What's interesting in the report is that no matter how you cut it Utah ends up having the highest concentration of internet porn useage in the United States, whether it be total amount per thousand people, total amount per thousand home internet users, total amount per thousand home broadband users, or total difference in subscribers per thousand home broadband users relative to subscription rates predicted based on
demographics.
In each case Utah is the state with the biggest internet porn users and as the article mentioned; 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 states favoured Barack Obama.
From the New Scientist article:
I am privately amused that churchgoers significantly dip their porn consumption on a Sunday before going right back to it the rest of the week, underlining some of the hypocrisy of social conservatives. Now to be fair, the total amount of porn consumption between the highest consuming states and the lowest consuming states is not great, and the general spread is pretty even, but it does reveal the vast number of hypocrites out there who are more than ready to ban marriage and sexual activity for other folks while privately indulging in all kinds of sins of the flesh that they rail against in public. Especially the champions of 'family values'. Not for the first time that this discrepancy has appeared between social conservative rhetoric and actual reality.
Quote: 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.
To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.
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."
"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.
It also reminds me of how Holland, the most liberal country in Europe, had as of two ot three years ago (haven't checked it since then) the lowest rates of teenage pregnancy, STD's and sexual attacks in Europe. Whereas Poland, a very conservative, reactionary catholic nation at the time had amongst the worst in all three areas. A counterintuitive set of facts you might think until you consider that the same phenomenon has consistently appeared in the US with the bible belt versus the rest of the country.
Talking about Holland and Utah reminded me of the first time I went to Amsterdam and shared a train carriage with a bunch of Mormons. They assured me that they were in Amsterdam on "research... to see what the modern Sodom and Gommarah looked like". Based on the research above it might be more likely that they were there to try to turn their internet fueled fantasies into reality.