This is been everywhere on the news…. Check it.

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and
blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the
nation: the liking for online porn.

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainmnet provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

“When it comes to porn  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.

Political Divide

Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft
and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens
of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the
firm.

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.

After 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.

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content
subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least
with 1.92 per 1000. “The differences here are not so stark,” Edelman
says.

Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.

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.

Old-Fashioned Values

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.”

“One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you’re told you can’t have this, then you want it more,” Edelman says.