This article features two of my favorite things in the whole world: 1) Pointing out the hypocrisy of social conservatives and 2) independent research.
Benjamin Edelman, who works at Harvard Business School and part-time as a consultant preventing credit card fraud for AOL along with an "adult entertainment trade publication" that took in $2. 8 billion dollars in revenue in 2006, had access to two years' worth of thousands of credit cards--and their associated postal codes. Curious, he decided to study these postal codes to see which states consume the most porn, and any other differences in porn subscriptions. Naturally, he controlled for broadband access and population, and although he found that there wasn't that much variation between states, there was enough to conclude that the states that tended to be the most religious--and, as reflected in the policies of those states, the most anti-gay--also had the highest average numbers of online porn subscriptions per capita.
Some of the indicators of online porn subscription "density" in an area don't really need to be said--for example, postal codes with high elderly populations are less likely to have households with porn subscriptions than are those with large populations of my 15-24-year-old peers; higher income (but not graduate degrees, which are negatively correlated with internet porn consumption) are associated with more adult-content subscriptions, as are areas with universities and high rates of college enrollment.
But the good stuff starts on page 8 of the report, which I recommend reading. For example, Utah--home of the magic underpants, and home to a population that provided key funding for Prop 8--was at the top of this list--5.47 porn subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users. Guess those chastity pants ain't so effective after all, huh?
Even more perversely, Edelman tells us that:
"Subscriptions are slightly more prevalent in states that have enacted conservative legislation on sexuality (regression results on file with the author). In the 27 states where “defense of marriage” amendments have been adopted (making same-sex marriage, and/or civil unions unconstitutional), subscriptions to this adult entertainment service are weakly more prevalent than in other states (p =0.096). In such states, there were 0.2 more subscribers to this adult web site per thousand broadband households, 11 percent more than in other states."
But residents of the top ten states (in terms of porn subscriptions per thousand broadband users) such as Utah, Mississippi, Alaska, and North Dakota aren't just hypocrites at the voting booth. In states where (according to data from the Pew Value Survey) a majority of residents agree with such idiotic statements as "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behavior," porn subscriptions are more prevalent--up to 3.6 per thousand more--than what demographic control factors such as age, education, and income would predict--the AIDS question, hilariously, was correlated with the second-highest difference in the predicted value of porn consumption, 3.56. (The question that yielded the highest difference from predicted values was, "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," which is just as hilarious!)
There is also a difference between porn subscriptions on Sundays and on other days of the week--just as other studies have found that religious people are more likely to give to charities, volunteer, or "be charitable" in other ways on Sunday and Sunday only, even in states where porn subscription "per broadband capita" is high see fewer subscriptions on Sunday than on the rest of the week--and this difference is statistically significant, and does not hold for less-religious zip codes.
The last, and perhaps most illuminating, finding from this study is the type of porn that is favored in different areas. States and districts that went to Kerry in 2004 have more hits on adult escort sites, while "red" states and districts tend to favor--ready?--wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and what Edelman vaguely describes as "sites about voyeurism."
While Edelman ultimately concludes that while statistically significant, the differences were small enough not to warrant conclusions about a true national divide, the differences that were present tell me something--the people who care more about the contents of a woman's uterus than the woman herself, who care more about some narrow definition of the "sanctity of marriage" than the equal protections guaranteed U.S. citizens under the law, don't care about these things because of thoughtful religious study or strong moral convictions. They care about these things because they see women as objects and servants and human incubators and means to an end--whether that end is a sense of manhood for having fathered a bajillion children, an orgasm, a clean house, or a meal. The fact that someone actually believes that AIDS is punishment for "immoral sexual behavior" yet feels perfectly okay with Googling and slapping down a few bucks a month for videos about "wife-swapping" is deeply disturbing.
I don't "swing" and I don't subscribe to porn, and I'm not saying anything about the morality of watching porn or swinging (which I still think is different from "wife-swapping," since I have friends who do the former but the latter sounds just icky and sort of--medieval). It's none of my business how others choose to conduct their private sexual lives, as long as they're not hurting or exploiting or yadda-yadda-yadda-ing anyone. But some people are quite vocal about the morality--or lack thereof--of other private acts, such as gay sex--or, hell, even gay LOVE, birth control use, and premarital sex. Which is why it's funny that those people are likely the greatest contributors to the adult entertainment largesse, especially such derogatory variants as wife-swapping and voyeurism (voyeurism, I think, implies a lack of consent--right?).
I'm not saying that what people who condemn others for their sexual practices choose to do, in their own house, on their own time, with their own money, isn't okay, or that they're bad people for doing it, or that those activities should be illegal; far from. But "Judge not, lest ye be judged" does come to mind.
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Comments
Conservative ideologue's in the United States at the present moment seems to have gone so far down the rabbit hole that I do not believe that they see those contradictions within themselves. Sad really and somewhat scary for our country.
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LOL! Love it.
Q: How many Mormons should you take fishing with you?
A: At least two. If you only take one, he'll drink all your beer.
Edelman's paper makes a classic error of statistics - to assume a cause and effect relationship between two correlated variables. His work would be a lot more relevant if he had done a comparison study of, for example, internet gambling. Or if he was somehow (God forbid) able to show that people who subscribe to Internet porn also make large contributions to churches.
To simply assume that the small number of internet porn subscribers (5%) is a cross-section of the resident population is junk science of the worst kind.
1. Conservative states have higher birthrates and correspondingly larger concentrations of younger people. You know, the ones who buy porn?
2. The states specifically mentioned are sparsely populated states with a much higher percentage of their residents living in rural areas. For those of you who have never lived in the boonies, there aren't a lot of video stores PERIOD, much less places to rent pornography. If you want to jack off to something that's not in your head or on cable tv in BFE, you better have broadband and a credit card.
It makes sense that areas which may be miles away from other people would be high in voyeuristic pornography.
1) With regards to rural areas having few strip clubs, porn shops, etc., Montana had the LOWEST number of internet porn subscriptions per 1,000 people with broadband, if you read the study. Montana is one of the most rural states in our country, yet the numbers control for people with broadband internet, so something besides spatial isolation is behind that trend. Check out that study; I know that a lot of the states near the bottom of "per broadband capita" were more rural than, say, Utah (which for the record certainly has its share of strip clubs) as well. There's something else going on.
2) And it ain't age distribution. For one thing, Edelman controlled for age, knowing that this would be an obvious issue. For two, other states and areas--such as Cambridge and Boston, college towns both--with high numbers of young people have much lower numbers. So there's something else going on besides that, too.
3) The large and statistically significant drop in subscriptions on Sundays. If the people who subscribe to xxxnastysluts.com represent the last bastions of secularism in their socially conservative regions, then why don't they watch porn or subscribe to porn on Sundays? It's a weekend, presumably everyone ELSE is off at church, there's nothing to do but sit in front of the computer and have some bonding time with your right hand. Given the sheer magnitude of reliable studies with much higher numbers and much better methods demonstrating that religious people (and only religious people) are more likely to do good things and less likely to do bad things on Sunday (and only Sunday), why does that same relationship hold with porn if the claim is that the people consuming it are not religious? If this finding had been excluded from the study, or if Edelman hadn't gotten these results, I would have been inclined to disregard the other findings. However, I think this correlation is a key relationship to suggesting--but definitely not proving--some element of correlation between social conservatism, religiosity, and porn consumption.
2. The study didn't "control" for age. The author did go back and compare raw numbers to generic "expected" data based on age, but the numbers reported here don't reflect an age control.
3. You're right to think "other factors" also play a role. Alaska, in addition to being one of the "youngest" states and the least densely populated, also has the highest male-to-female ratio in the nation. Utah, in addition to being basically a rural state and THE "youngest" state in the country, also has extremely restrictive laws regulating the distribution of pornographic magazines and videos/DVDs, substantially limiting the availability of "hard copy" porn.
In other words, I think this is still telling us a whole lot more about age/sex demographics than it is about religious hypocrisy.
There are some passages in the Bible, even in the new Testament against homosexuality, and against divorce, abortion is a trickier issue and is mostly a made up issue that's not really addressed in the Bible, but, there are far more verses about helping the poor, about helping widows and orphans, and about loving your neighbor. American Fundamentalist Christians are creating a bunch of little rules they can follow so that they can ignore the big ones laid out by Jesus. Most of them aren't really Christians at all, or at least, don't really have a clue how to be one.
I'm probably falling into the "Judge not, lest ye be judged." category by saying this, but I'm sick and tired of tyrannical "Pastors" that are advocating a theocracy that cannot even properly be called Christian. They're giving out a set of rules to their flock, which consists of those that either don't have the mental capacity or religious interest to gain enough knowledge to realize they're being duped into an incorrectly interpreted, militant version of Christianity that is not Christianity at all.
In short, mission work should be done by those in the know to these religutainment centers to hand out some C.S. Lewis, explain the gap theory, so we can forget about this silly intelligent design not lining up with scientific fact (there is no contention between the two if you know how to read the original greek, arameic, hebrew, etc. The bible states rather explicitly what scientists have been discovering for the past hundred years or so), and in short, letting them know that a significant portion of us Christians would appreciate it if the rest of y'all would quit making us look like idiots and zealots.
But I guess that would take away their opportunity to be idiots and zealots, which is, apparently, all they're really after anyway.
And if you wanna look at porn, look at porn. God knows you're a screw up, that's why he sent his kid to show you the way to heaven. To expect yourself to be anything other than a screw up is antithetical to Christianity's biggest teaching.
Alright I'm done. *phew*
I know I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Send the bigots and hypocrites to a world where they can be one.
But I think Tom is right. I think it's a bit sketchy to have a broad conclusion as your title: "Conservative Christians for Internet Porn."
Before I go further, I don't care. I've been blogging too long to take myself or any of us seriously. I mean, it's not like conclusions any of us draw mean anything. I guess I think that any study that says, "This part are of the country voted republican (even though that could be 52% of the population) and there are a lot of [whatever kind of] person who vote republican. So apparently, more of that person engage in this or that behavior" is probably stretching too far.
Statistics are like billiards. Every ball you add into the mix causes your inaccuracy to rise exponentially. By the time you trail three or four variables behind your conclusion, I'm not sure the conclusion is worth much.
To me, that explained everything about religious sexual morality.
It boggles my mind that people don't actually see through that bullshit... There must be a part of the brain that sits back and laughs at this shit and eggs it on that is very enlarged in these people.
Hell, one 'very religious' person that I know committed adultery with someone elses wife, while married himself, and now he and the now ex-wife are living together with her kids! Oh, and as 'rightous' and 'holy' as the day they were born. You see, this God that everyone fears, well He brought them together and 'encouraged' them to 'see the dead marriages' they were in and 'change' and 'grow' in His name...
So I guess if God tells you to break one of HIS commandments, it's OK? Funny how this God type thing works... God ting it wasn't that 'shall not kill' thing. Although they are rabid 'Warr of Terra' supporters...
I guess I'd have to be married though...and have a wife...oh whatever, I'll work around it.
Wife swapping it is! Wife Swapping 2009 Rocks!
I guess I'd have to be married though...and have a wife...oh whatever, I'll work around it.
Wife swapping it is! Wife Swapping 2009 Rocks!
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but when I post articles like this about studies, I'm usually just trying to "let the ideas out of the box" for people to play with. People are right to be careful about interpreting causation from the correlations, but at the same time, ideas have to come from somewhere. Before you can do the research needed to untangle causes, you need to know that there's an interesting phenomenon to be explained.
Suzi Parker (Sex in the South: Unbuckling the Bible Belt) points out that home sex toy parties do their biggest business in the south -- because of the absence of sex toy/porn/slutty attire stores ...
Somewhere in his past posts Real Preacher posted what the bible says regarding Homosexuality, and He said it is not expressly forbidden in the Bible
Allie Griffith,
Your point here is well taken. Of course even Conservatives who are computer literate would know the codes.
I tend to view these statistics as an incomplete, at best a glimpse of what may make interesting data if complete in who is paying for porn. There are though probably plenty who are not.
I do admit over the years I have found that those who are more open about sexuality I find less likely to be attracted to porn. They also have healthier attitudes toward sex and most may not be monogamous in their younger years but eventually they settle on a single partner and monogamy without having that longing for what they may have missed. I suppose you could say they experienced it (sexual experimentation) , found it lacking and moved on.
I would like to point out a true difference here when we speak of Christians. They are a very diverse lot, even among those who would call their selves Evangelicals. We have a woman who attends our music camp who is an Evangelical and whose political views are relatively liberal. She lives her beliefs as does her entire family. To me they personify what a Christian should be, chartable, non-judgmental, loving and caring. Her children range in age from 4 years to 21 years of age. All are wonderful children, very well adjusted and again what one would expect a true Christian to be. The entire family plays music together, folk and bluegrass.
On the other hand several years ago I knew a high school counselor who once told me that a high proportionate number of girls who she had approach her regarding molestation from parents were from Fundamentalist Christian families. Worse more often than not she was told it was none of her business what happened within the family. She had been a counselor for over a decade and was very disturbed by this. Naturally all these cases would be reported and she did receive threats by doing so from these Christian (Un-Christian) individuals.
But again most Fundamentalists are not perverts, but it seems as if some hide within their skirts.
Especially after your post gets put on the Front Page, I think your scientific side would want to make it clear that the headline and content of the post are no longer supported. Otherwise, the casual reader who comes across this will believe that something is factual when it is not.
Science is about evidence and truth, no?
There is plenty to mock in every religious belief, why did you feel the need to take a cheap shot at Mormons, you ham eater? Not sure how that furthers an otherwise thoughtful, research driven post like this.
While I'm always willing to jump on any bandwagon that exposes religious hypocrisy, Clark Carpenter is right, you can't find much porn in Utah without going on-line and there are other factors that were not considered as well.
It must drive the Utah powers that be nuts that they've been able to regulate it out of their state so well until the internet took it out of their control.
The more a group of society rallies against sexuality, the more sexuality will become expressed in increasingly radical ways. I personally think that the amount of time these radical right-wingers keep preaching against sex shows the amount of time they spend actually thinking about sex.
Clark Carpenter's posts are a good example of skeptical critical thinking by a trained social scientist.
If these findings hold up there are consistent with the following.
1. A large majority of the Internet traffic in Moslem countries is to porn sites around the North Atlantic, India, and Israel.
2. Steve Landsburg reported a few years ago that USA states with laxer Internet porn laws (or laxer enforcement), had lower sexual assault rate as reported to the FBS. He explicitly argued that the ability to consume porn in private made young men more civilized, because privacy enabled nature to complete its (sticky) course.
In much of small town USA, 7-11 doesn't sell Playboy. Video stores won't sell or rent anything rated harder than R. Most young men (women) are extremely embarrassed to buy condoms (K-Y) at the drug store. In this world, Internet porn transmitted by broadband is a technological revolution.
And it could simply be that people in the boonies have been slow to cotton on to the fact that there's a lot of free stuff out there.
To Christians who have posted on here--the Christian conservatives (often associated with promoting disgusting, bigoted legislation that has no place in this country) was the target demographic in the title, NOT all Christians. Just like it's crazy to assume that all Muslims are gun-toting, wife-beating, terrorist sympathizers, it's equally ridiculous for you all to assume that I assume that all Christians are wife-swapping, porn-watching, gay-hating zealots. I didn't think this actually needed to be stated, but for the record, there it is. So to all of the REAL Christians who actually read the Bible and strive to interpret it rationally, to all the Christians who live by what Jesus said rather than what parts of the Bible appeal to their base instincts--i.e. Real Live Preacher and Existence of Contradiction--who may have taken offense at this post, or saw it as me taking a cheap shot at a religion (that I do, for the record, respect) I owe you guys a huge apology. To the less-magnanimous variants of Christians who are offended by the tiny possibility that some of your peers may be hypocritical, I'm not sorry. This is an interesting study--although the conclusions, if we can draw any, are shaky and warrant further research--and I'll stop critiquing you guys when you stop trying to take away constitutional rights from U.S. citizens.
RE: the Mormon jokes. I'm irreverent. Deal with it. If what I write offends you, don't read it. And for the record, if Reform Jews had pumped money into another state's election in order to take equal protections away from that state's citizens, I would be more disgusted at my religious leadership than I would at people who took out their anger on yarmulkes (or lox--I love the stuff, but the idea of smoked raw fish is sort of gross if you think about it). And no, I don't have any Mormon friends; I do have lots of ex-Mormon friends, and their ex-religion creeps them out a lot more than it does me.
Oh, and the QUESTION MARK at the end of the title is there for a reason! It wasn't actually conscious when I banged out the title and hit "publish," but I do want to emphasize that these are very interesting findings and they require much MORE investigation than Edelman has undertaken.
Also, one of the main points I made at the bottom was that ALL of the numbers for every state/zip code were so small, and there was really very little difference in terms of numbers. We're talking .005 people vs. .002 people; it may not matter. Again, I assumed that people would actually read this and know that I know it, but apparently not.
I emphasized, somewhat inarticulately, that the numbers are small, the dataset improvised, and therefore the findings should be taken with a grain of salt, so no, McGarret50, no one debunked this post--this is an ongoing discussion, not a fucking fight. I've already acknowledged that the demographic issues may complicate matters both in the post and in subsequent comments--I feel I've done my job. That said, there are two main reasons why I think there's something to the conclusions I presented, although perhaps not as much as may have come across in my post. 1) The Sunday thing (mentioned in another comment), which NO ONE including me has a good alternative explanation for, and 2) The fact that the correlation between online porn subscriptions and answers to survey questions indicating socially conservative values (i.e. AIDS may be God's punishment for blah blah blah) are controlled for age, population etc, and that the number of subscriptions are always a bit higher than would be expected given demographic characteristics of that state/zip code. Granted, this may well be due to the paucity of sex shops, strip clubs, etc. in this area (which, of course, are a function of said ol' fashioned values)--that's a very good point that I didn't even consider, and thank you to everyone who has pointed that out. Inchkachka's right on--this is showing data, playing with ideas, and seeing what other folks think.
There is another reason, not based on statistics but on anectdotal evidence--you know, Rush Limbaugh with his oxycontin, Al Gore with his private jet and fancy house, that Nevada senator with his "wide stance," Ted Haggard with his male escort/meth dealer, and on and on and on. When people get all wrapped up in telling other people what to do, they think about those vices (or non-vices, as the case may be) a lot; sometimes, they forget that what they're condemning is actually fairly normal behavior, and don't see the disconnect between privately engaging in something and publicly condemning it. I don't know why this happens, and I don't know how OFTEN it happens, but it's more than we think. And that's my purely anecdotal basis for thinking there may be a link here--although I'll be the first to admit that nothing is proved yet.
I'm sure most porn "Hypocrites" are in congress or on wall street.
Seems like hypocrites and lying go hand in hand these days.
Really, what IF Christians liked porn? What IF they even liked sex? What IF they even liked watching gay sex? What IF they even like having gay sex? What IF they admitted it?
Then would they be happier? Would they be able to support healthy expressions of sexuality between adults? Would they be less likely to support bans on marriage between adults who love each other?
Btw - for the commenter who is stuck on how many people in Utah like porn, this study seems to have looked at one pile of credit cards, right? Not every single credit card in that's ever been used for porn, right? So, couldn't there be a lot more porn users in Utah? Is that a fair assumption? And what IF it's true? Then what?
And what about youporn? Free free free. I'm just sayin'.
Never.
Did I say never?
They don't. Research shows that of all the liberals in Massachusetts, Beverly Hills, New York, Wisconsin, hardly any of them ever indulge in porn.
Never.
Call a spade a spade.
Those people who rail against porn but are the biggest consumers of it are nothing but a bunch of lying hypocrites. And they can't get any, so they've got to fill their hands.
I blogged about this at my own site, intotemptation.net. The most relevant comments in the report are:
"Controlling for broadband access, states show remarkable similarity in their subscription quantities ... The ratio of these extremes is just 2.85—relatively small in comparison to states’ diversity in other respects."
Huge ado about very little. Don't let the facts get in the way of your opinions, though.
I was wondering about addressing the issue slightly differently.
If we were all nudists, would there be all this sexual dysfunction/fascination out there? In other words, how much does all the shame, sin and guilt which surrounds sex cause the very "problems" we're trying to control?
Or, perhaps, shame is actually required to make sex exciting. Strip away (if you will) that shame and, poof, there goes all the titilation.
If that's true, who's the hypocrite?
Wouldn't it be great to see the porn stats correlated with regional data on, oh... teen pregnancy, STDs, and domestic violence? We could call it the "shame index."
Since I finally met one actual Christian - i.e., someone who has created his life around the emulation of Christ - I've taken to using the terms "Christianist" and "Christofascist" to refer to the rest, depending on pissed off I am. This allows me to drop a boulder in the bath water without hurting the baby.
RATED
Need anyone say anything more?
Good question: Which existed first? Hypocrisy or religion?
I loved in a 'good catholic neighborhood' and the number of young girls that were sexually assaulted was just phenomenal. It got me to wonder whether catholicism was just a clever cover for pedophiles. That was decades before the 'priests buggering young boys' thing that the Vatican and the US catholic 'church' tried to sweep under the rug blew up in their faces. I know many catholics and most of them are in the 'recovering' category.
Maybe if catholic priests could 'get their rocks off legally' (with a woman) then maybe countless young boys could sleep without troubling nightmares of their experiences in the 'church'...
There is a misnomer that proposition 8 and other same sex marriage amendments were passed by conservative Christians alone is totally un statistically possible. Fact is the majority of Americans from all walks, faiths, and political affiliations voted against same sex marriage. This same majority voted for Obama.
It seems that for now the majority of people in this country religious and not do not see the need to change the definition of marriage to accommodate 1 to 2% of the population. Fact is when the idea of same sex marriage is put to a vote, even California (which is as far from the Bible belt as you can get) voted against it as well.
"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.
Edelman was working with two entirely different sources of information to derive his correlation: anonymized credit card records and earlier attitude surveys. There's no justification at all for saying the people who object to porn are the same ones who are buying it--the most he can say is that they live in the same regions. Sure, we could probably compute the probability that a given individual has expressed a view opposing porn and has bought it, but that would be tricky, and the article doesn't even try.
(It should go without saying that my commment isn't a reflection on this OS post, but rather on the cited material. Hope that's okay. It's just for perspective, for readers who may not spend a lot of time reading this kind of academic work.)
From my understanding University of Utah is a secular state school and has no affiliation with the Mormon Church. Although Utah is the stronghold of Mormonism, it is only about 60% Mormon. And of that 60% only about 50% are active.
As for a higher than average purchase of online pornography in states that have voted against same sex marriage, does that mean Christians or any other group opposed to same sex marriage are making the purchase.
The conclusions of the author's study does little to show that those who purchase pornography in Utah are devote Mormons or any other faith.