This year saw a number of developments in the world of porn, some for the good—like the increasing attention to the ills of revenge porn—and some for the maybe good—like the nascent stage of virtual reality porn. What remains consistent is that most of our sexual appetites are still driven by the news, even if (or especially if) there is no logical reason why the news should get us so riled up.
Trends in data from PornHub have born this out throughout 2016. For example, on the day of Fidel Castro's death, searches for Cuban-related content spiked 104 percent. ¡Viva La Revolución! indeed. On Election Day, searches on the site for Donald Trump and his family members skyrocketed. At least half the country thinks their next president will fuck them over, so perhaps they wanted a better idea of how that particular procedure might transpire. Around the time of the scary clown epidemic, searches for clown-related porn similarly jumped.
Given that premise, it's somewhat more difficult to parse the results of a recent data graphic from Brazzers, a pornography production studio. Instead of highlighting the most searched for trends in porn this year—which tend to average out along the same predictable lines of "milf," "teen," and so on—it looked at "the most bizarre searches" of 2016, highlighting search terms that were less broadly searched for in the aggregate, but nonetheless stood out.
Some trends that have been noted across the porn landscape as a whole, such as the persistent rise of faux-incest porn, held strong. But for Brazzers subscribers, the search for "mum and son" dominated that category, increasing 442 percent from 2015. Not to be left out, "granny" jumped a respectable 95 percent.
Elsewhere, searches for "police" and "cops" dropped 67 percent and 24 percent, respectively. I'd hazard a guess that a deluge of negative news about law enforcement in recent years has somewhat diminished its sex appeal. But New York maintained a solid nightstick for those who carry them, searching for "cops" at a rate 33 percent higher than any other American state.
But, despite all the disparity, there are still two things that bring us together: our allegiance to Internet porn, and the singular hope no one ever sees our browser history.
