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.
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…
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…
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.
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.
Could it be, could it be…that hypocrisy was perfected by conservatives and christians?
Thanks, Mr. Justin
Nope, I’m pretty sure all Republicans are expert at one-handed web surfing. Just ask Mark Foley or Larry Craig.
I disagree. Masturbating to pictures of young boys while on the web is “more connected” than I give the average congressperson. Shitting on the Constitution while burning money on the casket of a returned soldier is more my stereotype.
I was motivated to read the actual paper here:
http://people.hbs.edu/bedelman/papers/redlightstates.pdf
The paper got its broadband data here:
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-280906A1.pdf
It turns out that the FCC data has some massive holes in it that perfectly explain why certain states show up highly. To boot:
Utah – No cable modem sub data available
Alaska – No cable modem data
Massachusettes – No ADSL data after 2005
Hawaii – No cable modem data
This study systematically underestimates broadband–ahem–penetration in certain states. Lo and behold, a lot of podunk “red states” don’t submit good data, and it makes the porn sub rates per thousand broadband users higher. But it’s because the broadband user number is wrong.
Finally, even the study finds that porn sub rates are pretty consistent across red and blue states, so the article’s cherry picking is BS.
#22, so you assume people in zipcodes are identical now?
So looking at his tables, Mississippi and North Dakota are in the bottom ten of subscriptions per thousand people, but jump to the top 5 in terms of subscriptions per broadband.
This is a junk study for sure.
Yall mean ders free porn ot der?
Well Jesus H. Christ. The preecher neber said nuting about that. Dang, mabe I won’t have to go to hell after all.
Yippee Skippee. Now, were do I find dis here free porn? Do ‘ey have pictures of nekkid wimen? are the titties real?
The problem with the “Conservative” group is that to get conservative fiscal and foreign policy you have to hold your nose and accept religion based “conservative” social policy along with it. Liberals have the opposite problem.
Neither group really represents mainstream America. We all have to prioritize and compromise when we’re voting.
My, what a surprise; yet another conservative religion bashing post on good ole Dvorak.org/blog. Will the wonders never cease? I guess it’s a requirement for the authors here to be liberal fools.
Massachusettes and Hawaii, which don’t get any bluer, are also in the top 10. Why cherry pick North Dakota? Oh, because it suits your political agenda. How Cheney-like.
This study is at best misleading, incomplete, and inconclusive.
#41, Billy Bob,
Hey, is ya that Billy Bob Hatchins who lives down by the holler? The one that had that great big ole Hillary Sign up last year? Ain’t ya the one that got in trouble with the animal folks for what someone had done to yer goats?
Ya’s was making some of that fancy porn wasn’t ya? Jes you and your goat. I got one question fer ya. Did the goat blow his load all over your chin?
That is iffen yer that Billy Bob Hitchens. Cus, iffen yer ain’t, then never mind.
#40 and #41
Surely no one is suggesting that Conservatives are hairy palmed masturbators!
#43 QB
Nah, they don’t but they sure are good at tap dancing inside a restroom stall.
I don’t think its hypocrisy so much as a byproduct of oppression. I grew up in the south and saw this first hand. Everyone is told that sex is horrible, that porn rots your brain.. it makes you more curious. Sex and nudity are so taboo that the only outlet is porn. And since porn is so easy to find on the internet, it makes an easy outlet for people looking to escape.
So why do you figure people are so fixated on porn compared to, say, playing Scrabble(tm)? Do you figure it has anything to do with a billion years of sexual evolution? In which case, can we excuse other similar behaviors, such as human affinity to violence, because it too has been induced by evolution? Just asking.
RBG
What the study actually shows is Republican perverts are willing to pay for their porn while Democrat perverts feel entitled to free or stolen porn.