Conservatives consume more porn

Yes, someone actually studied this.

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

“When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,” says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. 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.

…

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.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% 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 behaviour.”

“One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you’re told you can’t have this, then you want it more,” Edelman says.

People crack me up.

6 Responses to “Conservatives consume more porn”

1. Susan J. says:

   February 28, 2009 at 8:26 am

   Hey Stel, I thought this article was great and submitted it to Mike’s Blog Round-Up at Crooks and Liars dot com… looks like he thought it was great as well. Congrats!
2. ysbaddaden says:

   February 28, 2009 at 8:47 am

   I’m not surprised by these trends.

   It’s all part of the old, “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven,” mantra.

   In the Victorian days it seemed to be enough to espouse certain values as if they were a creed, and behave another. It seemed the shame wasn’t the act, but the being so careless as to be caught.

   The problem is they’re trying to enforce their moral codes on the rest of us, like gay marriage etc, family planning etc.

   But perhaps they want laws passed against porn to protect them from themselves. “Oh no, my right hand is twitching again!”
3. stelpavlou says:

   February 28, 2009 at 10:28 am

   !

   I nearly fell out of my chair this morning. I read C&L regularly, among others.

   Thanks Susan!
4. Batocchio says:

   February 28, 2009 at 12:30 pm

   Thanks, funny (and unsurprising) stuff. There was some court case years back where a lawyer successfully argued that the porn consumption in the city or state of his client, the defendant, proved that his client had not violated the “community standards” with his porn shop (or something like that). On the repression angle, novelist John Fowles claimed in footnotes that in repressed Victorian England, most gentlemen lived double lives in terms of vice, and 1 in 10 buildings in London was a brothel. I’m not sure whether that figure is accurate, but prostitution was indeed rampant during that era.
5. P Smith says:

   March 1, 2009 at 2:56 am

   Where’s the surprise? I’m still waiting.

   This is just more evidence of the Larry Craig, Mark Foley and Rush Limbaugh and Ted Haggard effect: those who claim to hate something are trying to hide their desire for it.
6. ysbaddaden says:

   March 4, 2009 at 11:35 am

   Conservatives consume more porn

   No big surprise, have you seen their wives?

   They can’t all look like:

   http://www.progets.com/simpsons/pics/The%20late%20Maude%20Flanders.gif