According to a nationwide study of anonymous online credit card transactions, Americans living in traditionally religious, conservative states consume more online porn than their godless liberal blue state fellow citizens, with Utah leading the way. Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, analyzed anonymous credit card transactions to attempt to find a link between the rise in online porn consumption and division of "red" and "blue" states from a sociological standpoint. Ewan Callaway of New Scientist analyses Edelman's findings, noting that after Edelman factored in population density and broadband usage, Utah was actually the state with the most online porn subscriptions per broadband users. Conservative states made up the bulk of the top ten, in terms of porn subscriptions. As Callaway notes, "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. Edelman notes a difference in porn preferences between red states and blue states: "Using individual-level data from a Hitwise sample of ten million anony- mized U.
Related Articles
The term is wielded as an anti-liberal insult, but who is watching more of it online?
They're called "red states" because they're so hot and bothered, baby -- at least, that's how it's being trundled through the headlines, "it" being a recent ZIP-code based study published last week in the American Economic Association 's Journal of Economic Perspectives. However, as a San Franciscan, and especially as a blue-state Californian where most of the nation's porn comes from , I worry that it makes us look, well, frigid. The sensationalism centers around the amount of money spent in "red states" compared side-by-side with their conservative views on sexuality and gay marriage. The study finds that the reds spend an awful lot more of the cool green online to see the pink bits. Not that porn has anything to do with gay marriage -- it doesn't. And the study doesn't reveal what companies the authors worked with to get the data, which is based on credit card transactions online -- we'll never know what kind of porn these red state, gay-hatin' anti-sex baddies are actually buying. Now, if we were told they were consumers of gay pornography, sure -- that would be significant.
The GOP has called porn a "public health crisis"—but its constituents are loving it
This article originally appeared on AlterNet. They may refuse to provide cake or flowers for gay weddings, or even to attend. But online search traffic from behind closed doors in Jesusland suggests that the bad, nasty, sexual impulses righteous believers are trying so hard to shut down may be their own. For almost two centuries, what happened in the Bible Belt, sexually at least, stayed in the Bible Belt. Oh sure, there was the odd scandal involving a small-town preacher and the pretty young wife of a deacon or youth minister, or a big-name televangelist who, for example, asked male followers to get vasectomies and then examined their swollen willies. And there were the shocking-shocking-I-tell-you revelations of evangelical leaders feeling up young female interns or paying male call boys or even behaving like Catholic priests. But most people, for some reason, have had a hard time considering the possibility that conservative religion might actually augment sexual obsessions rather than icing them, that there might be a pattern of correlation between authoritarian religion, sexual repression, and sneaky sex. Individual search records are protected by privacy laws, but it is possible to compare the popularity of search terms across various regions or states, which is what they did. Specifically, MacInnis and Hodson linked state level information from Gallup polls asking about religious and political attitudes together with a variety of sex and porn-related search terms.
A website tracked how many people searched for a certain type of pornography by state. What I was inclined to do, however, is reach out to the good people at PornHub. Chris Jackson from the Pornhub Communications Team responded in quick fashion earlier this week.
