Conservatives Love Porn -- Surprised? You Shouldn't Be

By Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check. Posted March 12, 2009.

A recent study that finds that states hospitable to disapproving anti-sex scolds are the same states in which more online porn is consumed is the sort of link bait that editors stay up nights dreaming about.  People guffawing about conservative hypocrites, people defending conservative hypocrites, and dudes who want to make it clear that every other dude looks at as much porn as they do are all sure to weigh in on something like that.  Echidne of the Snakes had my favorite response, wondering why the study didn't break down by gender when every other variable came into play.  The enormous gender gap in who gives money over to the porn industry (which is not the same as who watches porn) is the sort of thing that's sure to embarrass the men of America, and so I see why it slid off the radar as a relevant data point.  

One aspect of this study that’s getting obscured in much of the coverage is that they didn’t actually measure who consumes online porn at all.  If they did, they’d find a much higher average than some measly 5.42 out of 1,000, which is the proportion of people in the conservative, religious state of Utah who subscribe to porn sites (the highest proportion of all states).  The study merely measured these subscribers, a much different and more dedicated group of porn users than the rest of Americans, who tend to pay to play on occasion or, most likely, just use the myriad of free porn sites to get a quick fix before moving onto other things.  

Presumably, the small percentage of the population that gives over money to have a steady, uninterrupted flow of mountains of pornographic videos are people that aren't getting their needs and desires met elsewhere on a regular enough basis to compete with what porn offers.  Having seen, like pretty much all Americans, plenty of porn in my time and, unlike many Americans, having tried to analyze what it means in our culture for quite a long time, I've concluded that porn basically appeals to a presumably male audience (women watch porn, but most porn is not made with a female audience in mind) for two reasons. There's the plain old sexual fantasy that appeals to 100% of porn users, and for a smaller but probably more devoted group, there's the appeal of seeing women degraded by sex in order to make up for the indignity of having to treat women with respect in real life.   

It's human nature to respond strongly to sexual fantasy, at least portrayals of our sexual fantasies, and so that explains the appeal of porn to men, whether they're misogynists or not.  Silly but relatively harmless fantasies like insatiable women and consensual voyeurism proliferate through porn in response to this.  Unfortunately, there's also a large and possibly growing market of porn that's main selling point is its vicious misogyny.  Websites like the infamous Bang Bus make all their money by showing men insulting, spitting upon, and having coerced sex with women, all with a tone of revenge fantasy for some imagined slight delivered by women in real life.  By no means do I think that this kind of stuff appeals to all men, but there's a misogynist audience out there who happily will pay to see this sort of thing. 

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Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

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