[Results][Casual] How do you hold your phone while watching porn? (18+)
Results for: https://www.reddit.com/r/SampleSize/s/rnIwYBMwIy
How Do You Hold Your Phone While Watching Porn? (18+): 419 Responses
419 people told us which way they turn the phone, which hand holds it, which finger does the scrubbing, and what shape of video they watch. Here's what came back.
Who Answered
| Count | Share |
|---|---|
| Men | 282 |
| Women | 88 |
| Non-binary | 38 |
| Unstated or other | 11 |
| Born | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 00s | 187 | 45% |
| 90s | 183 | 44% |
| 80s | 36 | 9% |
| 70s or earlier | 8 | 2% |
| Unstated | 5 | 1% |
Phones split almost evenly: Android 199 (48%), iPhone 188 (45%), unstated 29 (7%).
The Headlines
- 55% watch in portrait, 45% landscape
- 56% hold the phone in the left hand, 35% right
- 73% scrub with the thumb alone
- 79% scrub with the same hand that's holding the phone
- 60% rest the phone against the palm, the other 40% hold it in their fingertips
- 9% bring the chest into it
- Android and iPhone users answered every question the same way
Orientation
| Count | Share |
|---|---|
| Portrait | 230 |
| Landscape | 189 |
Roughly even, with a slight lean to portrait.
Which Hand Holds the Phone
| Count | Share |
|---|---|
| Left | 236 |
| Right | 145 |
| Other | 16 |
| Prop or no hands | 12 |
| Both | 10 |
Left hand wins by a comfortable margin. Most people are right-handed, so the phone tends to go in the spare hand.
That 56% doesn't mean the right hand is idle, though. Plenty of people hold the phone in the left hand and then reach across with the right to scrub. Counting which hands touch the phone at all, for holding and scrubbing combined:
| Share |
|---|
| Left hand only |
| Right hand only |
| Both hands |
So a genuinely free right hand is only slightly more common than a free left one, and more than a quarter of people use both.
Which Finger Scrubs
| Count | Share |
|---|---|
| Thumb only | 306 |
| Index only | 59 |
| Thumb and index | 45 |
| Other or mixed | 9 |
The thumb dominates. Worth noting it dominates much harder in portrait than in landscape, see below.
One thing the survey didn't ask: whether people change their grip to scrub. It treats the hold and the scrub as one fixed arrangement, when plenty of people probably shift the phone, reach, and shift back. So these answers are best read as the finger people scrub with, not proof that they're holding the phone the same way while they do it.
Portrait vs Landscape
| Portrait (n=230) | Landscape (n=189) |
|---|---|
| Same hand holds and scrubs | 88.1% |
| Rests against the palm | 67.4% |
| Scrubs with thumb only | 82.6% |
| Scrubs with index finger only | 8.3% |
Partly this is just geometry. A sideways phone is too wide to wrap in one hand and the thumb can't reach the middle of the screen. Still, it's a clean split: portrait is a one-handed hold, landscape mostly isn't.
Same caveat as above applies to the first row. Anyone who re-grips to scrub and then settles back would show up here as one-handed, so treat 88.1% as the ceiling rather than the number.
What People Watch vs How They Hold It
| Content actually watched | Held Landscape | Held Portrait |
|---|---|---|
| Landscape-shaped videos (n=154) | 72.7% | 27.3% |
| Mixture (n=174) | 35.6% | 64.4% |
| Portrait-shaped videos (n=69) | 8.7% | 91.3% |
Lopsided. Portrait watchers almost always hold the phone to match, at 91.3%. Landscape watchers often don't, and 27.3% hold the phone upright anyway, letterboxing the video into a strip.
Those 42 people are more one-handed than the widescreen watchers who do turn the phone:
| Landscape-content watchers | Hold portrait anyway (n=42) | Hold landscape (n=112) |
|---|---|---|
| Same hand holds and scrubs | 81.1% | 67.8% |
| Scrubs with thumb only | 78.6% | 58.9% |
| Rests against the palm | 73.8% | 49.1% |
Looks like a free hand is worth more to them than a bigger picture.
By Gender
Orientation
| Landscape | Portrait | % Portrait |
|---|---|---|
| Man (n=282) | 146 | 136 |
| Woman (n=88) | 26 | 62 |
| Non-binary (n=38) | 12 | 26 |
Men are a coin flip. Women and non-binary respondents lean portrait by about two to one. It isn't the content, since all three groups report near-identical viewing mixes (16.7% mostly-portrait among men, 18.2% among women, 15.8% among non-binary respondents).
The gap is widest among people watching widescreen video, where the share holding the phone upright regardless is:
| Holds portrait anyway |
|---|
| Men (n=105) |
| Women (n=30) |
| Non-binary (n=16) |
Which Hand
| Left | Right | Both | Prop | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Man (n=282) | 61.0% | 31.6% | 1.8% | 2.5% |
| Woman (n=88) | 47.7% | 37.5% | 2.3% | 4.5% |
| Non-binary (n=38) | 47.4% | 47.4% | 5.3% | 0.0% |
Men skew left hardest. Non-binary respondents are an exact tie.
Which Finger
| Thumb only | Index only | Both |
|---|---|---|
| Man (n=282) | 72.0% | 14.9% |
| Woman (n=88) | 73.9% | 12.5% |
| Non-binary (n=38) | 73.7% | 15.8% |
No real difference here.
The Chest
| Mentions chest |
|---|
| Man (n=282) |
| Woman (n=88) |
| Non-binary (n=38) |
39 people bring the chest into it, 10 of them balancing the phone there with no hands at all. It's mostly a portrait thing, 29 of the 39 mentions.
By Age
| Portrait | Left hand | Thumb only | Uses palm |
|---|---|---|---|
| Born 80s (n=36) | 41.7% | 55.6% | 80.6% |
| Born 90s (n=183) | 56.8% | 55.2% | 72.1% |
| Born 00s (n=187) | 56.1% | 58.3% | 74.3% |
Mostly flat. The 80s group leans landscape, but it's also 89% men, and men lean landscape anyway. Looking at men alone:
| Born 80s | Born 90s | Born 00s |
|---|---|---|
| Men, % portrait | 40.6% (n=32) | 47.4% (n=114) |
| Women, % portrait | 66.7% (n=3) | 72.9% (n=48) |
Younger men drift toward portrait. Women are portrait-first at every age. The 80s women figure is 3 people, so ignore it.
Most Common Grips
Among the 250 people who described three or more points of contact, the grips cluster into a few shapes:
| Grip | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Full wrap: palm and all five digits | 75 | 30% |
| Palm and four fingers, thumb free | 33 | 13% |
| Four fingers, no palm or thumb | 26 | 10% |
| Four fingers and thumb, no palm | 15 | 6% |
| Thumb, index and middle | 14 | 6% |
| Palm, pinky and thumb | 13 | 5% |
| Everything else (26 other combinations) | 74 | 30% |
The full wrap is the single most common, but the striking thing is the spread: 32 distinct combinations across 250 people, and no grip used by even a third of them.
Note the thumb is doing double duty in this table. People who leave it out of the grip scrub with it 94% of the time, against 75% for people who grip with it. That's mostly bookkeeping rather than a finding, since the thumb is either holding the phone or working the screen.
Caveats and Open Questions
Tick counts aren't grip strength. The grip question was a grid of checkboxes, left and right, palm plus five fingers each. 28 people ticked no hand boxes at all, 94 ticked exactly one, and 6 ticked eight or more. Tick counts also climb the younger respondents get, which is probably about how thoroughly people fill in checkbox grids rather than anything about grip.
The chest number is an artifact of the options. Chest was the only body part offered as a checkbox, and 39 people ticked it. Leg, thigh, ribcage and arm all had to be typed in by hand, and got one mention each. So the 9% may be measuring "used a body part" with chest as the only available box, rather than the chest specifically. Offer thigh and stomach as options and the picture would likely spread out.
Nobody was asked what position they were in. Lying down, sitting up and standing are three completely different problems for a hand, and the chest answers suggest a fair number of people are horizontal. Posture is probably the biggest single thing driving orientation and grip, and it isn't in the data at all.
Handedness wasn't asked. The reading that the phone goes in the spare hand rests entirely on assuming most respondents are right-handed. Roughly one in ten people aren't, and there's no way to identify them here.
Neither was phone size. A Pro Max and a Mini are different objects to hold one-handed. We asked which brand people use, which turned out to predict nothing, when screen size would plausibly predict quite a lot about palms and full wraps.
Nobody was asked what the other hand was doing. It seemed safe to assume.
"Typically" is doing a lot of work. Every question asked what people usually do. Nothing captures how much any individual varies between sessions, positions or videos, which for a lot of people is probably the honest answer.