Monday, March 02, 2009

Who Consumes Porn?



A study looked at that question by using zip codes and information on paid pornography. You should read through it, just to note the socio-demographic variables the study uses and the one it does not. Can you guess which variable appears of no interest in the study?

Yup. It's the gender of the consumer. Rather astonishing. Granted, one might argue that the percentages of men and women living in each zip code could be too close to a constant to allow its use as a variable in an aggregate-level study like this one, but I didn't read that as the explanation anywhere. Perhaps I missed the explanation. It could be.

In any case, we are told in a writeup of the study that Americans are pretty much all equally eager consumers of Internet paid porn, except that the more conservative and the more religious states lead the consumption figures:

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.

I really can't get over that idea of the genderless Americans in this context when in so many other contexts the gender is all the write-ups focus on.

Whatevah.

Are the more conservative and more religious 'people' really the biggest consumers of porn? Perhaps. But aggregate data of the type the study used can't really prove that.