Friends: I'm sure many of you came across the [tasteful] Fox News article titled "No. 1 Nation in Sex Web Searches? Call it Pornistan" that was published a couple of weeks ago and was subsequently picked up and reported on by various news agencies and blogs.
This piece, written by my good friend S. Kamal and appearing in the Pakistani newspaper "Daily Times" today, sets some of the facts straight.
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"Pornistan?" Only if you believe one Foxy intern from the United States of Erotica.
by S. Kamal
A couple of weeks ago, Fox News published an article on their “World” section titled “No. 1 Nation in Sexy Web Searches? Call it Pornistan.” The article has subsequently been the source of much discussion online, and has been published and circulated to a fairly wide audience. While the point of the article was unclear, the article called Pakistan the “world's leader in online searches for pornographic material” and stated that “Google ranks Pakistan No. 1 in the world in searches for pornographic terms.”
My reaction to reading the article, particularly some of the lewd terms for which Pakistan ranked #1 in, was bewilderment. Perhaps this was why Pakistan’s economy is in such poor shape? It appeared that everyone was seeking the wrong type of stimulus.
That is, until I started checking a few facts. Reader comments on the article on the Fox News website were promptly disabled, so I couldn’t voice my thoughts there. Finally, I contacted the author of the article – who, as I discovered, was an intern at Fox with quite a vivid imagination.
Some facts:
1. None of the rankings in the article were published by Google. Rather, every single absurd term reported in the article (“donkey sex,” “horse sex,” etc.) was manually typed into two Google tools called “Google Insights” and “Google Trends” that give statistics for where in the world certain searches originate. In other words, every single term reported in the article was a term that the Fox News intern who wrote the piece CHOSE to search for.
Now, if I were writing an article on the irony of a government that is passing laws against online blasphemy while its citizens engage in watching porn online (presumably the point of the story – although this hardly seems like a dramatic, newsworthy phenomenon), searching for “donkey sex” would certainly not pop into my mind first. So, I posed this question to the author on her blog, for which her response was: “I did not think up the searches on my own. They were brought to my attention from an outside individual. I am going to respectfully end my engagement in the discussion.” Ah. So her “source,” if you can call it that, is an “outside individual.” Must be quite the colorful character.
2. The method used to produce these results is obviously flawed. Interestingly (but not surprisingly), minor variations of the search terms on Google Insights yield dramatically different results. So I did a 15 minute exercise on Google Insights. First I looked at slight modifications of the terms in the article, to see how countries rank. As an example, let’s take “Donkey sex”, where Pakistan ranked #1, and change the search term to “Sex with Donkey.” The U.S. ranked #1 for “Sex with Donkey” for 2006, 2007 and 2010, and #2 in 2008 and 2009, while Pakistan does not appear in the top five countries for this search term in any of these years. Now, if one were to ascribe scientific certainty to such a finding, as the author has done, one could argue that “Donkey sex” (where Pakistan ranks #1) could refer to a search for donkeys reproducing with each other, while “Sex with Donkey” (where the U.S. ranks #1), is, well, less ambiguous.
In this case, it seems that the Islamic Republic of Pornistan has a lot of catching up to do with the United States of Erotica.
Along similar lines, the U.S. has also been ranked #1 or #2, for the period 2004 through 2010, for the following terms that are slight modifications of terms in the original article: “Sex with school child,”“sex with farm animals” and“sex with camel”. Pakistan was not ranked in the top ten countries for any of these search terms.
To further demonstrate the ridiculousness of this methodology, I’ve documented some results from my own “research.” Let’s just say that an outside source tipped me off that Americans fantasize about having sex with their vegetables. So, I put this to the test. The results, according to Google: The U.S. has ranked #1 for 2004 to 2010 in searches for the following terms: “tomato sex,”“corn sex,”“cabbage sex,” “spinach sex,” celery sex,” “sex with vegetable,” and even “chicken sex” and “tractor sex”. The U.S. also ranks highly in several other searches, “not suitable to publish here.” Surely, these results have deep philosophical implications on the psyche of the average American?
And the gem? The author claims in her blog that: “I contacted the appropriate [embassy] officials and attempted to contact multiple individuals in Pakistan.” Ah. So no one at the embassy responded to her interview request. Yes, we should certainly take our Embassy chaps to task for not paying due attention to this groundbreaking scientific research; and wasting their time instead on trifling issues such as the war on terror, strategic dialogue with India, internal political strife, Pak-U.S. relations, etc. As another commentator pointed out on the author’s blog, a more reliable source for information on internet use in Pakistan may have been to contact the Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan. The author may have found them through a simple Google search – if she wasn’t too busy Googling her sex search data.
I could say that this is journalism at its worse. But, to be frank, this is not journalism. This is a dishonest and irresponsible story, written in very poor taste.
As a respectable news source, Fox News needs to publish a retraction of this story, or at the very least, some clarifications on the intent of this article and the methodology employed. I believe this is in order, lest the general public conclude that they are in the business of cheaply seeking attention through controversy.
The author can be reached at sxkamal@gmail.com
at the bolded part.