Online porn habits in the USA revealed

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The amount of online porn watched in America hardly varies from state to state, a new study suggests.

Using two years worth of anonymous credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provides, researchers found little variation in numbers across the nation, however, those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption.

‘Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,’ said Benjamin Edelman of the Harvard Business School, who spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud.

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.

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.

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

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Monday 2 March 2009

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