“the red states doth protest too much, methinks”
Ah, Hamlet, were you only alive to read this… or, given that you were a fictional character, were you only ever alive. Hmm… actually, given how horrific your end, maybe ’twere better you stayed fictive.
A recent Harvard Business School study (”Red Light States“) further confirmed the trend that conservatives buy more pornography than progressives. Conservatives can take comfort that maybe, just maybe, the difference is that progressives steal more porn through file-sharing.
Largest per-capita online porn consumers:
- Utah (5.47 subscriptions per 1000 broadband users)
- Alaska (5.03)
- Mississippi (4.30)
- Hawaii (3.61)
- 8 of the top 10 states were “red states” (Hawaii and Florida were the exceptions)
- states with gay marriage bans averaged 11% more per-capita-subscribers than their progressive counterparts.
(Sadly, no data as to whether the delta between them was straight or gay porn — that would’ve been very interesting indeed!) - in a related item, a statistical extrapolation showed that a hypothetical state where people 100% agree with the statement that “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour” would have 3.56 more subscribers than one where 0% agreed. (The p-value for statistical signficance was 0.009, meaning this trend had a 0.9% chance of being a mere coincidence.)
Oddly, despite the fact that Utah had almost three times the registered users per capita as Montana (1.92), this sentence made its way into the article (my emphasis):
A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.
This may be true in bulk, but I think it’d be fiercely difficult to argue that there’s no difference between the above states, and Montana and Idaho (both <2 subscriptions per 1000 users, and both, incidentally, red states).
- - - - - - - -
As a coda, I'd feel remiss if I didn't note Fox News' noted fondness for sexual/sexualized content on their news, even as their hosts rail against it. After all, it epitomizes the above-noted pattern.