The News Factor, an online Conservative News Magazine

Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers

NewScientist.com

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

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

Gee, I wonder if Edelman has “A pony in the race?” MORE AFTER THE BREAK:

Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.

That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer’s postal code.

You don’t mean to tell me that he may have established his CONCLUSIONS first and then made the statistics conform? Hmmmm? But watch out … here comes the BIG LIE OF THE DAY:

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Pornography and sex-related sites make up nearly 60 percent of daily web traffic.

Dude … a TENTH OF ONE PERCENT? You can draw conclusions from that!! Are you kidding me? Sure, a lot of Christians are in church on Sunday morning, but do you know what many of the the unbelievers are doing? THEY’RE SLEEPING IN. And I’m thinking that would account for a resulting drop in online porn purchases. Perhaps you can get your PORN CLIENT to fund a poll to find out how many of the heathens are staying in bed on Sunday mornings.

Statistics are really cool, except when they are made into journalistic “hash.” One of those writers who is particularly adept at that skill is Gun Toting Liberal, who has relished in finding that the Religious Right has finally been caught in their sanctimonious hypocrisy. His post, entitled: “Nationwide Study: Online Adult Entertainment Business Would Crumble Were It Not For The Religious Right.” He begins his revelation:

Am I shocked at the fact the online “boo-tay bidness” is alive and well thanks in large part to those who continuously go out of their way to try and ban it, criminalize it, publicly condemn it and constantly criticize those who work in the field and the customers who drool at the chance to view it? Of course I am. NOT. It’s always those who holler the loudest who are the ones you’d better watch your back around.

Although our post diminishes Edelman

I’m probably safe in saying that 99% of the people who are gleefully reacting to this headline have NOT actually gone to the Harvard study and read though the piece … making special notice of the variables that Edelman mentions. One important caveat is: “Even after holding constant income, age, and education, adult entertainment subscriptions are most prevalent in urban areas.” IN PLAIN ENGLISH, that means the results are skewed in favor of higher population areas of each of the so-called Christian/Conservative regions … meaning, of course, to anyone with enough brainpower to turn on a light switch, that the groups responsible for higher consumption of adult entertainment live in the CITIES. But does this Harvard brainiac present ANY STATISTICAL BREAKDOWN of the population demographics of the very regions on which the study is focused? Short answer … NO.

Edelman’s biggest failure is what we call, “Ecological Fallacy.“ As described by Wikipedia, this is “… an error in the interpretation of statistical data in an ecological study, whereby inferences about the nature of specific individuals are based solely upon aggregate statistics collected for the group to which those individuals belong.”

I guess we might as well include another charge while we’re at it (Gun Toting Liberal will have to be brought in as an accomplice on this one): Hasty Generalization: “… a logical fallacy of faulty generalization by reaching an inductive generalization based on insufficient evidence.”

Edelman summarizes his conclusions according to STATE but fails miserably in creating a subset of statistical analysis based on the actual target regions that account for the headline presented by the New Scientist: “Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers.”

STATISTICAL FAIL!

Interesting variations on a theme:
RedState.com: ABC News — Conservatives Are Biggest Porn Consumers?
AOL News: Porn Study Suggests Republicans a Bunch of Perverts
NewsBlaze: Study — Christians Consume Online Porn as Much as Everyone Else
Everybody wants a piece of the action … I just Googled “Conservatives Are Biggest Consumers” and came up with nearly 15,000 pages, all siting the same study. With the exception of Red State, nobody even bothered to question the study … nah, that would take all the FUN out of bashing Christians and Conservatives!

Ponderables, Religion Edelman, Harvard Business School, Internet pornography, Pornography, Statistics