The way the internet is talking about sex is rather fascinating, which is the polite way of saying I'm getting old and the way new generations talk is weird and scary to me.
It'll happen to you one day, I promise, you'll hear all sorts of slang you don't recognise or understand and you'll wonder why people are saying it when there's perfectly good words already.
Advert
In an effort to dodge certain algorithms cracking down on content words like 'sex' have become 'seggs', and there's a whole host of other words to learn too.
Some people already know them and keep typing them into Google, and according to the Daily Mail sex and relationship expert Rachel Thompson has been tracking those trends.
She's trawled her way through 160 million Google searches to figure out what's hot and what's not when people use the internet for one of its most popular functions.
Advert
The rising star among all of these is something called 'gooning' (no, I'd never heard of it either) with a 778 percent increase in the amount of searches.
Apparently 'gooning' is basically edging yourself while masturbating until you enter a trance-like state, reaching some sort of solitary nirvana over not having blown your beans during a marathon w**king session.
No other term has grown in popularity quite so much over the last five years, though at an increase of 504 percent 'femboy' isn't far behind.
Others wanted to know what a 'thirst trap' was, delved into the world of the 'throuple' and learned more about 'edging' which basically ties back into 'gooning'.
Advert
Speaking of ties, the rope bondage 'Shibari' rose by 62 percent in popularity but overall searches for 'bondage' dropped by 36 percent.
In a disastrous turn of events for car parks and motorway laybys everywhere it turns out that people are also losing interest in 'dogging', with searches down 34 percent.
Perhaps dogging has had its day, while people looking up 'spanking' similarly dropped 33 percent.
Advert
The biggest loser over the past five years was 'cottaging', which has plummeted 70 percent.
Right behind that is 'sploshing' down 54 percent in Google searches but seemingly still having an active and interested community over on TikTok, so perhaps some of these internet folks have no so much given up on their kinks as migrated searching for them to a different site.
Meanwhile, PornHub has released its figures for 2023 and it looks like the UK has been slacking off, having fallen three places in the overall rankings.
Topics: Sex and Relationships, Google
Joe Harker