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Friday, February 16th, 2024

Do People in Conservative States Really Watch More Porn? A Hierarchical Analysis

Author:     Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead
Source:     American Sociological Association
Publication Date:     February 26, 2020
 Link: Do People in Conservative States Really Watch More Porn? A Hierarchical Analysis
Stephan:  

An ex-Mormon reader wrote to tell me that I was missing an important trend, the fact that conservative religious groups and Republicans are the biggest consumers of pornography and that Mormons were such big porn consumers that there was even a special channel for Mormon porn. Those are pretty inflammatory statements but if she was correct it was a trend of astonishing hypocrisy going on that I had completely missed. So I did some research and it turns out she was right. The same people who are hysterically nasty to LGBTQ people trying to control their lives are, in fact, the same people who spend hours watching porn. Article after article reported this (do your own Google) but I decided if I were going to report this in SR, it had to be peer-reviewed research so it was as reliable as possible. Well, here it is, and this is the conclusion: “However, interactions between individual-level evangelical identity and state-level political conservatism indicate that evangelicals who live in more politically conservative states report the highest rates of pornography consumption.” So the next time you hear some conservative ranting on about LGBTQ folk, ask them how much porn they watch.

Abstract

Figure 1. Relationship between evangelical Protestantism, recency of pornography viewing, and state-level political conservatism.

Recent studies have found that state-level religious and political conservatism is positively associated with various aggregate indicators of interest in pornography. Such studies have been limited, however, in that they either did not include data measuring actual consumption patterns and/or did not include data on individuals (risking the ecological fallacy). This study overcomes both limitations by incorporating state-level data with individual-level data and a measure of pornography consumption from a large nationally representative survey. Hierarchical linear regression analyses show that, in the main, state-level religious and political characteristics do not predict individual-level pornography consumption, and individual-level religiosity and political conservatism predict less recent pornography consumption. However, interactions between individual-level evangelical identity and state-level political conservatism indicate that evangelicals who live in more politically conservative states report the highest rates of pornography consumption. These findings thus provide more nuanced support for previous research linking religious and political conservatism with greater pornography consumption.

Within the past few decades scholars have sought to understand how broader community norms and cultures, generally measured at the state level, might correlate with the presence of pornography in those […]

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