Fidget Spinners and Dogging: How the World Watched Porn in 2017

My theory is that the three overriding human emotions are "fear", "rage" and the holy third one, "horny". Think about it: really, you don’t know someone until you’ve seen them, horned up and lubricated, desperately trying to cum.

And so the Pornhub’s fifth annual "Year in Review", which may as well be subtitled: "Yo, What Did We Honk One Out to in 2K17? And What Can We Learn – About Ourselves, About Others, About Humanity as a Whole – from Those Sordid Emissions?"

Friends: we can learn a lot. A whole lot.

Once again, Kim Kardashian – who you will recall and know from being Kim Kardashian – is in the top four ranking of porn stars worldwide, for that literal one time she made a sex tape. I don’t know about you, but if I were a porn star working and thriving outside of that top four, I’d be mightily pissed off that a one-time amateur was consistently outperforming me, numbers-wise, every single day of my career. Is that not very humiliating for Brandi Love and Dillion Harper? Alexis Texas? Dani Daniels? Day in, day out, they clock on, contort themselves into various positions, shower off like three times, then drive home. And then Kim Kardashian. Who doesn’t even do porn. Still gets more clicks than them. Obviously, obviously: mad props to Kim Kardashian, for conquering yet another industry for profit and fame. But come on, man. Think of the toll that success is having on those lower down the pecking order.

In 2017, the main thing that happened was that, for a ten-week period over summer, children and then adults got obsessed with fidget spinners under various degrees of irony (I, for instance, got one completely ironically, and then spun it exactly once and fell utterly in love with the sensation of it) and then we all forgot about them entirely.

Apart from pornography connoisseurs, anyway, who made "Fidget Spinners" one of the top three mainstream-breaking porn searches of 2K17, just behind "Rick & Morty". I get that our near-deranged desire for sex has inspired most of man’s achievements to date – we only wore clothes to be warm enough to live long enough to have puberty and fuck, for instance; every single invention since then has basically been about progressing our life so we can fuck more; porn won the VHS vs. Betamax argument; every single car, leather jacket and motorbike was created as a means of having sex – but at some point our progress goes awry, and no more was that so than in 2017. We tried to fuck fidget spinners, man. We tried to fuck either Rick or Morty, I’m not going to Google it to find out. I’m all for kink, but, like. Come on. Don’t try to fuck a fidget spinner. Come on. Come on.

Cheerleaders doing scissoring, then, I guess, would be a sort of porn neutral term, which – if searched for in 2017 – would actually render the searchee instantly un-horny. Maybe we could use this to… I don’t know. Pipe pornography of cheerleaders scissoring into university classrooms to calm down over-active teens? You know what, I’ve gone mad. I’m pretty sure I just had an idea that is illegal.

Hentai, jumping six places to second on the list of most searched terms in 2K17, could, it says here, be blurring the lines between "getting off" and "being entertained", i.e. the only two things anyone likes doing, ever. Look at this quote from resident Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center expert Dr Laurie Betito: "The world is moving at a pace the likes we have never seen before and as such, stress levels have gone way up. Hentai is a way for people to disconnect from reality and delve into the world of total fantasy, forgetting about all the stresses that real life brings. Good, bad or indifferent, Hentai is an escape, not much different than seeing a sci-fi movie at a local theater for a couple of hours of mindless distraction."

Listen, I’ve read the quote like six or seven times now and I’m pretty sure the advice is: next time you are stressed at work or in any way in need of escape, watch… a bunch of… Hentai…?

It’s rare I’m proud of the UK in any way at all, but i. if you look at the porn-watching figures they truly are astonishing: last year we were second in the world only behind the US (pop. 323.1 million) and ahead somehow of India (pop. 1.324 billion), meaning pound-for-pound we really are consuming a fantastic amount of pornography; and ii. we are almost singlehandedly keeping the search term "amateur dogging" in the charts. Thousands of us, horny for layby sex or amateur footage of layby sex. We are, clearly, a nation of people horned the fuck up by the grey suede seats in 02-plate used cars. There is nothing more British than cumming on a bonnet.

I suppose the main conclusion here is we are constantly being watched and monitored, even when we jack, even when we take a few sweet little moments to jack. I mean: don’t worry about it, obviously. We’re still about eight to ten years away from full Nineteen Eighty-Four state monitoring of everything we do and wank off to. But just know that every single technology-assisted wank you did last year was logged and charted by a computer and stored as data. Don’t let it get to you too much – don’t let it ruin your next one! – but just. It’s something to think about, isn’t it, next time you google "kim kardashian fidget spinner hentai".