Pleasuring yourself 'til the end of the world

Call me a prude, but the first thing I thought of when I saw Pornhub's statistics "Hawaii Missile Alert Traffic Change" was J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel, "Crash." It must have been the melding of sex and violence that did it. Or maybe - just maybe - it was that the hype over Pornhub's statistics borders on the mental.

This is no flippant remark. Ballard's American publisher said the British author was "beyond psychiatric help," as he had written a book that explored the lives of a group of men and women who are obsessed with having sex while crashing cars. Sick, right? No. It was visionary. "Crash" speaks to a sense of utter boredom we feel despite being almost permanently stimulated. And Ballard saw it coming about 40 years ahead of his time.

Pornhub's "data," such that it is, speaks to a similar kind of boredom, one that suggests some of us are "so over it" that not even the threat of an imminent missile attack is shocking enough to detract from the self-absorbed job in hand.

The data highlights a one-hour-twenty-minute period on January 13, 2018, when Pornhubbers on Hawaii were faced with a dirty little dilemma: Keep calm and pleasure on, or run for safety.

Day of the Pornhubbers

At 8:07 AM local time that Saturday, US officials erroneously issued an incoming missile alert. It sent some on the island into a blind panic (if masturbating hadn't already robbed them of vision, as the old adage goes), because by 8:23 AM Pornhub's traffic had dropped by a whopping 77 percent on figures for a "typical Saturday."

But then, mere moments after officials issued a false alarm statement, the Pornhubbers were back at it. And perhaps not just any old Pornhubbers - the regular riff-raff - but at a rate 48 percent above the norm at that time on a Saturday.

Sorry, no offense to those upstanding Pornhubbers among us, but having had to peruse the site while researching this article, I can say I am at the very least perturbed that one of the live camera feeds this morning (18.01.2018) featured a woman who looked very nearly under-aged.

And I thought "kiddie-fiddlers" were a thing of the 1970s. Like I say, call me a prude.

Casting aside my concerns about what's legal and what's not, perhaps more telling than Pornhub's now ubiquitous yellow graph (which we've recreated in a sober grey) were the comments on the site's "Insights" blog post:

JP: Doing what they loved.

Willis: Ain't that the truth.

guy: They wanted to die the way they lived.

Okay, so I admit it: I grabbed some random slurs from the blog comments and quoted them out of context. I guess I'll "die a w*nker," as Pornhubber J'accuseteau puts it, or I'll "live long enough to see yourself have ED." He probably means erectile dysfunction. But, alas, I've already got that.

Statistical abuse

Almost as disturbing as these supposedly vital statistics, or Pornhub's seeming abuse of child-like images, is the suggestion via a form of rogue inference that all Hawaiians have an (un)healthy porn habit. We've all just sucked up the statistics without understanding the percentages properly, and this is one thing that was pointed out by a Pornhub user "benndur."

benndur: It was 77% drop in traffic, compared to the normal amount of traffic; the percent change in traffic. That doesn't mean that 77% of ALL PEOPLE weren't watching porn while 23% of them were beating off. The fact that [another user is] getting so many upvotes shows that most people complete shi* understanding of graphs and percentages.

I have it on good authority that at least one resident of the US outpost fed her chickens when the alarm was lifted. What about the rest of them? The kids, surfers, runners, supermarket staff, bus drivers…

But these sorts of threads are often cesspools, so someone still found it in them to have a dig at "benndur."

LunarD3ATH: You're such a giant dick, you should consider doing porn.

So I refer you, dear Pornhub, to another dead Brit: Winston Churchill and his often quoted "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics." For your generous distribution of these statistics is little more than advertising, and it has given rise to an unsavory kind of breast beating on the bulletin board: "See those stats, that's me in there, the grim reaper can come and get me for all I care, but not before I've had a good tug (or rub)," is what you read between the lines. 

And why not, hey?

If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing it properly, and in my book that means finishing it off.

At the end of the day, there was no missile attack on Hawaii. So it was a happy end for all.