What’s the most surprising thing about Americans’ porn habits in 2013? It’s not that the few things that make us take a break from Pornhub include zombies and singing contests. It’s not that Farrah Abraham was the most popular adult-film star of the year.
It’s that the majority of porn—52 percent—was viewed on a smartphone, up from 46 percent in 2012. Another 10 percent of Pornhub traffic comes from iPads or other tablets. Instead of using Chrome private browsing like civilized masturbators, Americans are sneaking off with their mobile devices instead.
Screengrab via Pornhub/QZ
Is that a smartphone in your pocket? RT @qz: The US now watches the majority of its online porn on mobile phones https://t.co/2D4O0BVS26
— Josh Greenman (@joshgreenman) December 22, 2013
The days of big-screen porn are over, and the implications could actually be a little dangerous.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s 2013 film Don Jon showed us a porn addict driven to watching dirty videos on his phone during class and in the car to hide the evidence from his disapproving girlfriend. He’s not alone. Besides shame and self-disgust, portability and privacy are excellent reasons to switch to mobile porn browsing. The possibilities are endless when you’ve got Stoya and James Deen in your pocket. A quick porn fix can happen anywhere—at work, in the airport, a coffeeshop, or on the road, where distractions can get deadly.
GIF via Tumblr
As Quartz points out, our digital lives are transitioning from desktops and laptops to mobile devices. Porn is just one realm of entertainment that’s leading the way. But that also means we’re living in a world where we’re watching Game of Bones as casually as we’re firing off text messages. It’s also a world where high-definition is a goner.
Even more worrying is how entrepreneurs will start to cash in on the trend:
@daweiner @qz @robferdman someone needs to make a mobile site of porn optimized for portrait orientation
— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) December 22, 2013
Photo via magnus_d/Flickr