A doctor in Saudi Arabia has caused a social media storm by claiming that 92% of Saudi women watch porn.
Dr. Nizar Bahberi, the head of the Saudi Infectious Diseases Society in Jeddah, said in an interview with the Rotana Gulf channel that when he first began collecting data on the issue in 2014, he found that only 23% of Saudi women had seen at least one pornographic video in the past year.
“However, when I repeated the survey in 2019, the percentage reached 92% of respondents. They numbered 3,000 women,” he said.
“Therefore, in many pre-marital seminars I tell men that you can’t blame you wife who you recently married and ask her, ‘how do you know about these things?’ because access to this content is much easier than before,” the doctor added.
However, his comments caused outrage in the conservative Saudi kingdom, which has strict social and religious taboos against extra-marital sexual activity, with social media users even launching an Arabic-language hashtag against him – #Nizar_Bahberi_Insults_Saudi_Women.
In response the doctor tweeted that he had not intended any offence but was merely publishing results of research, and that access to pornography was much easier than before.
“More than 3,000 women answered the question, ‘have you seen a clip at least once in your life?’ and the answer was 92% yes. This doesn’t mean that it happens in all of society, this is a sample which follows my [social media] accounts and this means that [women watching porn] may happen,” Bahberi said. The Arab
