Red-state residents buy the most online porn

Updated

A Harvard Business School assistant professor who had access to customer receipts from dozens of adult websites found something titillating: The more conservative and religious a state is, the more likely its residents are to buy Web porn.

As someone who helps big companies like Microsoft and AOL with internet fraud, Benjamin Edelman, Ph.D., had access to two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included purchase dates and each customer's ZIP code. Using that with existing demographics, he found that of the 10 states where porn is most consumed, eight of them gave their electoral votes to John McCain. Out of the 10 states with the lowest consumption, only four did.

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

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