what your porn searches say about society

or vice versa?

Pornhub’s 2024 Year in Review just dropped, and it’s all slang.

According to the adult video website, searches for “demure” rose 133%; searches for “tradwife” are up 72%, and searches for “hawk tuah” went from zero to over ten million.

At first glance, this might not seem that surprising: the words are trending all over the internet. If Google searches are up for all these terms, why wouldn’t they be up on Pornhub as well?

The difference is that our porn searches go well beyond silly quantifications of internet trends. They’re intimate windows into our deeply personal desires, which still seem to follow those trends. The fact that these “online slang words” also appear on Pornhub shows that they’re so much more than mere memes: they’re ideas that pervade both our collective psyche and our private actions.

This is clear through the searches that correlated with slang words. At the same time as “demure” went viral, the terms “mindful sex” and “modesty” both increased by over 70%. Meanwhile, “tradwife” was accompanied by greater search interest for “wife,” as “hawk tuah” correlated with a 233% increase in “spit on dick.” Clearly, our online culture is playing some role in shaping our sexual preferences.

Or is it?

There are two distinct ways of looking at this phenomenon, both fascinating in their own regard:

1. Our desires are shaped by internet memes.

2. Internet memes give a name to something we already desired, and go viral for that same reason.

The first explanation, proffered by Pornhub itself, posits that our very identities and desires are shaped by the media we consume. This is certainly true to some extent. To draw on some other examples from the adult film industry, look at the words “money shot,” “creampie,” and “cumshot,” which only became common after they were popularized by porn:

Of course, coitus interruptus has always had an important role in contraception, but it didn’t seem to be as fetishized—or, at the very least, as discussed in our culture—until its appearance in pornography. I can also think of more niche fetishes, like pixellated bukkake or tentacle hentai, that couldn’t have existed until new technology gave them a means to develop (thus helping create people’s sexual identities).

At the same time, many sex theorists believe that the ideas of “creampie” and “cumshot” only became so popular because the cultural moment was right. America was opening up to the idea of sex positivity, and new methods of birth control meant that extravaginal ejaculation could be seen as a kink, rather than a utilitarian act. Through this lens, the words “creampie” and “cumshot” became trendy because of the second explanation: they gave a name to something society needed a name for.

The same could be true for the internet slang words we see on Pornhub. Maybe “demure” and “tradwife” went viral because they expressed a latent cultural inclination toward reservedness and tradition. “Hawk tuah” certainly got popular because that’s what men on the Zynternet wanted to see.

This second analysis is more concerning, since it implies that part of what goes viral is what men desire sexually. Our trends spread in context of the male gaze, meaning that our ultimate vocabulary is influenced by the objectification of women.

If you’re familiar with my substack, you’ll know that I think both explanations are correct. In fact, they both influence each other through what I call the engagement treadmill—a positive feedback loop where trends go viral because some part of them is initially compelling. As a result, they become even more compelling:

With each trend comes a word to label the idea that compels us—a word that then furthers the idea to new people. Pornhub’s Wrapped is a great reminder of that: cultural labels are inextricable from culture itself.