From the realm of the utterly unsurprising, Neuroskeptic, a blog about neuroscience, clues us in on a study of Google Trends that confirms what anyone who ever hit puberty has known from age 13 on: to everything there is a season, especially getting naked:
The authors looked at the Google Trends for a selection of naughty words and phrases, and this revealed a pretty marked 6 month cycle for searches originating from the USA, with two yearly peaks in the search volumes. There was no such pattern for some non-sexual control words.
The study, conducted by the psychology department at Villanova University, used “harmonic analyses” to track seasonal trends in searches for words like “‘porn,’ ‘boobs,’ ‘xvideos,’ ‘tits,'” as well as other party-funtime terms like ‘hentai,’ ‘xxx,’ ‘nude’ and the always evocative ‘milf.’
Neuroskeptic suggests the clear six-month cycle may be due to “a social construction driven by the fact that in Western cultures, Christmas and summer are the main holiday seasons.” However it could also be evidence of a “more primitive biological cycle.”
The chart showing the 5 year overall trend indicates a particularly large spike in the summer of 2010. Apparently it was one of the hottest summers on record in more ways than one.