Christopher Ingraham compares red and blue states’ porn-watching habits:
Blue states watch more porn. But what’s the matter with Kansas? According to Pornhub Insights, Kansas leads the nation in porn pageviews per capita at roughly 194. They don’t specify what interval this is over (monthly, weekly, etc), but the state-by-state comparison is nonetheless interesting.
Plotting Obama vote share in 2012 versus porn consumption, it looks like blue states consume more porn per capita than red ones. Aside from Kansas – a clear outlier – and Georgia, the remaining top ten per-capita porn consumers are all blue. Similarly, New Mexico and Maine are the only blue states in the bottom ten per-capita porn consumers.
Update from a reader:
Kansas is getting the credit for other people’s porn habits. This is due to one the the vagaries of IP-address based geolocation. When a geolocation service tries to figure out where, geographically, an IP address is located but does not have the date to specify at a less-than-national level, it returns the location of a spot in the very center of the country – which is a spot near Wichita, Kansas. Thus, Kansas numbers are inflated by all the IP addresses for which a more specific location could not be identified.
In other porn analysis, Calvin Hennick wonders why commenters on porn sites are, on the whole, more upbeat than those elsewhere on the Internet:
Take this sampling from XVideos, a site where I’ve spent hours, ahem, researching this phenomenon:
“Her booty is the best”
“11 out of 10! This one never gets old”
“great video”
“awesome. whats her name?”
“If Kendra was my sister, I’d fk her…is that weird?”
Okay, so maybe it’s not all healthy and constructive. But consider what’s here: straightforward, sincere expressions of appreciation, along with a simple request for more information (“whats her name?”). Now consider how rare those things are on the rest of the Web.
His theory:
Porn is primal. Everywhere else online – even places where we’re anonymous – we “keep our clothes on,” so to speak, unable to shed our egos. We think we’re right about everything, and it is very important to us that everyone else knows this. But when we watch porn, we’re not trying to impress anyone or prove anything to ourselves. We’re totally naked. And so, instead of critiquing the videos, or debating their merits until we hate a person we’ve never met, we allow ourselves to relax and wallow happily in our shared humanity.
The Dish 