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Red State Special

Jill

(Totally stealing Jezebel’s title for this post).

So whaddaya know: Red state citizens consume the most online porn in the United States. Utah is the biggest porn customer in the U.S., and eight of the top-ten highest porn-consuming states went for John McCain in the last election. But don’t get too worried yet: Porn consumption decreases on Sundays, when more people are ostensibly in church. And states that have banned same-sex marriage in order to maintain traditional values consume 11% more pornography than states without marriage bans.

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.”

Here’s the paper (PDF).

16 thoughts on Red State Special

  1. I had a discussion about this with a friend yesterday… the decrease for church days is like .1%. Barely anything.

    Basically, I think that since you actually have to GO to church to be church-going, you’re at the service for an hour or two, and then you have to talk to people you see there, and there’s the travel time to get there and back… You can’t look at porn while you’re busy doing something else, you know? That’s enough for a miniscule decrease.

    You would assume the same thing would happen with work, but my ex lives in South Carolina and caught one of his coworkers watching porn at work one day. (Obviously, that was anecdotal snark, and not data.)

  2. This is certainly suggestive, but I do feel the need to point out that we have no indication (from what you’ve posted; don’t have time to go read the study so if someone wants to correct me go ahead) that *people* who say they believe in family values download more porn, since the data refer to states and not individuals; for example it could conceivably be possible that people who themselves are more “blue” download more porn if they live in red states because they feel less able to fulfill their desires in person (not saying that’s the case or even likely; just saying we don’t necessarily have anything to show that it’s NOT the case).

    sorry if i’m coming across too nitpicky – it’s just that we spend a lot of time on this side of the internet cracking down on conservatives who misuse statistics and, well, I don’t want to see us sink to their level. the findings are definitely intriguing and I hope someone follows up on this lead with individual-level data.

  4. riffing off what Isabel said, I also get nervous when stories like these make the news because part of the novelty/humor seems to be coming from shaming sexuality. I’m thinking of cases when prominent conservatives are outed as gay or have their BDSM kinks publicized, and the “liberal” reaction is to say “ha ha, so-and-so is queer.” Sure, some of the reaction comes because of the irony of the particular situation (e.g. closeted gay Congressmen campaigning against gay rights) but overall the schadenfreude reaction causes too much collateral damage to other queers for me to be comfortable with it.

    To clarify, I’m not at all saying that Feministe has done this, but I wanted to point it out because it occurs a lot in certain ‘fauxgressive’ places.

  5. I’ve thought that conservatives do a lot of projecting on to others what they are actually “guilty” of, in this case they do feel guilty, dirty, pervy for viewing porn, so they have to judge someone else as worse than they are to make themselves feel better.

  6. Utah is the biggest porn customer in the U.S., and eight of the top-ten highest porn-consuming states went for John McCain in the last election.

    But they were doing research!

  7. I DID have time to read the study and I don’t think the paper supplies good evidence that people who live in conservative states or zip codes are more likely to subscribe to adult entertainment than people living in liberal areas. Author Benjamin Edelmen seems to agree with me; the last line of the article is, “With interest in online adult entertainment relatively constant across all regions, there’s little sign of a major divide.” As the study reports, all but 11 states have between 2 and 3 subscribers to adult entertainment per thousand broadband subscribers.

    In addition, Edelmen found no relationship between adult subscription rates and either presidential voting patterns or sodomy laws. He doesn’t report overall broadband subscription rates, and the study is based on the number of adult entertainment subscribers per broadband subscription. All of this data is from one of the “top-10” adult entertainment sellers, maybe this one is oh-so-slightly favored by churchgoers and that explains the whole effect! Do we think that the relationship between voting rates and the type of adult entertainment you use matters? Edelmen cites another study (Tancer 2008) that found that adult escort services were more popular in Gore-voting states and wife-swapping sites were more popular in Bush-voting states. Edelmen talks about the MUCH HIGHER rates of web visits to porn sites.

    I am going into this exhaustively not because this issue–in and of itself–is important. But I’m worried that citation of this study is a particularly egregious example of a larger problem of slightly sloppy re-posting. This leads me to the question, with so many real cultural patterns that are associated with real problems, why are you reporting this? Why are so many of the blogs that I admire reporting this?

  8. I just read the Jezebel post, which brings up most of the same issues that I brought up. The Jezebel editors chose a different quote from the article, in there’s Edelman says, “When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different.” If I’d just read your post, or Jezebel’s title, or the posts on several other blogs, I would have gotten the wrong impression. That is worrisome. I’m with Isabel and Jessica– we should be careful to avoid sloppy statistics and sex-shaming that we criticize in others.

  9. Where is anyone sex shaming here? I thought the point was that “red states” are at least officially are very into sex shaming with their anti-gay, “pro-family,” anti-choice, pro-abstinence only education, etc. policies. And clearly it doesn’t do a damn bit of good.

  10. (. . . assuming that one’s definition of “good” is “sexually puritan.” Mine, of course, is not. But obviously it is the definition of good under the policies listed above.)

  11. Yeah, what Cara said. It’s the hypocrisy and the irony. Sex and porn aren’t shameful, but right-wing blow-hards argue that they are. So it’s funny when online porn usage (or paid-for online porn usage) is higher in the red states.

    Also, the post was a one-off. The article is linked and you can all read it. It does say that porn usage is more consistent across the country than it is different — shockingly, people in every state look at nudie pics online. It might also be that people in red states are just more likely to pay for their porn, whereas blue-staters get it for free. It was just a funny topic, so I took 4 minutes out of my day to write about it. No ulterior motives and certainly no sex-shaming.

  12. I think the key takeaway here is that Red Staters are more likely to PAY for porn online. Who PAYS for online porn these days?

  13. Agree with Isabel, Jessica and Essa, as a stats buff. But I take your point about it being a casual link rather than representing this as gospel. Your point about lack of ability to track free porn access is also a good one. Many people using work computers or with limited funds don’t indulge in porn in any trackable way, but do indulge. I have to admit, I look at XXX sites but do not want a bunch of emails coming back on penis extension so I have never plunked down a dime.

    It may indicate that red staters are less concerned with money or privacy than blue staters. But I agree with the article’s conclusion that porn use is fairly consistent across the country.

    This is anecdotal, but to the extent paying for porn and stripping are connected, from when I was stripping in a high volume club, there were a number of ways one could tell who was going to be a “consumer” and none of them had to do with politics.

  14. I pointed this out in the Jezebel post, and it’s not very important BUT

    this study only focuses on people who have porn subscriptions. Many people (especially young people) don’t have porn subscriptions and get their porn for free (whether by streaming sites such as porntub or pornhub or xtube, etc, or torrents).

    Perhaps people in blue states are more likely to look at free porn.

  15. The reason for this is because porn is illegal in Utah and “Bible Belt” states, therefore online consumption is naturally higher.

    People are so stupid.

  16. Not sure if someone’s covered this in the comments already but the people over at Sociological Images have already gotten to this.

    This is from the paper: “On the whole, these adult entertainment subscription patterns show a remarkable consistency: all but eleven states have betweeen 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.”

    Not surprising.

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