Porn in the USA: Conservatives Are The Biggest Consumers
(I think that this is harmless, but will go through the motions of warning that this may be NSFW).
New Scientist points us to a study done by Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School that shows that conservatives love their porn:
…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,” Edelman says….
…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.
…Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage…
According to Edelman’s paper, 8 of the top 10 states signing up for porn subscriptions voted for John McCain in last year’s presidential election, Florida and Hawaii were exceptions. Of the states with the lowest subscription rate, 6 out of the lowest 10 voted for Barack Obama.
So what does this tell me? That here is one other front of the Culture War that conservatives are losing badly — after all, they are (as was widely known) big consumers of the thing they claim is so harmful. This paper (while not exactly definitive, but good enough for its point) begins to document the real waste of energy it is to try to control what grown people view. The BushCo DOJ spent a great many resources targeting this industry, which always struck me as a particularly stupid policy. And their focus wasn’t entirely on child porn (which is beyond the pale and folks making that should be sent to the guillotine.) No doubt a corner of the family values set will continue to raise cain over grown up choices, but after this, you do know to ask them tips on the particularly hot sites.
It’s just cause people in the blue states steal porn rather than paying for it. 🙂
And, of course, because we conservatives are interested in the opposite sex!
And, of course, because we conservatives are interested in the opposite sex!
Does this mean that there is no such thing as gay or lesbian porn?
I love this!
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Sunday porn abstinence? Any other day is A-okay, but no smut on Sunday.
Never On Sunday!
So you equate gay marriage and porn lovers? They are substitutable?
I love liberal math!!!
And, of course, because we conservatives are interested in the opposite sex!
excluding all the pastors, Senators, Congressmen and Campaign workers…yes I agree
So you equate gay marriage and porn lovers?
Hmmmmm…..direct substitution for natural, biological intimacy.
I love liberal math!!!!!
It’s just cause people in the blue states steal porn rather than paying for it. 🙂
well i got news for you. You are even dumber than I thought because if you think you have to pay for it you are going to the wrong site….
think porn and you tube and you have the most valuable free website on the internet right now beating Google
“It’s just cause people in the blue states steal porn rather than paying for it. ”
true
“well i got news for you. You are even dumber than I thought because if you think you have to pay for it you are going to the wrong site….”
Truer
I also wonder if one of the reasons that conservative states are larger consumers of porn is due to the lower information factor there — if the only info you get is Abstinence Only and Wait til Marriage perhaps they need the venue for the, ahem, possibilities, than others do…..
This is not at all surprising to me, as someone who was raised in the Bible belt. I learned that the people who proclaim the loudest about their own personal holiness are usually the ones that have something to hide. I’m amazed that people are surprised by this at all.
Conservatives interested in the opposite sex, where are you getting that from the article? The reason cultural conservatives rail so much about teh gays is because they’re mighty tempted by it.
Stimulus money.
Apparently, the liberals prefer to exploit it for money… tax it:
http://www.contracostatimes.com/california/ci_11810832
“I didn’t quite understand. Apparently porn is right up there with mom and apple pie.”
And your point is? Liberals aren’t trying to tell everyone that porn is bad for you and society. Which is the core conservative point.
If it is legal and people think it should be taxed, who cares? You can always not buy it.
Another ‘study’ which says nothing. In those states you can not know the subscriber’s political beliefs one way or another.
Your desperation is getting apparent.
Read this one and learn something.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110002930
And here’s Disparate Mike — spamming his disinformation while never even reading the source material cited.
This ‘study’ seems to be an exercise in sloppy curve fitting.
My libertarian leanings make me yawn at the mere mention of porn. It tends to be predicatble and boring. It has some merit as satire or with a comic theme but it is better to do the stuff than to watch it.
I do recommend “Orgasmo”, a satirical anti-porn work in which an LDS Missionary becomes a porn star in LA and teams up with a sidekick with two PhDs from MIT. It is not X-rated but Mitch Romney would not approve.
Note that there is no graphic material as racy as a National Geographic in my personal library.
It’s been my longstanding opinion that sexual repression is the primary tool of conservatives the world over, particularly through hardline Christianity and hardline Islam. Both relegate women to “traditional” housewife roles, while quietly promising men that when they get to heaven, they’ll get everything they denied themselves on Earth. This sexual repression takes two primary forms – increased anger and secret perversion. The anger gets directed at whoever the hardliners declare an enemy. The secret perversion (porn, solicitation of prostitutes, adultery, rape, etc) serves only to drive the person to act more religious, to obtain God’s forgiveness. Much like Newt Gingrich, who thought he was so freakin’ holy that God would just have to forgive all his affairs.
Thanks for the tip, Donhoni.
If you read the original study (Cassandra apparently either didn’t, or didn’t understand it, despite calling someone else out on it), and not the New Scientist’s shameful misrepresentation, you find that the study author did not find the data showed that conservatives consume more porn. The study separated by state, but there’s no way of knowing who in that state actually bought the porn. It’s possible that in conservative states, a more restricted market leads more people online. Or that liberals are less likely to PAY for porn. I’ll quote the last two paragraphs from the study directly:
“I experimented with a number of other variables, but did not find statistically significant results. In the 13 states that forbade sodomy immediately prior to Lawrence v. Texas (2003), subscriptions to this adult entertainment service are more prevalent than in other states, but insignificantly so. Furthermore, I found no significant relationship between subscriptions to this adult entertainment service and presidential voting in 2004, based on poll data by congressional district. However, using individual-level data from a Hitwise sample of ten million anonymized U.S. Internet users, Tancer (2008), finds that adult escort sites are more popular in “blue” states that voted for Gore in 2004, while visitors from the “red” states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism.
On the whole, these adult entertainment subscription patterns show a remarkable
consistency: all but eleven states have between two and three subscribers to this service per thousand broadband households, and all but four have between 1.5 and 3.5. With interest in online adult entertainment relatively constant across regions, there’s little sign of a major divide.”
Shoddy reporting by the New Scientist. I guess the “new science” doesn’t involve reading or math.
I sure did read the study and the article.
And the trick to your argument is that you shouldn’t expect a difference in porn subscriptions between red and blue states.
But that isn’t true, is it? Red state family values types rail against porn and the liberals who either defend it, or who won’t join them in their jihad against it. The expectation of such a study would be that conservative states would have a markedly smaller use of adult entertainment sites. Or — at least — be smarter about covering their tracks (as in not leaving the credit card receipts behind).
Certainly the base data shows that red states have more subscriptions per thousand broadband users, which you wouldn’t predict based on their traditional politics. The fact that the difference in the numbers of subscriptions between red states and blue states is statistically not significant is reported by the New Scientist. But the news is still that these so called socially conservative states are big consumers of the stuff — certainly not what you would expect from their usual preaching at the rest of us. And the news still is — as usual — that these people undermine again their position in the culture war.
The fact that Utah – Utah! – is number one is news enough.
In Utah, the only place you can get virgin wool is from the sheep that can outrun the republicans.
For the TMI file: Art Downs’ tastes in porn.
“I sure did read the study and the article.
And the trick to your argument is that you shouldn’t expect a difference in porn subscriptions between red and blue states.”
Why would I expect a red state to consume less porn than a blue state? It’s only a “trick” if you pretend that Utah is 100% socially conservative Republicans. I offered a plausible explanation why there might be more consumers of porn in culturally conservative states: ordinances against sex shops and swinger’s clubs leads people online. Besides, not every single person in that state is red. It’s not like 100% of Utah-ites (or whatever they are) woke up and voted for McCain last November. There are sections of your hypothesis that are true (“Red state family values types rail against porn and the liberals who either defend it, or who won’t join them in their jihad against it”), but the data doesn’t prove the conclusion in your headline.
I’m a libertarian who despises the GOP for just the sorts of reasons you suggest, but I can’t pretend that the data in the survey leads to the conclusions you draw. They don’t, and the survey author says as much.
It’s Utahn.
Way to walk back your argument, Joe R.
They are a Red State because they pretty routinely vote for the conservative politics of the day. Which includes a fairly extreme social conservatism –one that wants to make pornography alot more illegal than it is now. It certainly makes all kinds of sense that a socially conservative state would actually live in accordance to their overstated politics. Even though a place like Utah has Blue elements (the Mayor of SLC is a Dem) there is little room to look at the the prevailing politics and pretend that social conservatism isn’t the ruling view.
I make no claims that the author does not make himself. I am only drawing attention to the fact that conservative states do — in raw numbers — outconsume blue states in online porn (which is in the study) and drawing attention to the hypocrisy of the thing. And it is in assessing the hypocrisy of the thing that you find the difference in expectations.