Porn watchers beware! These are scary times. It hardly needs mentioning that the COVID-19 pandemic is terrifying everybody in the world right now. Now, on top of that threat, we’re being warned of the looming threat of what one British optician has dubbed “porn eye.” 

With millions of workers the world over staying at home, doing our work remotely, including meetings and other tasks that were once done without a screen in front of our faces. Even during our downtime, many of us are video calling, watching entertainment on our devices, and playing video games. And, as we reported last week, that also means more people are spending a lot more time watching porn between conference calls. 

That’s why Tom Broughton, an optician at the glasses company Cubitts, is warning the masses. “Porn eye is a condition which puts undue stress and tension on eyes through continuous mobile phone viewing,” he said, as quoted by Metro.uk. “Watching adult material on a smart-phone is not going to help your eyesight; you are looking at tiny images and sometimes the video quality can be poor, which leaves you straining your eyes.”

Broughton, the frontman for an anti–porn eye campaign from Cubitts, was quoted by UNILAD saying, “We as adults know that sometimes some light relief will help us get through a stressful time, but let us not make it detrimental to our vision.”

He continued, “There’s a joke about a certain physical activity making you blind, but we want to make the serious point that as the nation adjusts to home office life, we’ll undoubtedly be more reliant on screens more than ever before.” 

In other words, wanking won’t necessarily blind you, as the old wive’s tale would have us believe. But wanking while staring at a screen 24/7 might, if you don’t care care of your eyes!

The Cubitts company is encouraging those of us stuck at home with our screens and smut to think of our eyes while we’re in quarantine. The company’s senior optometrist, Betony Spall, said: “Try to apply the 20-20-20 method: for every 20 minutes in front of a screen, take a 20-second break, and look out at an object 20 feet away.”

Stay safe out there, perverts!

Eye photo by Victor Freitas from Pexels