Religious conservatives in the United States “Bible Belt” search for online porn more than anyone else according to a new study published earlier this month.

The original study, was published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2015 was produced by researchers from Canadian Universities, and found that American states with more religious conservatives are the ones that search more for sexual content on Google.

The following is an excerpt from the study’s Abstract:

“In America, religiosity and conservatism are generally associated with opposition to non-traditional sexual behavior, but prominent political scandals and recent research suggest a paradoxical private attraction to sexual content on the political and religious right.

We examined associations between state-level religiosity/conservatism and anonymized interest in searching for sexual content online using Google Trends (which calculates within-state search volumes for search terms). 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”…

In this new study, researchers used “Google Trends” to analyze porn searches while linking state level information from polls asking about religious and political attitudes together with a variety of sex and porn-related search terms.

Statistics aren´t a surprise. On the Daily Beast´s article from 2017: “Christian Right-Wingers Love Porn: New Studies Suggest the Bible Belt Has A Kinky Side.” Homegrown Video announced the results of a six-month study on amateur porn demographics. Just under a third of all homemade sex tape submissions were created in the United States “Bible Belt”.

Farrell Timlake the owner of Homegrown Video, an amateur pornographic video production company based in San Diego and established in 1982, explained that women are now submitting their own videos almost as much as men. “Remember, these are not porn stars, just regular people who film themselves for the world to see.”

Perhaps even more interesting is the type of user-generated content coming from areas of the country some consider repressed. “We get so many interracial tapes from states that people would stereotype as being racially bigoted areas” Timlake explains.

In addition to the “Homegrown Video” study, numbers released last spring by Pornhub, one of the world’s biggest porn sites, indicated that people in the “Bible Belt” watch more gay pornography than anywhere else in the United States.

The name “Bible Belt” has been applied historically to the South and parts of the Midwest, but is more commonly identified with the South. It consists of a line crossing various states such as: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina/South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia.

The states with the highest percentage of “gay views” is in the South. According to the numbers, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia lead the South in “gay porn” consumption, and the state with the highest percentage of “gay porn viewers” in the nation is Mississippi at 5.6%.

In the new study, the researchers offer the paradoxical hypothesis that a greater preponderance of right-leaning ideologies is associated with greater preoccupation with sexual content in private internet activity. Other reports conducted by research companies indicate similar findings concerning the Bible Belt’s apparent voracious appetite for pornography.

At the end of the day, we can only speculate as to why there is such a strong connection between the consumption of porn and professed conservative Christian values.

The Yucatan Times

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