VIRAL PLEASURE

Indians scoured the internet for porn during the pandemic, triggering a spike in the number of desi adult content creators. But along came controversies and concerns about exploitation, lack of regulation and addiction

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

When New York City was struggling to deal with the spike in Covid-19 cases a year ago, Sanya Virani, a forensic psychiatry fellow at Brown University, began studying how her friends in the city were coping with the stress and anxiety induced by the pandemic. She soon realised that the consumption of pornography was a common underlying factor. She then led a group of 11 authors from various universities worldwide to publish a paper on internet and pornography use during the Covid-19 pandemic in the scientific journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.

In the paper, the authors reported data to show the rise in pornography use during lockdowns in different countries. Virani was “shocked”to find that “India ranked the highest in terms of porn consumption during the pandemic among all nations”. This was based on the number of hits Pornhub, the world’s most popular porn site, received from each country during lockdown.

“Covid-19 has changed everything,”said Virani. “We have seen that there is a surprising relationship between the moment in which the confinement is declared in each country and its highest porn consumption. This says a lot about the way we consume porn. I recall how on August 28 last year, when there was a technical error on Zoom (a virtual meeting app) and it stopped working for close to six hours, the consumption of pornography skyrocketed and a peak of 6.8 per cent increase in porn usage was noticed. This can mean that when a person is in front of a screen and does not know what to do, he turns to pornography.”