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Welcome to Fair Play, a column exploring the shifting dynamics of sex, dating and culture by Playboy Senior Editor Magdalene Taylor.
Porn has always influenced how people have sex, for better or worse. Over-the-top moaning, jackrabbit-style thrusting, contortionist-worthy positions — for many of us, these are things entirely learned from porn. It can serve as a source of inspiration, or as an unrealistic portrayal of what you “should” be doing in bed. In either case, we’re performing something we have previously seen on screen. But what about the kind of sex we have alone, by ourselves, with no audience to watch us act? Many of us, it turns out, are continuing the performance even then.
Last month, hookup app HUD and sex toy company Girls Get Off released their 2026 Pleasure Census, an anonymous survey of 2,183 people. While not entirely representative of the broader population—respondents were recruited by, well, a hookup app and sex toy company, and 68 percent were women—there are nevertheless some startling insights to glean. Chief among them is the fact that 44 percent of respondents said they’ve caught themselves “performing” while masturbating alone. Among Gen Z respondents, that number jumps to 54 percent.
“Even when completely alone, they think about how they look, how they sound, and even what they’re meant to feel,” the report explains. “Appearance pressure runs right through everything. Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z say concerns about how they look make sex and pleasure harder to enjoy, with women reporting these concerns at well over twice the rate men do.”
There’s an old school word for this: “spectatoring,” first coined by Masters and Johnson in 1970 to describe how people often view themselves in third person during sex. It isn’t immediately a bad thing, though. For some women, it’s actually what gets them off. As Katie, 29, tells me, her solo “performance” often manifests in her putting on lingerie just for herself. Sometimes she talks dirty to herself, too. “Something about the way I can perform hyper-femininity just helps get the job done. Also I think there’s a piece of it where I’m imagining what someone else would be seeing.”
“I have a mirror that takes up the wall in front of my bed, so I feel like even solo play kind of helps picture how the real thing would look or play out and what angles or positions I look good in,” Jessica, 26, tells me. She says some of the guys she dates enjoy dirty talking, something that she prefers to practice in order to feel confident and comfortable. “I sometimes find it a good opportunity to think through what I’d want to hear and how I could encourage that naturally,” she says of her time alone in front of the mirror. “I think a lot of what’s sexy about sex is the performance of being your hottest.”
But Jessica also admits that without some of that sense of performing, she would feel weirder about masturbation. “That’s kinda where shame or grossness factors into people’s psyche,” she says. Imagining it’s all for a partner acts as a barrier for Jessica, while Katie uses that whole dynamic as part of the appeal: “At this point in my life, I’m sure there are probably some toxic self-objectifying aspects of it when I’m doing it alone. but it also gets me off like crazy so what can I say,” she says.
Now obviously, with everyone conscious of these dynamics—or at least aware that there might be some subconscious anxieties at play—who’s to say any of it is a problem? After all, while we can talk all we want about self-love and enjoying our bodies for ourselves, most of us are indeed sexually oriented toward other people. It’s normal that we would want to feel sexy for them, and enjoy the idea that we are attractive from another person’s perspective even when we’re alone. But even so, is there some element of us that has become so wrapped up in the act of performing that we’ve sexualized it as a means of coping? Perhaps we have internalized an outside gaze to the point that it dictates our pleasure.
It ultimately isn’t just through sex that we’re performing, either. Young people are increasingly behaving as though they’re constantly on a livestream. Thanks to the chatroom components of streaming sites like Twitch, teenagers now often refer to whatever audience they’re addressing as “chat,” even in person. And thanks to the digital panopticon, we often feel as though we are being watched at all times, regardless. With more and more Flock cameras being installed nationwide, we probably actually are. But maybe on some levels, we enjoy the sense that we’re performing for an audience, be it during intimate moments or otherwise. In a way, performing alone can bring us closer to our own desires—so long as we’re comfortable enough with ourselves to confront them.
“For me, performing for someone else feels more guided by internal anxieties and societal pressures,” says Katie. “Performing for myself feels more fun, free, sensual—outside the bounds of what others may think or want.”
