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Conservatives Watch More Porn

Red states and the religious consume the most.

A new study finds that people in red states consume more pornography than their blue-state peers. Though the disparity is "not so stark," reseracher Benjamin Edelman found a positive correlation between a state's consumption of internet smut and its conservativeness and religiosity. Edelman used credit card data to tabulate porn consumption and controlled for regional differences in internet access and adjusted for population. Utah tops the porn consumption list with 5.47 "adult content subscriptions" her 1000 broadband internet users. Montana broke the red state mold but clocking the fewest subscriptions: 1.92 per 10000. Eight of the top 10 porn consuming states went for John McCain in 2008. (Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions.) States where a majority of residents say they "have old-fashioned values about family and marriage" bought more porn than those who disagreed with that statement. The same trend applies to places where people think "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behavior."