PASADENA, Calif. – Craig Gross, founder of XXXchurch, recently wondered aloud why porn consumption has declined on Sundays. Along the way, he posited several theories to explain a trend for which he offers the extremely compelling and totally convincing evidence of a large, colorful infographic that cites no source in particular.

“Used to be, Sundays were the biggest days for online porn consumption, but new statistics show this is no longer the case,” Gross wrote. “That’s good news!”

What might be just plain news to people who actually work in the online adult entertainment industry is the fact Sunday was ever the biggest day for online porn consumption, something apparently hidden from them in devious fashion by their own servers and statistical tracking software.

At any rate, more interesting than the stats Gross cited (and/or imagined) are his well-reasoned notions about why online porn usage has declined on Sundays.

First, there’s the highly optimistic and life-affirming outlook the reduction in porn use is due to a healthy rise in crushing spiritual guilt.

“Porn used to be the thing no one talked about — especially at church,” according to Gross. “But now, thanks in part to our efforts here at XXXchurch, more and more pastors have decided this is something that needs to be talked about. And so they are. With that in mind, it’s highly likely that a lot of churchgoers are hearing about porn at church and feeling guilty about using it, so they give it up.”

Of course, under the Gregorian calendar, there are six other days of the week (even for the most devout of Christians), and as Gross noted, “Monday comes around and the work/life realities hit once more, and so they deal the same way they always have: by turning back on the porn pipeline.”

I’m not clear about whether this “porn pipeline” runs parallel to the proposed Keystone XL (in which case I’m pretty sure it’s opposed by Obama but shouldn’t be, because it would create jobs and assure energy security and an ample porn supply for the future of America), but either way, it sounds like a moral and environmental disaster just waiting to happen. As such, I do wish these pious perverts would stop turning it back on, no matter how horrible their work realities might be.

Since guilt only seems to last for the roughly sixteen hours after church lets out, Gross argues there must also be a “rise in alternate activity,” by which I assume he means more people dressing like a 1980s-era Robert Smith, or sitting around listening to old Nirvana albums while sobbing incessantly and moaning how much they miss Kurt Cobain.

“There’s way more to do these days,” Gross wrote, without specifying when all these new things to do first reared their diverting heads, “and more ways to do all that more, so it’s possible that porn usage takes a dive on Sundays because porn users are off doing something else.”

This observation is both brilliant and extremely helpful to me, personally, because if Gross hadn’t suggested porn users are capable of doing things other than watching porn, I would have continued to stumble through life under the assumption porn consumers hibernate like morally deviant bears in between online porn surfing sessions.

Also important to understand is “church isn’t the only thing that rules Sundays,” as Gross noted, because there’s also the Slightly-Less-Holy Trinity of football, family and television.

“Colloquially, family gatherings largely happen on Sunday afternoons (usually after church), and we all know plenty of folks who put everything on hold during football season to root for their favorite NFL team,” Gross wrote, apparently employing some hitherto undiscovered definition of the word colloquially. “And finally, Sunday nights are traditionally the highest-rated nights for television programming… So it’s possible that casual porn users are just doing other stuff — and it’s the kind of enjoyable, stress-free stuff that feeds their pleasure centers, not the boring, stressful stuff of life that sends them running to porn in the first place.”

This makes perfect sense, because as we all know, there’s nothing boring about hanging out with your family, especially when they’re colloquial.

Gross’ third theory, the one he designated the “most tantalizing” possibility, is “attitudes toward porn and porn use are slowly changing.”

“What’s especially encouraging is that there’s no evidence indicating that the old Sunday viewing has shifted to another day,” he wrote. “It’s not like people changing the day they fill their gas tanks; this is like people driving less.”

I’m not sure what I find more enlightening about this paragraph: the fact Sunday porn viewing has not shifted to another day (including, evidently, the Mondays cited earlier by Gross as being the days Christians turn on the porn pipeline again) or the fact many Christians apparently fill their gas tanks with pornography, something I’m not likely to try myself, primarily because I haven’t been able to find any porn with an octane rating of greater than 87.

The real point here is “changes are happening,” according to Gross. He believes trends trends are “being borne out in the numbers,” by which I assume he means the numbers on his colorful infographic, which even I must admit displays different numbers than other source-free infographics I’ve seen in the past.

Whatever the explanation(s) for the alleged massive decline in Sunday porn-viewing might be, one thing is for sure: This whole subject has bored me to the point where I need to watch porn immediately — preferably something colloquial.