There is no escape from coronavirus news. It’s all anyone can talk about on my social media feeds and everywhere I go. It’s permeating every aspect of our lives, including our sex lives. So today, let’s talk about how the COVID-19 coronavirus is affecting the porn industry.

If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you probably recall previous posts about how current social events tend to be reflected in our porn searches. For example, around major holidays like Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and Christmas, porn searches become more, well, festive. Specifically, people start looking for porn with holiday flair.

This led me to wonder if people might currently be looking for coronavirus-themed porn right now, and it turns out that many are. I just did a quick search for “coronavirus porn” (for research purposes, of course) and, on Pornhub alone, it brings up 276 hits.

What does coronavirus porn look like? Perhaps not surprisingly, it involves a lot of people having sex while wearing masks, surgical gloves, and hazmat suits.

Your next question is probably why people are looking for this kind of porn, and the answer is similar to why people look for holiday porn. In part, it reflects our constant need for sexual novelty and humans’ ability to fetishize virtually everything.

In this case, however, what we’re seeing might also be an eroticization of fear. It has been well established that strong emotions are often mistaken for sexual attraction. For example, when people engage in activities that produce high-arousal states—like riding a roller coaster—and then encounter an attractive stranger, attraction to that person increases. In other words, high-fear states have the potential to amplify sexual arousal and attraction.

So if people are on edge from coronavirus news (meaning they’re in a heightened state of generalized physiological arousal) and, say, see a media image of an attractive person wearing a mask, this could lay the foundation for them to start sexualizing coronavirus imagery.

The rise of coronavirus porn isn’t the only way the porn industry is being impacted right now. As recently reported in Rolling Stone, many porn performers are worried about how their work could potentially expose them to the virus.

Some porn performers are therefore avoiding shoots until the situation is under control in order to protect their health, despite the personal financial hit it will cause. Others are compensating by doing more cam work in order to minimize physical contact with others while still protecting their bottom line.

Of course, all of this is also going to have implications for porn production companies: if performers want to sit on the sidelines until the crisis is under control (and we obviously have no idea when that will occur), the potential financial implications for them are enormous.

So what we’re seeing right now is that the COVID-19 coronavirus is affecting not just the amount of porn that’s being produced, but also the type of porn that’s coming out (i.e., more coronavirus-themed porn and more solo work) and what people are searching for on tube sites.

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Image Source: Shutterstock/Geobor

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