Smut! Give me smut and nothing but!
A dirty novel I can’t shut,
If it’s uncut,
And unsubt-
-tle.

-- Tom Lehrer

The Internet has been a great boon to pornography. No longer do you have to drive down to the Combat Zone and sidle into a sleazy shop that smells of disinfectant and latex. Now all you need is a broadband connection and a credit card, and nympholeptic fantasies unfold on your computer in seconds. Although adult entertainment is suffering from the same recession affecting the rest of the economy, online porn remains a multi-billion dollar industry.

So who’s watching all this smut? Harvard Business School professor Benjamin Edelman did a study using zip codes associated with all credit card subscriptions of a top-10 online vendor over a two year period. The full paper is well worth reading, and can be found here:
http://people.hbs.edu/bedelman/papers/redlightstates.pdf

Here are a few highlights: The most subscribing state is Utah, where 5.47 of every 1,000 broadband households subscribed to this particular online service. I imagine there will be some interesting sermons in Mormon wards this coming Sunday. The top three are all staunchly Republican Christian conservative enclaves:

        Utah                      5.47
        Alaska                5.03
        Mississippi        4.30

In regions where more people attend church services, there’s a .10 percent reduction in purchases on Sunday. Those areas just shift their viewing to the rest of the week, consuming the same amount of adult entertainment as others. Edelman also parenthetically quotes another study that found that religious people are more charitable only on Sundays. The highest subscription rate was seen in those who had the most conservative positions in religious, gender roles, and sexuality, as measured in agreement with such statements as, “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage” and “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior.”

In New England, Maine had the highest percentage, New Hampshire and Connecticut the lowest, and and Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island on the low side nationally (2.4 to 2.7 subscriptions per thousand home broadband users).

While there seem to be twice as many broadband-equipped households subscribing to porn in Utah than in Massachusetts, the takeaway isn’t that we godless liberals are less depraved than the uptight religious conservatives. Porn has been popular since the first neolithic artist crafted a clay model of a fertile woman with wide hips and pendulous breasts. The difference probably has more to do with the sweeter taste of forbidden fruit.

“Who needs a hobby,
Like tennis, or philately?
I’ve got a hobby:
Re-reading Lady Chatterley!”

-- Tom Lehrer