Research based on consumer credit-card spending finds the conservatives states are the biggest consumers of online pornography.
A
nationwide study based on credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment company shows online pornography is popular in both liberal states (blue – Democrats) and in conservative states (red – Republicans). But the red states consume more porn than the liberal states.
One may expect the opposite, since conservative states teach abstinence education, no contraceptives, and they are the more religious of the two states. But the study shows contrasting results.
Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School wrote in
his report:
Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by.
One of the adult entertainment sites (their name was kept confidential) provided two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that contained the consumer’s purchase date and their zip codes. All the data was anonymised before studying in order to protect the users’ identities.
He then compared the download rates (bandwidth used) from each of the states: it found Utah to be the biggest consumer state with 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users, and Montana had the least with 1.92 adult content subscriptions per 1000.
Edelman noticed though the differences are low, he found one notable difference. In eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states, conservative Sen. John McCain was the big winner in the 2008 Presidential race; Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. Among the lowest 10, six out of 10 states chose Obama.
Other prominent facts found were:
* - 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.
Edelman also compared this data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion. He found that in states, where a majority agreed with the statement, “I have a old fashioned values about family and marriage”, they bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed with the same statement.
A similar difference also existed for the statement, “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior”.
You can check the full study
here.
