- Benjamin Edelman --Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?. Journal of Economic Perspectives 23, no. 1 (winter 2009): 209-220.
- New Scientist summary
- Charles Blow NYT blog summary
The reason this is funny (to me) is the fact that conservatives and their puritanical style of government are so ironic and hypocritical. When the Religious Right and Rush Limbaugh run your party, you know you have some issues. If the Democrats headlined a former gay porn star at their far-left conference, it wouldn't be nearly as funny as when Republicans do it at their CPAC conference, because of the RR influence.
When the RR has a conference, they choose only "non-porn offering hotels..." at first this sounds like a moral choice (to support businesses who are "more pure") but then you realize it's just so they can't control their urges to watch big manly bear porn. They also can't deal with the raw fact that gay sex is observed in the animal kingdom all the time, so they probably prefer hotels without the Discovery Channel too. Religion is like porn in many ways.
While many religious people will say that things like porn consumption make people "fall away" from the faith, it turns out that porn and faith seem to have no real impact on one another: Edelman found that a 1% increase in churchgoing in a postal zip code was correlated with a 0.1% drop in porn subscription purchases on Sunday...but that purchases through the rest of the week brought up those zip codes to the average (or above).
It turns out that abstinence until late adulthood contributes to sexual dysfunction. Perhaps it's because they spend too much time watching porn to practice the real thing and their expectations are all out of whack with reality ;)
