through content whose legality was in doubt. xHamster switched its video moderation to be done by paid employees, declining to comment on the reason. User trends In September 2018, the site released the top seven porn categories most popular among female users of the site, with "cunnilingus", "vibrators", and "eating pussy" ranking as the top three. From October through December 2018, xHamster reported a ten thousand per cent increase in user searches for the term "The Grinch". Coupled with the widespread popularity of holiday and film-themed pornography, Alex Hawkins credits the recent Hollywood remake of The Grinch with the stark increase in searches. The site reported an upward trend in searches for sex robots from 2016 to early 2019, pointing to increasing interest in lifelike sex dolls. In 2019 xHamster reported about 40,000 searches per month for "braces", a preference associated with teen porn but also reported as a fetish on its own. After a sex scene was aired in an April 2019 episode of the popular television series Game of Thrones, xHamster reported a marked jump in searches for actress Maisie Williams and her character's name, Arya Stark. Based on xHamster's survey of 50,000 respondents from over 150 countries, Cosmopolitan Magazine reported in May 2019 that "the ideal dream woman is a 25-year-old, 5'5", Eurasian, bisexual woman named 'Shy Yume.'" This supposed "ideal" woman has blue eyes, straight, dark, long hair, an "average" body size, "fully shaved" genitals, and is "not a feminist". In 2019, xHamster reported a 100% increase in "pirate" related searches between 18 and 19 September. The sudden popularity of pirate-themed searches, most common among 18-35 year old users, is largely attributed to International "Talk Like a Pirate Day", falling on 19 September. After the release of the 2019 film Joker, xHamster Vice President Alex Hawkins reported an "astounding" 1300% increase in "joker" related searches. In a 2020 survey of 100,000 xHamster users, the company found that female-identifying viewers are younger, more sexually fluid, and outspend their male-identifying users on porn, even while watching less frequently. Amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, an article published by Vice media outlet cited data released by xHamster which reflects a surge of interest in police-related pornography. The data, which show that search terms such as "cop", "police", and "jail" rose in popularity by 39 per cent in the U.S. and 25 per cent worldwide between the first week