In the wake of Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, David Vitter, Mark Foley and others, I find the results of a new study by a professor at Harvard Business School about online pornography consumption interesting but not necessarily surprising.
Studying credit card payments and correlating the billing zip code with demographic data, the study found the biggest consumers of online pornography are in the same areas where you are most likely to hear a holier-than-thou lecture about the importance of living a "good and moral" life, and condemnation of certain lifestyles that don't follow the guidelines they pretend to follow in their own lives.
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.
I've always believed the more that people work themselves into a frenzy about "immoral" behavior the more likely it is that they themselves engage in that behavior.
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.
Maybe this built-up sexual repression explains some of the post-election anger we've been seeing?
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.
Honestly, don't you wish these people would just let loose and start fucking instead of taking out their sexual frustrations on the rest of us? The world would be such a happier place.
"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."
Hypocrites. Plain and simple.
One last note about the study. Don't worry. Individual card holders were anonymised -- you're secret is safe, for now. :-)