mad anthony

Rants, politics, and thoughts on politics, technology, life,
and stuff from a generally politically conservative Baltimoron.

Saturday, March 07, 2009

Do conservatives watch more porn?

I know this is an old story, but I've been busy with work and stuff and haven't gotten a chance to write something. Evidently, a recent study claims that conservatives buy more porn than liberals. They looked at credit-card receipts from an online porn vendor, and found that in states that are traditionally red/Republican there were slightly higher sales of porn.

Mondays WSJ OpinionJournal had a good look at the issues with the study - including that it only looked at one vendor, and that states that lean conservative tend to have more laws that make it hard to buy porn at brick-and-mortor stores, making purchasers go online.

But there is one other major problem. Much, if not most, of the porn viewed and downloaded online is not purchased - it's stolen from peer-to-peer services like LimeWire and eMule, or downloaded from torrent sites. Now, I have no scientific basis on this, but I'm going to guess that the people who use those services tend to trend younger - since it takes a little more tech knowledge to use those sites and because people often get introduced to them while in college - and younger people tend to be more blue/liberal politically. So it's not outside the relm of possibility that the reason that red states have slightly higher online porn purchasing has less to do with politics and more to do with the fact that blue states - full of younger, and often more college educated people - are watching more porn, but not paying for it.

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