Watching The World Watching Porn

Three interesting posts about internet pornography — and let me just say right off the bat that there is nothing in this post even remotely interesting if you’re looking to get that little, satisfying tingle in your dopamine receptors from reading about porn; I didn’t even include racy illustration photos because as it turns out, there’s a lot of that stuff freely available on the internet (go check it out, if that’s what you came for, I’ll wait) — and the statistical study of smutty viewing trends and may I just say it’s fascinating. And revealing! (Not revealing in that way, pervert.)

1. “Pornhub Data Shows 5 Surprising Trends in Americans’ Porn Habits“.

Is what it says on the package. (Not that kind of package. Stop it.) Takeaways: we are watching more porn, we are watching more and more of that moreness on our mobiles. We particularly like to jerk off when it’s cold out and on Mondays. (The last, presumably, because it’s the one day of the week we’re least likely to have plans after work, having just finished the weekend. Or because it’s the worst day of the week and we need comfort — and, apparently, busty Asian MILFs — to get over the gloominess.)

But the number one interesting fact here for me is that income inequality and education level seems to significantly affects porn viewing habits. (PornHub suggests that bandwidth issues might be causing the extra time on site, but surely not the extra pageviews, though?) If it really is the case that these are major factors, what is the thing that makes educated, better-off people watch less porn?

2.”Pornhub.com Search Data Shows Us Just Who Likes What in Each Of the 50 States”

Which is mostly a fun post, but also with one interesting data point: it seems that Republican states in the US watch more porn. If that’s true, then that’s a really interesting data point, which seems consistent with other factors like teen pregnancy, age of sexual debut, divorce etc. There’s some pretty convincing evidence that those factors are caused by income inequality and education inequality, so that’s a likely explanation here also, but there might be something else at play. Some cultural factor beyong inequality that links porn viewing to conservatism and religion.

3. “Pornhub Has Figured Out A Brilliant Way To Get Free Publicity”

Tl;dr: This post was in effect just one big viral advertisement for Pornhub. Which was not my intention. D’oh.

Crossing the Tracks to Get to the Other Side

Following Wednesday’s horrific train crash in Spain, The Washington Post has a fantastic rundown today of safety stats for railway accidents. The takeaway is that rail is pretty much the safest way to travel, along with airplanes.

“You’re 30 times more likely to be involved in an accident while riding in a car in Europe than you are while riding in a train”, writes Post reporter Caitlin Dewey. 

Photo: Flickr/Eolé CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

That’s the important bit, but there were some other really eye-popping takeaways as well. The first is that even though railway travel is safe, almost 4.000 people die every year in train accidents in the EU area. And almost none of them are on trains. They are people who sneak onto tracks, cars crossing the lines, people who fall onto the tracks …

But overwhelmingly, the fatalities in European train accidents are suicides. An astonishing 2.500-people-or-so jump in front of trains every year. So you can strike “train driver” right off the list of things I want to be when I grow up. That statistic really, really got to me.

Photo: Flickr/Dr. RawheaD CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Suicide is what happens when your psyche buckles, so you can’t really be expected to leave the world in a considerate way. But still, jumping in front of a train has to traumatise train drivers across the EU. 2.500 a year: surely a significant percentage of the EU’s train drivers have the experience of hitting a suicide some point in their careers ? 

In addition to the safety, you get: much lower environmental impact, denser civic infrastructure, collective and public works projects, a better travel experience and freight moved at lower cost. What are we waiting for? Time to upgrade the worldwide train network and downgrade air travel.

Programming note: I’m offline on vacation for a few days. I hope all my literally tens of readers who have come here over the past week and a half will still be here when I get back. Follow me on Twitter: @PunchingSomeone, or put me in your RSS feeds.