Congress, GOP Hypocrisy
A study of the online porn purchases nationwide by Harvard Business School uncovered something surprising (or maybe not). Residents of right-wing religious areas purchase more porn than those in liberal areas:
Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” [Benjamin Edelman of Harvard Business School] says.
For example, the study found that porn purchases in churchgoing areas declined dramatically on Sundays. And guess which religion appears to be the most porn-obsessed? Yup, Mormons:
The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. “The differences here are not so stark,” Edelman says.
Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.
Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.
Wait, there’s more:
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11 percent more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.
To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior.”
The study was based on analysis of the ZIP codes of customers of a large online porn emporium.
Topics: Congress, GOP Hypocrisy
Here are some thoughts: 1) Utah is one of the most highly connected states in the nation to the Internet (largely because it has one of the most urban populations of any state, and I would imagine Montana is likely not up there in connections or urbanism) there are therefore more possible connections per capita; 2) because people in Utah are buying porn doesn’t make them Mormons necessarily; only 2/3 of the state is LDS, 3) there is no proof that the people who say that they have more traditional values are the ones downloading the porn; 4) the comparison among states is not as useful as a comparison within states to find out who it is that is actually buying the porn; then we can see who the hypocrites are; and 5) porn is not widely available for purchase in physical form in conservative places like Utah and there is a stigma attached to having it; so naturally people are going to go online to get it where they can do it in privacy instead of having their license plates tracked even when they’re out of state parked in an adult bookstore parking lot. While they may have worked the stats here to deal with some of these issues, we should all read the report with these ideas in mind.
It would be very interesting to know how much of the porn consumption is gay porn. I have a feeling we’d see hyprocricy at it’s best.
UTAH = BOI-OI-IOOOOOONNNGGG!!!!
Pretty funny! But why would anyone PURCHASE porn when they can look at all the porn they want for free??? There’s TONS of the stuff out there and you don’t have to pay a nickle. I guess people love to throw their money away…
It is also interesting to note that the state (Idaho) with the second highest population of LDS folks (27 %) is also second lowest in porn subscription. Clearly any snap judgements about correlations should be suspect.