Pornhub’s WOTY

Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the various Word of the Year (WOTY) competitions run by dictionaries and linguistic organizations. But they may not know that the site Pornhub.com has its own WOTY project of sorts. Each year Pornhub publishes a statistical analysis of its users, and in addition to providing global demographic data about who uses the site and when, it publishes the top and trending search terms used on it.

The 2024 analysis can be found here. [Note that the analysis itself is not pornographic, but beware of clicking links within it as those may lead you to NSFW pages. Moreover, one may not want to visit this link on a work computer, as your IT department may notify your boss that you’ve visited Pornhub.]

Hentai, sexually explicit cartoons in the style of Japanese manga, was the site’s no.1 search term again this year, with MILF, an acronym for a mom I’d like to fuck, also holding position at no.2. Demonstrating Pornhub’s global reach is the no.3 term, Pinay, referring to a Filipina, climbing from no.5 last year. On Pornhubgay.com, the top three terms remained unchanged from last year: twink, a man of youthful and slim appearance, at no.1, anime at no.2, and Pinay’s masculine counterpart Pinoy at no.3.  

But the real interest is in what terms trended this past year, search terms that reflected other societal trends. The biggest trend clocked by Pornhub was demure, inspired by a 2 August TikTok viral video in which creator Jools Lebron described her hair and makeup as “very demure.” Lebron’s TikTok video was not overtly sexual, much less pornographic, but evidently it kicked off a trend in Pornhub searches, which included demure itself (+133%), mindful pleasure (+112%), and mindful JOI (+87%). JOI being an initialism for jerk-off instructions, a video in which a performer addresses the viewer, giving instructions on how to pleasure themselves and describing, and sometimes performing, various sexual acts themselves.

The tradwife phenomenon and the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives TV show also spawned a Pornhub trend: Mormon threesome (+122%), Mormon sex (+92%), tradwife (+72%), and Mormon wife (+71%). All this while Pornhub is largely blocked in Utah.

People were evidently lusting after Olympic athletes, too. In the third quarter of the year, corresponding to the Paris Olympics, the trending terms included: vollyball [sic] (+165%), swimmer (+101%), and the generic athlete (+88%).

In an American Dialect Society/Pornhub WOTY crossover, the phrase hawk tuah, coined in a viral YouTube video in which a woman used it describe spitting on a penis during oral sex, was one of the nominees for the ADS WOTY in the Most Fun While It Lasted category. On Pornhub, hawk tuah got over ten million searches, and spit on dick rose +233%.

One of the more fun analyses that Pornhub does is a map that shows for each US state the search term that is most popular relative to the other states. So, furry is relatively popular in Oregon, pee takes the honors for Wisconsin, friends mom in California, footjob in Colorado, anal dildo in Alaska, and facesitting in Massachusetts.

Pornhub has a global reach, and it also publishes the most popular search terms for the top twenty countries. In the United States, hentai was the most popular term, climbing from no.3 last year, Latina took second, climbing from no.4, and MILF slipped one spot from no.2 to no.3. In France, the top three search terms remained unchanged. Unsurprisingly, francaise was no.1, but foreign terms challenged the country’s linguistic nationalism, with hentai and MILF coming in second and third, respectively. In the Philippines, Pinay and Pinoy unsurprisingly took the top two spots, with Japanese coming in third, all unchanged from last year. In Mexico, it was hentai and lesbianas, unchanged in the top two spots, with culonas (big ass) displacing MILF at no.3. And in the United Kingdom, MILF and lesbian continued to hold the top two spots, but British moved up two places, displacing Indian. British has been moving up the search rankings in recent years, perhaps reflecting some kind of post-Brexit xenophobia.

But overall, when one looks at the top search terms in the twenty countries, one is struck by how similar the lists are. Evidently tastes in porn genres do not vary all that much around the world. What is interesting, however, is which non-anglophone countries tend to use English terms and which use their native tongues. English terms dominate in the Philippines, Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands. Egypt has a mix of English and Arabic search terms. While France, Japan, Ukraine, Brazil, and Spanish-speaking countries tend to search in their native languages.

All of this leads one to ask, is porn a universal language, a lingua franca that unites rather than divides? Probably not, but with everything else going on in the world, it may provide some kind of common ground.