Google Trends is a fascinating little tool for checking out who’s looking for what.
Biggest ‘sudoku‘ Googlers? Switzerland.
Who’s Googling ‘wrestlers‘? Surprise: it’s Pakistan, followed by the Philippines.
And who knew that ‘hello kitty‘ was such a popular search term for Brazilians?
But which countries are Googling ‘sex’? Would you have guessed that these were the top ten?
1. Pakistan
2. Egypt
3. Viet Nam
4. Iran
5. Morocco
6. India
7. Indonesia
8. Saudi Arabia
9. Turkey
10. Malaysia
Hmm. Eight of them are predominantly Muslim.
Obviously, we don’t know about the dataset, normalisation techniques, and so on. But here are some hypotheses:
1) Muslims are mad for it, like everyone else is.
2) The West is corrupting Islam.
3) People in non-Muslim countries don’t use the search tem ‘sex’, preferring more specific terms like ‘diaper fetish’ and ‘turkey-slapping’.
4) People in non-Muslim countries don’t Google for porn on the Web at all; they just dive into their pile of pornographic magazines at home and swim through them, like Scrooge McDuck with money.
5) Sex is a human instinct, and the sexual urge will stay more or less constant, no matter what authoritarian power structures do to control it.
Take your pick, or draw your own conclusions in comments.
28 September 2006 at 9:02 am
hehe… I like it. I think you’re right on the money with your hypotheses…
2 and 5 somewhat conflict however 🙂 I go with 5 and add a 6th – people aren’t having enough sex in real life.
I hate how sex is such a societal taboo and how we label it as ‘dirty’! Blame it all on religion. It’s fantastic and natural and I could rant about this for a long time but I wont here.
On an unrelated subject, I need to steal Cantique from you so I can drum in the French pronounciation… blah. I also have some ace BBS songs to share w you 🙂
28 September 2006 at 1:57 pm
From George Orwell’s 1984:
She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:
‘When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?
28 September 2006 at 2:42 pm
…a book that I have not yet read but have intended to for ages 🙂
28 September 2006 at 3:59 pm
I say the more the instinct is repressed the stronger it fights back.
Did you get some good progress done on your research?
28 September 2006 at 11:23 pm
That is hilarious. I tested your hypothesis number 3 by entering ‘fetish’, ‘kinky’, & ‘dominatrix’ and I think you are correct – and the results were very interesting!
The 1984 excerpt is wonderful – thanks for posting it.
28 September 2006 at 11:46 pm
If you check for ‘kinky’, you’ll have to use ‘kinky -friedman‘ to exclude searches on the Texas gubernatorial race.
And what country comes up top? The Netherlands, by a mile! Perfect.
29 September 2006 at 7:24 am
I’m almost home! I’m catching the bus from Brookton tomorrow at 11:30am, which means I miss virtually all of the grand final. Quite upset.
I love being a country girl. Can’t wait for harvest time to roll around!
See you next week!