These became evident in the countries under investigation throughout March 2020, as free content became available in each one. They found that in fact it was a campaign by Pornhub, offering free Premium services for 15 days with the slogan encouraging people to stay at home and ‘help flatten the curve’ of Covid infection, that sparked increases in searches. They looked at searches for pornography in the USA, Spain, Italy and the UK – the countries most affected by Covid-19. Victor Cerdán Martínez, Daniel Villa Garcia and Noelia Deza describe how they investigated this claim, analyzing global search traffic between March and May 2020 and comparing this with the same period in 2019. Our first article focuses on very recent developments in the time of the pandemic, investigating Pornhub’s claim that lockdown had caused a huge increase in porn consumption. Our third issue of 2021 contains a rich mix of studies – an analysis of global online searches for porn investigations of porn films, art and television, with plenty to say about the histories of adult entertainment and about issues of colonialism, race and migration and an analysis of academic literature on porn and pleasure across the humanities and social sciences.
