I suspect the folks most surprised by this next study will be those who should be least surprised.
A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states. When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,” says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.
However, 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.
Hypocrisy? Repression? Or maybe (I’m sure someone will suggest this) it’s all the closeted liberals who can’t be lewd and licentious in public around all those good church-going folk, so have to use the Internet to get their jollies.
Right.
That [adult website] company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer’s postal code.
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.
Well, we all know what the Internet is for. (Cue conservatives now willing to concede it was invented by Al Gore.)
The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. “The differences here are not so stark,” Edelman says.
Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.
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.
But it’s not as though the religious have no standards.
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.