A shocking number of people have admitted to watching porn in the office — 60% according to a Sugarcookie survey — the reason why they got frisky while on the clock isn’t what you think.
“I think we have this view that if someone’s accessing porn at work, they are somehow secretly masturbating at the desk or they’re disappearing off to the toilets to masturbate,” Craig Jackson, a professor of occupational health psychology at Birmingham City University in the UK, told the BBC recently. “It’s more of a distraction.”
In fact, Jackson noted that watching porn could be “stress relief or a coping mechanism” while working.
But for some, it’s not a way to solve their boredom. In fact, it’s a “reward,” said Paula Hall, an addiction therapist and spokesperson for the UK Council for Psychotherapy.
Working from home meant more freedom while on the clock, and with it, came wandering minds. More than half of people working from home admitted to watching adult videos on devices used for work, according to a survey by Kaspersky.
Research from PornHub affirmed those findings, revealing in a 2021 study that, while 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. was the most popular time frame for porn-watching, 4 p.m. came in a close second.
Leisurely viewing during work hours could have been spurred by pandemic-related working from home trends, but the NSFW site’s data speculated that afternoon gazing was present well before COVID-19 struck. So, returning to the office might not deter employee’s workplace porn consumption.
And, for many, there haven’t been any negative consequences for secretly letting their freak flag fly.
If it feels “good” and there aren’t “immediate negative consequences,” Jackson told the BBC, people will “do it again and again and again and again.”