This post comes with a massive trigger warning for rape, pedophilia, incest and sexual abuse.

Now, what the hell is going on? Allow me to explain.

Today, the ever-ubiquitous “the sex education I wish I had” was republished on SpunOut.ie (a great Irish website focused on young people, currently running a campaign on sexual health awareness, so check them out.) I had a little flurry of activity on Twitter and everything was lovely, so this evening I wandered over to my stats page to see the effect (if any) on my traffic. I also had a look at what search terms have been directing people here in recent days.

And lo and behold, I have discovered the most frequent search engine referrals to Massive Hassle are people searching for underage porn.

No seriously.

I KNOW, RIGHT!?

These are not even the most explicit results. A few days ago, someone who was searching for full-on child porn somehow ended up in my corner of the Internet. Honestly, I’m pretty creeped out. I feel like someone took a shit in my virtual home.

But then, of course, because my morbid curiosity obviously knows NO BOUNDS, I had to search for a couple of the less explicit terms myself to find out WHAT IN THE HELL WAS GOING ON (thank you for existing, Chrome Incognito window). Well Internet, I can happily confirm that “the sex education I wish I’d had” is officially the top result for the second search listed above (I’m not going to type it out again, or it will never stop being the first result). Philip Larkin’s Wikipedia page was just under me, so at least I’m in distinguished company.

What I have concluded from my research is:

1. The person who was searching for this stuff is probably all the same person. (I really hope it was all the same person, I will be depressed if there’s more than one.)
2. Who is not very good at using Google. (None of these results actually turned up much porn, though quite a lot of them turned up some feminist writing on the first page.)
3. Search engines work in mysterious ways.
4. The Internet is weird and disturbing place.

Brief open letters to my unsatisfied customers

Dear pedophile,

I’d tell you to get better at Google, but honestly I hope you never find the shit that you’re looking for and that your Internet breaks forever and it makes me feel kind of gross that you were on my blog, which is probably the exact opposite of what you wanted to find, since this is a blog about how women and girls are people and not various iterations of genitalia to be abused for your pleasure. 

Ugh.

And now to address myself to two less reprehensible and considerably more intrepid Googlers who ended up here through the caprice of the many-termed search.

Dear person who found my blog when searching for:

Um, your princess is DEFINITELY in another castle, but I guess I hope you find her?

Dear person who found my blog when searching for:

I guess they do, bro. I haven’t actually seen it, I just thought the trailer looked shit. Also, this isn’t really a question, so I hope you found someone else out there in the wilds of the Internet who confirmed your belief that those zombies do indeed look like people who have partaken of MDMA. And thus, perhaps, allowed you to move on with your life.

Fellow bloggers, has anything like this ever happened to you? If so, were you as freaked out as I currently am?

I am lucky enough to be someone who has lived a life free from sexual abuse and being exposed to this stuff (on my WordPress stats page, of all places) was – while disturbing and squicky – not actively upsetting or triggering. There are many people out there who are not so lucky and who also have blogs that deal with similar themes to mine. No one should have to read the list I just read without prior warning. Sigh. The patriarchy once again proving itself to be a massive hassle in small but tangible ways, lurking just below the surface, ready to remind you that there are still large swathes of the population who think a woman’s body is a sex toy, her youth a fetish and her ability to consent totally irrelevant.