Is Porn Really ‘Cheating’ for Gen Z Women?

Introducing Fair Play, a column exploring the shifting dynamics of sex, dating and culture by Playboy Senior Editor Magdalene Taylor.

If you’re reading this, you have seen pornography at least once in your life. It can probably be assumed that every adult with Internet access has. And if you’re a young guy, it can probably also be assumed that you have not only seen pornography, but done so recently. At least, that’s what everyone is thinking. 

And yet, despite its ubiquity, it remains a matter of contention — especially for the men and women of Gen Z, who are navigating entirely different attitudes towards pornography and its place in a relationship.

This was evident a few weeks back, when a clip from Cut’s “Breakup Game” series went viral on both TikTok and X. In the clip, a young woman asks her boyfriend whether he watches pornography, and is shocked when he answers “yes.” She is even more disgusted to hear that he has watched porn within the last few weeks. He, however, seems entirely surprised by her response himself. It’s as though they both had made concrete assumptions about porn’s role in their shared lives without having ever spoken about it: he assumed she knew he occasionally watched porn, and she assumed he never watched porn at all. On the two platforms where the clip was shared, the response was similarly polarized—some women said they’d break up with a man over porn, while others thought the girl in the video was overreacting. 

This compounds the ongoing discourse about Gen Z’s devolving relationship with sex in general. They’re having less of it, they’re being dubbed “puriteens,” they’re pushing back against porn consumption. But if you talk to young people IRL, the story is more nuanced than the discourse would have you believe.

“I personally don’t mind if guys watch porn, and I personally watch porn, so I wouldn’t really have an issue with it,” Bella, a 24-year-old photographer in NYC tells me. “But my sister, she’s 21, and she told me she hates porn and has a major issue with it., She says she finds it really degrading, and that if her boyfriend watches porn, it would make her spiral.” 

Bella tells me that plenty of guys tell her that they don’t watch porn, but she’s dubious. “A lot of guys that I’ve talked to say they don’t like porn, that it doesn’t do anything for them, but I don’t quite believe them.”

For her, porn has only really been a problem in a relationship when she and a partner also weren’t having much sex. She recalls living with one unemployed ex-boyfriend in the past who barely concealed his porn use, leaving tabs up on his computer for her to see. “I was weirded out by it, because he didn’t want to be intimate with me, but he was also watching porn,” she says. “It made me feel really self-conscious”

But for a lot of young women today, the concern isn’t strictly about porn’s potential impacts on intimacy: it’s a matter of politics. 

“I think it’s fair to say Gen Z’s relationship with pornography is clearly evolving,” Angie Rowntree, founder & director of Sssh.com, which bills itself as an ethical porn site. “Theirs is a generation shaped by the online experience and social media—and increasingly, the digital labor economy. Where porn is concerned, it’s not just that they grew up with unprecedented accessibility, but they also have a much greater willingness to engage with issues such as production ethics, and a desire for conversations on inter-related topics such as the impact of porn on body image. Many are vocal about wanting to ensure that the content they consume feels authentic and respectful.”

There is data to suggest that young women are watching porn relatively often, themselves. Per a 2020 study of 1,392 in the US, 60 percent of female respondents said they had watched porn in the last month, compared to 90 percent of men. In 2025, PornHub’s viewership was 38 percent women. Meanwhile, sales of erotic literature have more than doubled in recent years, with readers being predominantly women. 

“For many young women, the issue may not be erotic content itself, but whether the content reflects agency, consent, mutual pleasure, and respect,” says Rowntree. She says that this itself may be why women resonate so much with written content — here, there are no concerns about exploitation, even when these books or stories explore more taboo subjects.

Still, tension proliferates. In some cases, young couples seem to be avoiding the conversation entirely. As one 26-year-old guy told me, the extent to which he talks about porn with a woman he’s seeing depends entirely on the kind of sex they have “If a girl is open about her sexual pleasure and experience, I’d be more open to talking about porn with them, watching porn with them or even making a film with them,” he says.

For other guys, porn use isn’t a topic of conversation not out of avoidance, but because they just don’t quite think it needs to be elaborated upon. “I’m 27 and have been in a serious relationship for nine months,” one guy tells me. “I watch porn on occasion, a few times a month and have told my partner this. We haven’t spoken about the type, and only discussed it once in passing.” 

Sarah, a millennial in New York, is dating a man in his 20s. “The way he talks about porn is always negative, and it ranges between dismissive and outright hostile. We’ve been seeing each other for a few months, and the first time we ever brought it up was right after we had started having sex. He was telling me about friends that he had, and how he felt like they consumed too much pornography, and that immediately was very interesting to me.”

Like Bella, she was skeptical of his honesty. “I thought it was maybe like a weird virtue signaling kind of fakery that he was doing just to look a little bit more desirable or like a better person in the early stages of us seeing each other. I thought eventually this facade would end, but no, he’s maintained this sort of anti-porn stance,” she says. 

Meanwhile, the men she’s dated around her own age have held an entirely different attitude. She recalls one ex-boyfriend opening up his web browser on his phone to show her something while they were on public transit together, and seeing porn on his screen. “I went ‘ugh’ and he was like ‘If we’re going to start living together, you better get used to this,’” she says. “That’s what I just assumed they were all like.”