We commissioned Pollfish to ask hundreds of women a set of frank questions about masturbation, sex education, erotic content and how well they actually understand their own bodies. The results, published in full below, are the data behind our Pleasure Gap report. Some of it confirmed what we already suspected. A lot of it didn’t.
44.5% of women have never discussed masturbation openly with a friend. Not once. Not with a best friend, a sister, a partner’s friend, a group chat. Never.
That’s the number that stopped us in our tracks when the data came back. Because 62.5% of the women we surveyed masturbate at least a few times a month – 1.5% daily, 29.5% a few times a week, 31.5% a few times a month – and yet nearly half of all women in the survey have never said a word about it to another woman.
The silence isn’t a function of behaviour. Women are doing it. They’re just not talking about it.
77.5% of women say sex education did not adequately cover female pleasure when they were growing up. Only 22.5% felt it did.
This is the single most consistent finding in the survey, and the one that probably explains the most. If three in four women left school without ever being taught what their own pleasure looks like, the downstream effects – the silence, the shame, the orgasm gap, the partner-communication issues – start to look less like individual failings and more like a systemic outcome.
We asked women whether they feel they have a good understanding of what brings them to orgasm:
Pause on those last two for a moment. Nine percent of women – close to one in ten – say they don’t really understand what brings them to orgasm. Combined with the 42% who only “somewhat” understand, that’s more than half of women navigating their own sex lives without a clear sense of what works for their own body. The link to sex education is hard to miss.
We asked women how much they agreed with the statement “Masturbation is shameful and / or wrong.”
The headline reading is reassuring: a clear majority of women push back on the idea that masturbation is shameful. But the more interesting number is the 29.5% who sit on the fence.
Outright shame is easier to identify and easier to push back against. Ambivalence – the vague sense that something might not be quite right without being sure why – is what keeps the conversation stuck. It’s also, notably, the exact emotional residue you’d expect from a sex education that simply didn’t cover the topic at all. You can’t actively endorse something you were never given the language for.
We asked women which types of erotic or sexual content they had previously consumed (respondents could select multiple):
Two things stand out here.
The first is that written erotica is closer to video than most people would guess. The cultural assumption is that porn dominates and everything else is niche. The data says otherwise: half of women have read erotic fiction. Written erotica is not a fringe format; it’s mainstream consumption that mainstream conversations ignore.
The second is audio. At 19%, audio is the youngest format on this list – Quinn launched in 2019, Dipsea in 2018 – and it has already reached almost one in five women. That’s a fast adoption curve for a category that didn’t meaningfully exist a decade ago.
The 21% who consume nothing at all is the other number worth sitting with. It’s not small. One in five women have never engaged with any form of erotic content. Whether that’s by choice, by access or by the absence of anything that felt like it was made for them is a question this survey can’t answer – but it’s a question worth asking.
For the full picture on frequency:
87.5% of women masturbate at least sometimes. 12.5% never do. The “never” group is roughly the same size as the group that thinks masturbation is shameful (13% combined strongly + somewhat agree), which is suggestive but not conclusive — we didn’t cross-tabulate the two questions in this wave.
The cleanest read of the data is that the problem isn’t behaviour. Women are masturbating. They’re consuming erotic content. They’re doing the things the cultural conversation suggests they’re not.
What they’re not doing is talking about it – and a lot of them haven’t been given the foundational knowledge to understand what they’re doing or why. Sex education didn’t cover it. Friends don’t discuss it. Half of women are working out their own bodies without a reliable map.
That’s the gap. Not a pleasure gap exactly. A knowledge and conversation gap that produces a pleasure deficit downstream.
Methodology
Survey conducted by Pollfish on behalf of Erobella / Lust in 2026. Sample: 200 women. Fielding method: Pollfish mobile and web panel. All percentages above are drawn directly from the raw survey results. Pollfish is an established consumer research platform used by Fortune 500 brands, academic researchers and major media outlets.
