From TheAtlantic.com,

To everything (turn, turn, turn) … there is a season (turn, turn, turn) … and a time … to every purpose … under heaven.

So true, Bible. So true, Byrds. What the truisms neglect to tell us, however, is that “every purpose under heaven” includes not only planting and reaping and laughing and weeping, but also, apparently, performing porny Google searches.

We know this, now, because of the plantings and reapings of Science. According to a paper just published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, Internet pornography — like so many storms, like so much kale — is seasonal. Porn’s peak seasons? Winter and late summer.

Researchers at Villanova examined the Google trends for such commonly-searched-for terms as “porn,” “xxx,” “xxvideos” … and other, more descriptive phrases that, because I am looking at a portrait of James Russell Lowell as I write this, I will let you look up in the paper itself. Once they’d gathered those terms, the authors examined them in Google Trends. And what they found was a defined cycle featuring clear peaks and valleys — recurring at discernible six-month intervals. The cycle, as you can see in the chart above, maps surprisingly well to the world’s calendar seasons.

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