After it came out last week that porn actor Stormy Daniels had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006, the number of people searching for her on Pornhub jumped 375 percent. This statistic isn’t particularly surprising. People tend to conduct online searches for those who make front-page news. Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford) is a porn actor. Pornhub seems like the natural place to search for her online. Put those two facts together, and of course people flocked to Clifford’s porn videos in droves last weekend.
Perhaps more surprisingly, the same thing happens for celebrities who aren’t in the porn industry. When the most buzzed-about celebrities have a big news day, searches for them on Pornhub also tend to skyrocket, whether they actually have videos there or not.
On Feb. 1, 2017, Beyoncé took to Instagram to announce her pregnancy. On Feb. 2, searches for the pop culture icon on Pornhub increased by 83 percent.
Kim Kardashian turned 37 on Oct. 21, 2017. That same day, her Pornhub searches went up by 654 percent. (The selfie queen does have a leaked sex tape, but she is not an active porn actor.)
Feb. 20, 2017, was President’s Day. Guess whose Pornhub searches increased by 787 percent. Several months after that, the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, made the news for her gauche fashion choices and reusing parts of an old speech on a diplomatic trip to India. Those stories came out, for the most part, on Nov. 30, the same day her Pornhub searches climbed by 1,704 percent.
And last on Pornhub’s most-searched celebrities of 2017 list, with 45,669 searches (Kardashian is at the top with 22,744,478) is Kathy Griffin. Her searches peaked (up 8,580 percent) on May 31, the day CNN fired her for taking photographs with a disembodied head that looked an awful lot like that of Donald Trump.
You can find these statistics in Pornhub’s “2017 Year in Review,” a roundup created by the company to describe a year’s worth of international porn viewing. The range of statistics Pornhub provides — from the proportion of female viewers in different countries to how much less porn people watch during sports seasons — lets readers draw a number of far-reaching conclusions about the porn-viewing public. However, the lesson from the celebrity searches seems pretty straightforward. People are using Pornhub like it is any old search engine.
Pornhub has been publishing roundups like these for the past five years. Last year, the company learned that right after the presidential election, adult video searches for Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Tiffany Trump, Ivanka Trump and Hillary Clinton (in that order) all surged.
It’s not only celebrity news that inspires searches on the pornography platform. Popular “Adult Swim” cartoon “Rick and Morty” influenced Pornhub users’ searches in 2017. So did, of all things, fidget spinners. Mashable noticed this peculiar X-rated trend in May, prompting Pornhub’s statisticians to do some digging of their own. They found that searches for the device went from zero to 2.5 million over the course of the month.
For most folk, fidget spinners are decidedly unsexy. In an attempt to decipher this fad, therapist John Marchini, who specializes in “non-heteronormative sexuality” like kink and fetishes, cited “rule 34” as an explanation. Rule 34 says that for anything you can possibly imagine, there’s some corresponding pornography. You may encounter this rule when exploring the sexual proclivities of certain “brony” subgroups or learning that climacophilia is a thing. That rule pertains to exceptions, true oddities. The fact that 2.5 million people searched for fidget spinners on Pornhub in a single month begs a more thorough explanation.
May marked fidget spinners’ peak popularity. Like Pornhub users searching for Kardashian on her birthday, searches for the spinners peaked when the devices became top of mind for the public. Though schools began banning them as early as April, calling them classroom distractions, the bulk of news stories about the toy came out in early May, between the first and the ninth, just as fidget spinner Pornhub searches began to climb. There was a direct correlation between news media coverage and Pornhub searches for fidget spinners.
That doesn’t sound like rule 34. In fact, it almost sounds like supply and demand. Lots of people became interested in content surrounding a new, hot topic, so that’s what they got — including X-rated content. Or maybe the toy’s popularity gained so much momentum that it overflowed shops and the (baffled) news media, spilling into the realms of pornography, baking and sexy Halloween costumes.
Both the fidget spinner and celebrity Pornhub search surges baffled sex therapists and PhDs. Though the spinners proved more confounding, these human sexuality specialists didn’t have a ready answer for the celebrity search spikes, either.
After several false starts, Dr. Jason Greenberg, a psychologist and psychoanalyst who works with people experiencing “issues with sex,” including pornography, speculated that people who searched for celebrities on Pornhub at these times were those who “already associate online use with porn.”Greenberg struggled to find the correct word (“natural,” “instinctual”) before settling on “association” to describe the link between these stars appearing in the news and in people’s Pornhub search bars.
Other mental health professionals suggested that actors, politicians and musicians appearing in the news simply gave people the idea to search for them in porn. Searchers had perhaps exhausted their usual porn topics, and, upon seeing Beyoncé in all the headlines, thought, Hmm, I wonder if she has a sex tape. News media coverage simply reminds people which celebrities they’d like to see in the nude, or suggests new searches that offer an antidote to boredom. It’s possible that people searched for Trump on Pornhub because they find him physically appealing. Though boredom and/or curiosity, especially considering his sex life’s frequent appearance in the news, seems more likely. In this case, Pornhub could provide a supplementary, if not primary, source for news outlets’ findings. Did Russian sex workers really urinate on a bed while Donald Trump watched? Let’s check Pornhub and see.
“I think generally people have an extra interest in things that are going on in the news,” said Dr. Michael Aaron, a New York-based sex therapist and clinical sexologist, adding that celebrities have always been among porn sites’ top searches. He also pointed out Mr. Skin, a website where visitors can find a whole directory of TV and movie scenes where celebrities appear naked.
Aaron, however, was more interested in discussing fidget spinners. Where other professionals in his field gave a hearty shrug, he offered explanations.
First, it’s important to note that not all of Pornhub’s fidget spinner videos are porn. Some of the more imaginative ones are featuring masturbation and even fidget spinner butt plugs (available for sale on Etsy). But other videos are just fidget spinners . . . spinning. The more popular ones include voiceovers, in which the men and women spinning the toys simulate the words and noises that might take place during a human threesome. Instead of people, the footage features fidget spinners knocking into one another.
The particular video I’m thinking of lasted for one minute and 32 seconds (no, I did not watch all of it). It called itself a “fidget spinner bisexual threesome” and has around 129,000 views on Pornhub. That’s more views than many of the fidget spinner videos featuring actual sex, though the most-viewed of the fidget spinner variety got about 500,000.
If people purposefully searched Pornhub for these more innocent videos, Aaron said, that would mean people are “looking at Pornhub almost as a kind of YouTube replacement.” He suggested that although such people may have gone to Pornhub for masturbation, they then stayed “to see if there [was] interesting material related to this hot, new item called fidget spinners.” For these people, Pornhub is their “central” video search platform, where for others it might be YouTube or Dailymotion.
Besides its “2017 Year in Review,” Pornhub recently made the news thanks to the false missile alert in Hawaii. According to Pornhub’s data, for the roughly 30 minutes when Hawaiians though they were in imminent danger of nuclear annihilation, the site’s traffic “massively” declined. Then, when Hawaiians got word of the false alarm, Pornhub’s traffic surged 48 percent above “typical levels” for 9:01am on a Saturday.
Aaron chalked that up to people using Pornhub as “stress relief.”
Ultimately, people use Pornhub for more reasons than the business model intended. They use it to relieve both stress and curiosity, to search for oddities and to corroborate news stories. This sounds not unlike the way people use Google.
Other times, people use Pornhub to research stories for Salon. And then those people can never look at fidget spinners the same way ever again.
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