Religious conservatives in the Bible Belt search for online porn more than anyone else according to a new study published earlier this month. The new study, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior and produced by researchers from Canadian Universities, found that American states with more religious conservatives search more for sexual content on Google. Researchers used Google Trends to analyze porn searches while linking state level information from Gallup polls asking about religious and political attitudes together with a variety of sex and porn-related search terms…. While researchers caution that aggregate data can’t be used to draw conclusions about individual religious conservatives, there does seem to be a strong correlation between religious conservatives and the consumption of pornography.
I’ve always believed that one’s pronounced, righteous objection to something is roughly correlative to one’s attraction to it. When you repress something, particularly in the realm of sex and sexuality, it doesn’t just go away. Something so innate and hard-wired into our collective psyche may be tamped down, but it WILL come out- sometime, somewhere, someplace. The question, of course, is what form it will take…and in this case, who will be hurt by it.
The Puritan belief that sex is dirty and that sexuality is best kept tightly under lock and key is what leads to things like sexual abuse, sexual ignorance, and Dennis Hastert. That the Bible Belt has the highest rate of porn consumption isn’t particularly surprising if you think about it for any length of time. Demonize something, make it dirty, nasty, and evil, and about all you’re really going to create is a situation in which stolen melons taste the sweetest. Even more amusing (at least from my perspective) is the revelation that Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia lead the South when it comes to the consumption of gay porn. I’ll leave it to my gentle readers inclined to parse that factoid for what they can.
The good news is that at least Mississippi’s #1 in something, right?
The researcher’s conclusion sums it up with more alacrity and detachment than I’d likely be able to manage:
the paradoxical hypothesis that a greater preponderance of right-leaning ideologies is associated with greater preoccupation with sexual content in private internet activity.
Translation: Southern Bible-thumpers are the ones most likely to be getting their rocks off via (gay and straight) Internet porn.
I could wax philosophical and/or theological over the reason why Conservative ideology and theology lend themselves so well to the desire for and consumption of pornography, but I think I’ll leave that one for my readers to ponder. I have my theories, and none of them are even faintly redolent of rocket science. To say anything else would be superfluous.
