The Seahawks ram it through the Broncos’ tight little defense.

A. Ron Galbraith sent me this fascinating analysis of traffic on Pornhub.com during and after the Super Bowl, which suggests that Denver fans continued to have a hard time when the game was over. Get ready for more of that kind of talk. During the Super Bowl, internet traffic from Colorado and Washington to the web’s most popular pornographic video site deviated from average by -51% and -61%, respectively. After the game, Seattle traffic remained 17% below average, but Denver traffic was 11% higher than usual. It appears that Broncos fans drowned their sorrows in Kleenex, which gets weirder the longer you think about it.

Then you think about it so long it gets really weird for a few seconds, and then you go to sleep. Before we get into the weeds, let me point out the vaguely pornographic tone that innocent sentences take when your browser says “pornhub” at the top. The first paragraph, for example:

The Super Bowl, for many men and women in America, is something that can’t be matched by anything else in the world. The Pornhub Insights team has previously studied how major world events affect porn viewing habits. This time around, our number-hungry statisticians eagerly awaited the kick-off of the year’s biggest game, not just to watch the action unfold, but to also see how traffic changed on the world’s biggest porn site.

Editor’s note: change “number-hungry statisticians” to “number-craving statisticians.” Also, the men and women who find that the Super Bowl can’t be matched by anything else in the world are doing it wrong.

But that’s not important now. What’s important is that after this year’s Super Bowl, fans of the winning team appeared to continue partying into the night, whereas fans of the losing team began masturbating immediately. Not only did PornHub’s Colorado-originating traffic spike after the game, but it spiked to levels above its usual Sunday average. Which brings to mind two possibilities:

1. Even chronic masturbators take a few hours off to watch the Super Bowl, but they make up for it afterwards.
2. Sometimes people look at pornography because they are sad.

I assume you know this already, but Denver got blown out in the Super Bowl this year. They were down 22-0 at the half, and they finished up a frustrating 43-8. As a lifelong Iowa Hawkeyes fan, I can tell you what it feels like to watch your team trounced in a big game, but I can’t say my sports-related disappointment has ever driven me to masturbate.

Our sadness-turned-sexual narrative loses some force, though, when we look at the numbers from other regions. New York City, for example, generated PornHub traffic slightly above average after the game. It seems that the progression of events is not so much watch Broncos lose, get sad, seek solace in disobedient babysitter as it is watch Super Bowl, turn off television, wonder what to do next. Which is also kind of sad.

Surely, watching television has ranked high on the list of things to do when you don’t know what else to do for a long time. Fifteen years ago, America might have been equally bored after the Super Bowl and had little choice but to watch Becker. Now we have high-speed streaming video pornography, and for a substantial portion of the Super Bowl-viewing audience, that’s a better waste of time than TV.

Let us say, for the purposes of argument, that watching Sunday-night network television and masturbating to internet pornography are equally wasteful activities. Neither one repairs our growing partisan divide or moves us closer to a cure for ALS. All other things being equal, which would you rather the American people did?

My gut reaction is that I would rather they watched New Girl, and not just because Jake is on it. I am pretty much a lifelong detester of network television, but I would have a hard time arguing that watching porn is better for you. Don’t masturbate, dear reader, but if you do, don’t masturbate to a drug addict pretending to be a nurse.

That’s my stated public position, at least. But in my heart of hearts, which [MOM, STOP READING RIGHT NOW] periodically masturbates, I’m not sure porn is worse than primetime TV. You shouldn’t watch pornography because it reduces human sexuality to looks and industrial penetration narratives. But network television reduces the whole of human experience, be it to wacky neighbor behavior (sitcoms) or autopsies (all other non-sitcom programming.) The choice is between objectifying women and cheapening sexuality or formularizing humor and cheapening everything else.

So stop watching television and jack off, and teach your children to do the same. I guess I’ve kind of argued myself into a corner, here, but it’s worth thinking about. Our nation’s choice in passive entertainment is shifting, and surely that must mean something. At least they’re burning more calories at PornHub.

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