I Have Watched Coronavirus Porn and It Involves Lots of Purell

A quick and dirty survey of pandemic porn

Photo illustration. Image source: Aleksandr Zubkov/Getty Images.

Pornography is a form of escapism, so you’d think the last genre anyone would want to watch would be “coronavirus porn.” That would make as much sense as Corona beer sales going up this year — which they are.

As of March 23, searching “coronavirus” on Pornhub delivered more than 1,000 videos. Users on the site started punching in the search term on January 25. Since then, nearly 10 million have looked for coronavirus porn.

Coronavirus porn videos are all homemade because no one is going into an office, especially one as unsanitary as a porn set. There are so many coronavirus porn videos there are already four subgenres: apocalyptic horror, quarantine boredom, public service announcements, and “videos that have nothing to do with coronavirus but hope to get clicks by mentioning it in the title.” For instance, “Corona Virus Quarantine Gamer Girl St Patrick’s Day Blowjob.”

The apocalyptic horror videos are hard to watch — goth makeup and gas masks are popular. But many are scary in a different way. They belong to the “Last Man on Earth” category, in which couples have sex in some eerily abandoned public space: on a subway, or on top of an abandoned building onto which they’ve graffitied “Coronavirus” and “Hell.”

In “Covid-19 Scary Porn” (which is scripted and not really in public), an “agent” in a hazmat outfit walks around at night and locates an infected woman in a white gown with white makeup and red eyes whom he then, in a fashion, falls in love with. These videos offer the appeal of all horror movies, or the many war movies made during World War II—confronting our fears by seeing them played out in the extreme.

Purell porn plays on our hand-washing obsession. In one clip, a woman named Rebecca Vanguard stands alone in front of a camera, smearing hand sanitizer on her body and cooing “I want to clean myself so good for you, Daddy. Is this what you want, Daddy? Oh God, I can feel it killing all the germs. There’s so much hand sanitizer. It’s so cold.”

In another video, “The Cleanest Place in New York City,” strippers at Sapphire Club Times Square parade huge bottles of Purell with sparklers on top…