In what amounts to either a breathtaking breach of privacy or one of the most fascinating sex research artifacts of the year, PornMD (acceptably SFW as long as you don’t search), a porn search engine, has broken down porn searches by country and U.S. state. The system offers a fairly complete view into the fapping habits of people worldwide and suggests that while the people of Minnesota are into “college,” the folks in Idaho are really down with “milf.”
California, not surprisingly, is into “asian” “massage.” Education-minded New York, on the other hand, likes “college.”
The top search terms from more conservative countries, however, shows a poignancy that isn’t often found in data gathered by porn search engines. Users in Iran are mostly looking for presumably illicit gay porn while many Middle Eastern and African countries try for “military” and “hijab” searches. Oddly, Europeans usually search for their own countries first (except for Finland where they like “czech.”)
Ultimately the data gathered by a network of porn sites shouldn’t be taken as an exhaustive survey of the sexual habits of the known world but it’s a massively important artifact that proves that even in places where sexual freedom is curtailed, the human fire still burns. Say what you want about porn and sexual mores, but we can all agree that numbers – and very often the hips – don’t lie.