From http://www.newscientist.com
Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers
16:18 27 February 2009 by Ewen Callaway
Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.
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.
Political divide
Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.
That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer’s postal code.
After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states – online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog – and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.
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.
Old-fashioned values
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.
It’s illegal to ship porn to Utah. I wonder if those Mormons stop to thank God for the internet.
I think Montana has the lowest numbers because they’re the drinking capital of the U.S.
The ultra-repressive Victorian era had more erotic literature writers than virtually any period in history.
The more you repress something the more it builds up within, whereas repression becomes obsession.
“The top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain”… this says it all.
What a bunch of schizophrenic hypocrites!
They BUY more porn because they are too stupid to find it online for free, lol.
Those conservatives actually trying to denial the result of this research, and blame it on whatever they could imagine of. I personally would think that all these “accusations” are an insult to the academic society. The original academic journal paper can be find here in pdf format:
http://people.hbs.edu/bedelman/papers/redlightstates.pdf
The author is a real Harvard professor gotta put some weight on this research. However, if you are interested enough to read the actual article, it contains a whole lot more information than the news articles. And the statistics used in the report is sound. Most of the results have a p-value of less than 0.01. That basically mean that his conclusions were solid and non-random in terms of the data in his study. Thus, a good number of conservatives gotta be responsible for this result; and that being said, they are indeed hypocrites.
MissBiach – Please do not get them started on the free porn!!
They go off the deep end about stuff like that.
Kay, she is referring to porn that is meant to be free by the people who produced it
Yes, but doesn’t that just stir all of you up to?
The whole porn business is going down the tubs because anyone with a camera can make porn now?
Kay, Yes that’s right everybody that has a camera in the PORNO valley can run a ad on Craigslist and get all the out of work talent from the agencies that are HUNGRY and desperate for money and will fuck in front of the camera for CHEAP and that what going on in PORN valley….like right now…sad, the stuff sucks!!!
I guess nobody bohtered to read the final paragraph of the report……
“On the whole, these adult entertainment subscription patters show a remarkable consistency;all but eleven states hhave between two and theree subscribers to this service per 1000 broadba=nd households, and all but 4 have between 1.5 and 3.5. With interest in online adult enetertainment reletively CONSTANT across regions, theres litle sign of a major divide.”
A little food for thought. There is no data whatsoever that identifies whether the subscibers are religious or not.
The virtually insignificant difference in percentage of the number ten and number fifty states might give some pause to reading anything more into the report than what the report itself actually says….”on the whole, these adult entertainment subscription patters show a remarkable consistency.
It might also be noted that six of the states on this top ten list are also in the top ten of household income, and five of the states on the lowest ten are in the bottom ten of household income.
Dont ya think that might have a little more to do with how people spend thie discretionalry income? Lets be honest now.
And none of the richest states were among the lowerst subscribers, and none of the poorest states were in the top subscibers.
It is obvious that economics plays a much larger role than ‘religious’ beliefs. The stats speak for themselves, but I guess if you just see what you want to see then you can make the stats say anything you want.
PPPMMM, what do you think of the economic pattern seen here, and od you think it is more relevent than the religious pattern?
“hey BUY more porn because they are too stupid to find it online for free, lol.”
Or maybe their protestant ethics say that they should respect property rights! LOL
The general,
Good point, I did not think of the economic aspect of this research. Though the actual journal is not explicitly stated that “conservatives” are the actual subscribers, it is only a speculation. It is, as usual, the news article seeking for something more controversial and put that in the title. i.e they are trying to magnify any kind of speculations and implications.
Is this research reflect the truth? I don’t know, but based on its database, there is a good relationship between the red states and higher porn consumption. Considering it is highly unlikely for liberals in the red states to buy significantly more porn, the implication that conservatives in those states do buy considerable amount of porn, even if they openly condemn this industry. For me, the result remains valid. BTW, it is always fun to point finger at the hypocrite, right?
Considering that this study shows a difference of roughtly 3/10th on one percent differnce from the top state to the lowest(utaah top at .54% and montana lowest .19%) I argue that there is NOTHING in this report to justify the title of the article. Without a title like the one given this article it would get no recognition at all.
And the lowest state Montana, last time I looked was a red state.
Also read…..”Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public atutude tword religion.” This survey showed absolutely no significant differnce between red and blue states(3/10th of one percent). He then chose to use a completely seperate survey of religious attitudes that had absolutely NOTHING to do with purchasing pornography to draw these conclusion
The general,
I did not conduct this research and I can not speak for Dr. Edelman. However, if you are trying to argue something, please read the actual journal paper (the pdf file), not the news article. As a matter of fact, I just re-read the paper a little bit that the original database already compiled with family income data. Hence, economic aspect of this issue is already one of the considerations. The demographic data includes income, age, education, marriage and etc. (checkout table 3).
In page 219, he wrote: “I experimented with a number of other variables, but did not find statistically significant results.” Based on his data, the results presented in the paper is not some random gibberish.
BTW, if you do want to challenge his results, please google his name and he has a blog with his e-mail address on it.
I did read the link you provided, very thoroghly I might add. And I completely agree with the summation in the final paragraph…”the subscription patterns show a remarkable consistancy.” 3/10th of one percent difference from the highest state to the lowest.