Born again and porn again: Is there a connection?

Who consumes porn? My immediate answer would have been: “Everybody.” By that I mean there would be few differences in the consumption or use of erotica between various groups. I would have been wrong.

One of the largest providers of erotica in the country allowed a study(pdf) of their credit card receipts after names and addresses and the card number were stripped out. The data that was left indicated the zip code of the purchaser. The company in question “runs literally hundreds of sites offering a broad range of adult entertainment.” The study controlled for the “amount of broadband access available in each region” since broadband is pretty much a requirement to download a lot of film material.

After all the controls were put into place what did they discover? In particular, are there any trends in the consumption of porn that we would find interesting? I think the answer is yes.

One state seems to subscribe to porn channels more often than the other states. I won’t leave you waiting—it was Utah. Yes, the Beehive state, the Deseret Kingdom of Mormonism has more porn subscribers than any other state. No doubt they are all fantasizing about their future multiple wives in the afterlife —or not. In second place is Mississippi, home of countless fundamentalists. The next tier of states in porn consumption are all Bible-belt states, but one: Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Florida. The one exception is North Dakota, which at least has an excuse—it’s pretty lonesome up there.

The third tier of states tend include West Virginia, Virginia, Missouri, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, New York and Maine. The top ten states in porn consumption were as follows:

Utah
Alaska
Mississippi
Hawaii
Oklahoma
Arkansas
North Dakota
Louisiana
Florida
West Virginia

You might notice that 8 of these states are considered Republican states while a ninth, Florida, is a toss-up with very strong Republican representation outside the large urban areas. It would be interesting to know if porn consumption within Florida increased in Republican areas.

Of the 10 states with the lowest consumption of porn, six of them went for Obama in the last election.

The trend seems to imply that conservatives, with their moralistic agenda, are more likely to buy porn than those who lean to the left. Other aspects of the study tend to confirm that. So far 27 states have passed laws against gay marriage, an issue conservatives find very important these days. Those states have 11% more subscribers to porn than the states that haven’t passed these bans.

Now these church-going, god-fearing, gay-hating, Bible-thumping types are not entirely hypocritical. The study found:

...a 1 percent increase in the proportion of people who report regularly attending religious services is associated with a 0.10 percent reduction in the proportion of purchases that occur on Sunday. This analysis suggests that, on the whole, those who attend religious services shift their consumption of adult entertainment to other days of the week….

When porn consumption is compared to the percentage of adults expressing conservative religious viewpoints, porn subscriptions are also more prevalent in states with more "traditional" values:

Where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality. In states where more people agree that “Even today miracles are performed by the power of God” and “I never doubt the existence of God,” there are more subscriptions to this service. Subscriptions are also more prevalent in states where more people agree that “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage” and “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior.”

I think back to a discussion I had in Pretoria, South Africa, with the then sitting head of the board of censors. He was surprisingly forthright during the conversation. At the time, South Africa was trying to save apartheid by creating ostensibly independent homelands for blacks. Pretoria didn’t regulate the homelands the way they did the rest of the country. One result was that the homelands, which had no real border between them and South Africa, had gambling, adult video shops, and open prostitution.

The chief censor, who was himself an Afrikaner, joked about the homelands. He noted that it tended to be the fundamentalist-inclined Afrikaners who made the trips to the homeland to gamble, buy porn and have sex with black women. I also remember having a chat with a Afrikaans game ranger from the very rural Free State. He was gay, which I thought led to problems in finding sexual partners in the tiny town where he lived. This was compounded, I assumed, by the fact that the town was almost 100% Afrikaans, with very few English present. He assured me that the Calvinist Afrikaners were far more interested in the sins of the flesh than their English counterparts.

Prof. Benjamin Edelman, who conducted the study, offers a possible explanation for this trend. “One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you’re told you can’t have this, then you want it more.” Hmm, if that is true, what does it mean for the school abstinence programs? Could that be the reason teenage pregnancy is higher in the Bible-belt states?

Photo: In fairness, while the Catholics have their own unique sexual problems, porn consumption doesn't trend upwards with Catholicism. But the photo was simply too cute to leave out.