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What's Really Happening Behind the Bedroom Doors?

It would be inaccurate to say I love pornography, but I love that it exists.
Does porn exploit women — and men? Often. Should those responsible for child pornography spend the rest of their lives in prison? At least.
But free-speech arguments aside — it is free speech, by the way — nothing has been more influential in the development and dissemination of communication-based technologies throughout history, from photos to phones to videotapes. Johannes Gutenburg’s most famous invention certainly wasn’t used only to print Bibles and political fliers.
And then there’s the Internet.
Lenny (to a saddened Homer, who’s finally figured out Bart’s Web-based cartoon, “Angry Dad,” is about him): You’ve been world-famous for an hour!
Carl: You’re the Internet’s No. 1 non-porno site.
Lenny: Which makes you 10 trillionth overall!
And then there’s Utah, which — according to a just-released, two-year study by Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School — purchases more online porn per capita (5.47 subscribers per 1,000 homes) than any other state. It gets even better: Of the 10 states that bought the most online porn, eight voted for John McCain in November. It gets better still: States that have passed defense-of-marriage acts or anti-gay marriage measures had online pornography subscription rates 11 percent higher than those of other states.
Red states buy more porn!
It actually makes a lot of sense that people in overtly conservative, obviously repressed states would buy loads of porn online. There’s probably more peer pressure not to buy it openly, but there also are likely fewer urban areas, which means fewer strip clubs and adult book stores and adult-themed novelty shops. It’s also not a stretch to imagine that most local convenience stores probably have significantly leaner magazine racks. (To the credit of those individuals who were studied, they did purchase fewer online subscriptions on Sundays because, hey, it is the Lord’s day, after all.)
So what does all of this mean? From a cultural standpoint, it means that porn literally is unstoppable. From a business standpoint, it means that individuals who are marketing porn Web sites should spend at least as much of their budget on states containing people who not only pretend to not want the product but who vehemently scold others who lust for it openly. And from an ethical standpoint, it means several things, not the least of which is that a state containing a church that spent millions of dollars to help Prop. 8 pass in California probably could better invest that money in sexual education classes and couples counseling.
Edelman’s findings, as noted in an ABC News story, also showed there were an average of 3.6 more online porn subscriptions per 1,000 people in states where the majority agreed with the two statements: “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage” and “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior.”
Hopefully these same people stop watching so much porn. They could catch AIDS.