Conservatives use more porn

A new study suggests that those who are most outraged by pornography are the biggest consumers of it. In an article in New Scientist, Benjamin Edelman of Harvard Business school examined two years of credit card data that contained purchase dates and a customer’s postal code. The results of this study:

• The biggest consumer of porn was Utah, which averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users.
• 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.
• Six out of the lowest 10 porn consuming states favored Barack Obama.
• 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.
• Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.
• 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 behavior.”

Admittedly, the study was done with a limited data set of two years and trends do not necessarily equate to facts. However, the study does make you wonder about other issues that outrage conservative constituencies. Utah, the largest porn consumer in Edelman’s study, recently proposed a ban on violent video games. It would be interesting to see how many copies of Grand Theft Auto has been sold in Utah compared to a more liberal state. To quote Benjamin Edelman, “Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by.”