Conservatives and Pornography

Conservatives might outwardly oppose pornography but they are the biggest consumers. New Scientist reports:

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.

“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.

Utah is the biggest consumer of porn. Purchases of porn did correlate with election results:

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.

Of course this doesn’t mean that church going conservatives skipped church to buy pornography. They just held off until another day:

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.”

Bobby Jindal Is No Kenneth the Page

Since his disasterous rebuttal to Barack Obama’s speech on Tuesday, Bobby Jindal has been compared to Kenneth the Page on 30 Rock for the manner in which he spoke down to the audience and sounded rather simple himself. It turns out that this comparison is unfair–to Kenneth. While Kenneth might seem a little simple at times, he is honest. We found that Bobby Jindal is not completely honest. There have been blog posts all week questioning a story he told regarding Katrina. His office now admits that the story was not true as told. They have tried various ways to spin the story in their favor. Kenneth would never behave this badly.