+9 points in Italy, at 76%, +4 points in Spain, at 85%, +4 points in France, at 78%). “It is undoubtedly linked to a growing freedom from the normative discourses that traditionally weigh on onanism”, comment the pollsters.
More access to pornography
“This generalization of female auto-eroticism goes hand in hand with increasing access by European women to sexual arousal media such as pornographic videos that have been easily accessible on streaming sites for the past fifteen years”, they continue. Indeed, the proportion of female X video lovers has increased significantly both at European level (47%, +5 points since 2016) and at the level of France (50%, +7 points since 2016 ), knowing that this increase was also more pronounced in the Latin countries: Italy (+8 points, to 47%), France (+7 points, to 50%), Spain (+6 points, to 47% ).
“This development is undoubtedly due to an increasingly dematerialized access to pornography”, notes Ifop. Indeed, while the consumption of online pornography is slowly but surely spreading to all generations, physical media are increasingly neglected, particularly in France, where the number of women who have already seen an X movie on a television media (eg VOD, TV, DVD) fell sharply between 2016 (58%) and 2021 (42%). In the other countries, the trend is also – except in Germany – a fall in the consumption of pornography on television (-3 points in Italy, -5 points in Spain, -6 points in the United Kingdom).
More use of sextoys
“This trivialization of solitary pleasure is also to be linked to an increasingly wide access to objects of physical stimulation”, explains the pollster. Nearly one in two French people (46%) admit to having used a vibrator in their life, compared to just over one in three in 2012 (37%), 9% in 2007 and barely 7% in 1992. “The impact of the Covid-19 crisis on their appetite for sex toys must however be put into perspective in view of the limited increase in the number of amateurs observed in France between 2019 (43%) and 2021 (46% )”, analyze the pollsters. They add : “instead of noticing a “boom in sex toys” during the health crisis, we rather observe a slow and continuous diffusion of this type of object”.
Finally, just as other studies have shown in the past, European women living in societies marked by a certain egalitarian ethic in terms of morals are distinguished by a greater integration of sex toys in their sexual repertoire (61% in Germany , 60% in the UK). Conversely, in Latin countries marked by the influence of the Catholic Church, their use appears less frequent (eg 30% in Italy).
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