Porn Petition Would Force You to "Opt In" For Sites Like Pornhub

Last week, a man from Greenbrae, Calif. created a petition on whitehouse.gov demanding the government to "require porn to be an 'opt-in' feature with internet service providers rather than a standard feature."

The petition, whose author goes by the initials M.G., states: "We are asking that people who are interested in porn should have to seek it and choose it. They should have to 'Opt In' for it by making arrangements to receive it with their Internet Service Provider. Everyone else should be free from it and assumed 'Opt Out.'"

It sounds like a great idea, right? Do a quick Google search on "why porn is bad," and articles like this one pop up immediately with answers such as: It rewires the male brain, it demeans and objectifies women, it has a numbing effect upon reality … the reasons go on and on. So, it must be true that searching for online porn isn't too popular, right?

Wrong.

Data from Google Trends reveals how much Americans are Googling porn-related terms compared to other searches. The data is then normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100. Trends include the following: "Jesus" (66) is barely ahead of "anal" (65), "Abraham Lincoln" (25) gets beaten by "dildo" (34), "Barack Obama" (10) gets crushed by "boobs" (39), and "sex" (83) trumps "baseball" (21) . And yes, "porn" (61) is searched for much more often than "USA" (20).

Welcome to America.

As of Tuesday, the porn petition has only received 4,894 signatures, a far cry from the 100,000 required for the petition to be sent to the White House for consideration.