The government shutdown that’s been in effect since December 22 is pretty bad across the board. Eight hundred thousand federal employees are left without paychecks, and with a whole lot extra time on their hands.
And, according to porn streaming site Pornhub, they’re spending that time with their hands.
Last week, the world’s biggest porn site reported a nearly 6% uptick in traffick in the United States during the shutdown. Sourcing data from the second week of January and comparing it with pre-holiday data from December, Pornhub claimed that there are up to 14% more users on their site late at night, and 7% more in the early afternoon.
“Those fluctuations are similar to other events when people tend to stay up later and sleep in when they don’t have to go to work in the morning,” the Pornhub Insights team reported. And with so much free time to fap, visitors to the site are in less of a rush to finish their fun—Pornhub reported that the average time US visitors spent on the site increased by a whopping 33 seconds per visit, on average.
In response to the report, porn site xHamster invited furloughed government employees to watch all the porn they want for free—even xHamster’s normally paywalled “premium” content.
In a blog post on the website, xHamster’s vice president, Alex Hawkins, said, “We know that government employees who have been furloughed are being forced to make hard choices between essentials rent, food and transportation.” He continued, “Studies have shown that adult material can provide not only entertainment, but stress relief and better overall well-being,” so the site offered free access to all premium content to anyone who can provide a valid government ID. The free access will remain in effect for as long as the government is shut down…which is to say, who knows?
The xHamster free-porn announcement may be a publicity stunt in somewhat poor taste, but if this government shutdown itself isn’t an insensitive attention grab unto itself, we don’t know what is. Might as well have some fun grabbing something else while it lasts!
