Those Krazy Kristians love their porn…..

America’s religious conservatives — and even secular conservatives — are among the first to complain about pornography and anything which makes sex easier to see. It’s therefore very curious to learn that these same conservatives are also among the biggest consumers of pornography. Among the states which lead the nation in subscriptions to online pornography sites, 8 out of 10 supported John McCain in the last presidential election. The biggest consumer was the very Mormon Utah!  According to the New Scientist:

“When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,” says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

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.

So it seems that regular church attendance doesn’t cause any genuine decrease in the consumption of pornography, it just shifts the consumption to days when one doesn’t attend church. Is it because church takes too much time, or is there a guilt factor which inhibits looking at porn? Either way, I can imagine some church leaders using this to suggest attending church more days out of the week.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.

So people who don’t want gays to marry like looking at pictures and movies of non-gays doing the nasty? I wish Edelman had more information on how many of the online porn subscriptions were to straight sites and how many were to gay sites…

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.

That is a pretty natural and obvious hypothesis. There’s another, though, that should be just as obvious: greater pornography consumption correlates with patriarchal, misogynistic views which, in turn, correlate very strongly with conservative religiosity. Perhaps these views encourage a person to seek out porn where women are treated like objects; perhaps viewing women as objects in porn encourages treating them as objects politically. Perhaps both just reinforce each other in an endless, oppressive circle.

I really do think that connection should be explored a bit more. It is, again, natural to think that people who are most repressed sexually will also seek online sources of sexual release or entertainment, but if those sources serve to reinforce the patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes which help create sexual repression in the first place, we have a pretty serious problem here (besides all those obvious ones, I mean).

In principle, it should be good for repressed people to find a source of release because it might serve to undermine repression over time. I know that it won’t always and necessarily do it, but it should hurt and that’s exactly what we might be seeing here. Maybe we need someone to supply sexually explicit material that definitely isn’t misogynistic, but I wonder if would be as appealing to all the Red State people who are currently helping keep online porn sites in business.

Tip o’ the hat to Mike Stimpson

About Post Author

Professor Mike

Professor Mike is a left-leaning, dog loving, political junkie. He has written dozens of articles for Substack, Medium, Simily, and Tribel. Professor Mike has been published at Smerconish.com, among others. He is a strong proponent of the environment, and a passionate protector of animals. In addition he is a fierce anti-Trumper. Take a moment and share his work.

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