Red States Watch More Porn Than Liberal States

Southerners generally don’t have a reputation for their vast interest on sexual exploration and open acceptance of pornography in their everyday lives; but that certainly doesn’t mean they’re not equally — or according to the following results, more — obsessed with it than the rest of us.

A recent study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior showed that states with predominantly religious and/or conservative populations are significantly more likely to look for sex on the Internet. More specifically, when searching for terms like “sex,” “gay sex,” “porn,” “xxx,” “free porn,” and “gay porn.”

The study was led by Canadian psychologists Cara MacInnis and Gordon Hodson at Brock University in Ontario and they looked at two years of Google Trends statistics from many different states in the US, and found a consistent tendency from states that largely identify as very religious or conservative.

“Across two separate years, and controlling for demographic variables, we observed moderate-to-large positive associations between: greater proportions of state-level religiosity and general web searching for sexual content and greater proportions of state-level conservatism and image-specific searching for sex,” the researches wrote.

Red States Watch More Porn Than Liberal States

There’s no denying a more strict upbringing and the dreadful promise of disapproval from your immediate surroundings will have an effect on how public these sexual desires are manifested, and it makes a lot of sense that they’d feel more comfortable with the “privacy” that the Internet offers to get their porn on. And sure, Jennifer Lawrence and others might have a different opinion on how “private” things are online, but I digress…

According to their results: “Across two separate years, and controlling for demographic variables, we observed moderate-to-large positive associations between: (1) greater proportions of state-level religiosity and general web searching for sexual content and (2) greater proportions of state-level conservatism and image-specific searching for sex.”

Now, a more cynical person might think it’s because people in liberal states have a much clearer idea of what they’re looking for and probably approach their smut searches in a less broad way, but it does say a lot that these are being at least looked for, especially the gay-related ones.

“At minimum, these Internet-search data clearly demonstrate that those living in states with greater proportions of very religious or conservative citizenry nonetheless seek out and experience the forbidden fruit of sexuality in private settings,” the researchers said.

And hey guys, as one sadly unknown American philosopher once said for posterity: “He who smelt it, dealt it.” The next time you see someone on Fox News go on a homophobic rant about the immoral uses of the Internet, he was probably looking for “gay sex”, and found a lot of it.

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