NJ Binged on Porn During ‘Blizzard That Wasn’t’

What were you doing during last week's "blizzard that wasn't?" Up to 2 feet of snow had been predicted and many businesses closed for the day, but most of New Jersey wound up with only 3 or 4 inches of precipitation.

It turns out many New Jerseyans occupied themselves that day by looking at online pornography.

A report by the adult site Pornhub says their Web traffic increased more in New Jersey than any other state in the Northeast region.

During the storm, Pornhub viewing in the Garden State was 30 percent higher than normal on tablets, 29 percent higher on smartphones, and 19 percent higher on desktop computers. That's an overall 26 percent increase, easily besting Connecticut's 21 percent jump. And while most states experienced a dip around lunchtime, New Jersey's numbers went up -- by 50 percent.

"The report isn't really surprising because people seem to use porn on the Internet constantly," said professor Whit Strub, director of the Women's & Gender Studies Program at Rutgers University in Newark, "so being stranded at home, bored and idle, would be pretty predictable in leading to this."

Strub said the porn binge involved women as well as men.

"Women have always been avid consumers of erotic materials and pornography," he said. "There used to be more social breaks on it in terms of shame as a tactic used to control women, but the Internet circumvents all of that, and women have been active in sexual arenas of the Internet since it began."

The professor said the material being looked at online is both heterosexual and gay since there are a diversity of interests, but in many cases users are searching for material involving teenagers.

"That is pretty predictable in a society that tends to eroticize adolescence," he said.

He also said pornography has been a central part of mainstream American culture for quite some time.

"With reality TV, and porn stars being on it, there's certainly been a real normalization of pornography in American culture," Strub said.

So why were more New Jerseyans looking at porn than any other state's residents during the snowstorm?

"Maybe people in New Jersey were more disappointed by the failed snowstorm and needed something to compensate," Strub suggested.

He also said a recent study of college students in the United Kingdom found many watched porn as a supplemental form of sex education, and that trend may carry across the Atlantic.

"I think a lot of Americans use pornography not to just to fulfill erotic interests, but out of genuine curiosity and intrigue about bodies and sexuality," Strub said.