This is my favorite graph today.
The chart / graph tells us which states are angels on the street yet devils… well, on their computers. The chart finds that the more religious a state is, the higher the number of Google searches for porn. The states with 80% religiousity and that are over 60 in their interest in porn (and I cannot tell how that is measured (i.e. 60 on a scale of what? as a percentage?)) are Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. I wonder what all these states have in common, other than hypocrisy.
Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post:
Cara C. MacInnis and Gordon Hodson of Brock University found that residents of more religious and more politically conservative states — often in the South — are more likely to Google things like ‘‘sex,’’ ‘‘gay sex,’’ ‘‘porn,’’ ‘‘xxx’’, ‘‘free porn,’’ and ‘‘gay porn” than their peers in more secular states. The study, published this month in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, analyzed state-level Google Trends data for 2011 and 2012, and combined it with measures of religiosity and political conservatism from Gallup surveys. “Overall,” the authors say, “a reliable positive association of moderate-to-large association size exists between state-level religiosity and searches for the term ‘sex.’” They observed similar patterns for Google image searches for sex with political conservatism.
Delaware is on the opposite end of the spectrum: We are less religious and our searches for internet sex is low.