As the nation waits with bated breath for the results of the 2020 election, which has now boiled down to a nightmarish melange of maps and simple arithmetic, we at Jezebel were alerted to the existence of another, more curious map, that requires a closer look.
Somewhere in the soft tangle of Wednesday’s stress, a tweet with a different sort of map, presented by Jezebel’s online correspondent Ashley Reese, provided some brief moments of levity. The map above is from a 2019 report issued by PornHub on, ha ha, International Women’s Day, and shows some granular detail into what the women of America are searching for, porn-wise. This map shows the top relative searches for each state, which means that compared to the national average, women in Florida are more likely to search for “ebony threesome” and that the women in Idaho are poking around for My Little Pony smut. None of these predilections are worrisome and it is not my job to yuck anyone’s yum, but I do have some questions regarding the circled terms above.
There’s something sweet about Nebraskan women searching “bedgasm,” which Urban Dictionary defines as “a feeling of complete and utter euphoria which peaks when climbing into bed at the end of an 18-hour workday, a long road trip or hours of extremely strenuous physical activity.” If a bedgasm is particularly pleasant, the physical release is similar to that of an intense sexual experience. I’d like to believe that Nebraskan women are really just horny for sleep, but a quick search on Pornhub reveals that “bedgasm” porn is just vanilla sex where everyone seems to be enjoying themselves equally and no one gets slapped in the face with an erect penis. Wonderful.
Montana loves “surprise anal,” which is a term I don’t need to look up because I’m pretty sure I already know what that is. The preponderance of search terms that include “ebony” in the South does not require further examination. It’s interesting to see that both Maine and Oregon like gloryhole porn, and I can’t say I share the same affection for it, but what really confused me, and I suppose the staff of Jezebel, is why Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (three of the four states which featured heavily in the election, that’s just a coincidence, really, has nothing to do with anything, I’m fine) searched for cities instead of sex terms on Pornhub?
Admittedly, most of these search terms net shakily-shot amateur videos and the term in question has nothing really to do with the content of the video itself. Searching “Boston” on Pornhub doesn’t turn up a video of a woman asking Paddy to pahk his friggin’ cack in her Hahvahd yahd, but I did see a brief clip of someone getting an enthusiastic blowie on the MBTA’s Red line. “Philly” doesn’t autofill to include the word “Phanatic,” as we’d suspected, but instead yields page after page of mediocre gonzo porn. Searching for both “Detroit” and “Milwaukee” nets similar results. My suspicion was that part of the erotic experience of say, watching a video titled “HeadDoctor Milwaukee,” was that the regional accents of the locations in question played into the experience overall. Violating my personal rule of not watching any porn on an empty stomach, I clicked around to see if this theory played out. Unfortunately—as ever—I was wrong.