Likely though, it’s pointing to a much larger social issue. What Pornhub’s numbers are showing could potentially be hypocrisy in the Bible Belt. To be out and proud is just not that feasible of an option because a) how do you find a partner in an area where gay culture is as oppressed as it is and b) how do you walk the streets with that partner when the chances of ridicule and public shaming are intolerably high? To be an LGBTQ member of society in these parts of the U.S. So while it may be easy to assume that conservative Bible thumpers are watching gay porn in their spare time, (and likely, many of them are) keep in mind that there are still many people in the south who have queer, homosexual or bisexual orientations.īecause expression of these orientations is snuffed out by the anti-gay culture of these states, likely what is happening is that anyone who identifies as anything other than straight is confined to experiencing their sexuality only with the help of what they put on the computer screen. Keep in mind though that Pornhub did not collect information of users’ political or religious views. A billboard near the centre of Alabama, a state where 4.97% of Pornhub searches are for gay porn. When considering these numbers, it’s easy to want to make a connection between the two. The conservative Christian (and dare we say intolerant?) values that are predominant in these states seems to clash drastically with the desire to watch gay porn. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with.
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Least of all in the United States this kind of video. The shock factor of these statistics is obvious. However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Among states with legalized gay marriage most gay porn watch people in Hawaii, New York and California. Of those states, the top three leaders in consuming gay porn were Hawaii, New York and California.įor anyone questioning Pornhub’s credibility, consider that the porn site has 35 million daily users. Those in the Bible Belt even beat out the states where gay marriage is legal. To put that into perspective, Montana has the lowest percentage at 2.6. Mississippi is actually America’s biggest gay porn consumer- their percentage of gay porn viewers sits at 5.6 percent. Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia lead the country. Their report showed that the states with the highest percentages of gay porn viewers lie in the country’s south. This news comes after Pornhub (one of the largest porn sites in the world) released numbers on U.S.
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“One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you’re told you can’t have this, then you want it more,” Edelman says.Apparently the Bible Belt is America’s biggest consumer of gay porn. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.” 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.
![religious states consum more porn gay porn religious states consum more porn gay porn](https://media.feministcurrent.com/uploads/2020/11/hypno-scaled.jpg)
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. Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.
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However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds. Old-fashioned valuesĬhurch-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. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama. Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.Įight 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. “The differences here are not so stark,” Edelman says. The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users Montana bought the least with 1. That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer’s postal code.Īfter controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states – online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog – and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.