Dec 17, 2011

Bible belt states lead the US in gay pornography searches between 2004 and 2011

The states of the Bible belt, America's conservative corridor, lead the country in searching Google for homosexual online media content between 2004 and 2011. I applied Google Insights for Search to the term gay porn and filtered the results to the "Online Media" category. The specific link to the search I performed can be located through this link. The results are normalized by Google such that the scaled numbers can be compared with each other. The top 10 states that lead the United States searching for gay porn are Mississippi, Florida, West Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and New York. The results also include a map showing the relative scaling for search volume across the US.
Search volume index for gay pornography searches
Since a few of the states in the top 10 are Bible belt states, I wanted to graph the search volume index of gay porn as a function of religiosity for people from those states. I included data from a recent Gallup Poll that surveyed Americans about how important religion was to their lives. I plotted the results of this poll as a function of the number of searches for the word 'Bible' in each of the 51 states, just to confirm the that Google searches do indeed reflect the opinions and interests of the people within their states.
To no surprise, as the graph below shows, there is terrific correlation between the Gallup Poll on religion and the relative number of Google searches for the word "Bible".
Utah comes out as an anomaly because of the large Mormon population who are not as interested in searching for the word "Bible". For Utah "LDL" was more searched religious term.

Next, I plotted the Gallup Poll as a function of Google search volume index for "gay porn" and plotted the results below. The trend is not perfect, and it is not meant to be. But it does have some interesting features. The results clearly show that the most religious state, Mississippi, also leads the country in gay porn searches. Several other religious states are also surprisingly at the top of the list.
Those were the results and in my opinion, this data shows that hypocrisy is quite prevalent in the Bible belt. People may be conservative or they may be pretending to be conservative, but there is certainly a lot more homosexuality around than they are led to believe.

It is also possible that homosexuals in these states are oppressed and are reluctant to come out of the closet and fuel their frustrations through openly dating. They may be a lot more isolated and alone than gays in California, for example, which is a much more liberal state. As a result, they turn to the Internet to sexually satisfy themselves.

The table below shows the raw data. Data for the Google searches for gay porn has been extracted from the Google Insights for Research website which can be accessed through this link. Similarly, the data for the "bible" Google searches can be accessed through this link. The data for the importance of religion for the states comes from a recent Gallup Poll.

State Google searches for gay porn Google searches for "bible" Religion is important (%)
Mississippi 100 93 85
Alabama 78 100 82
South Carolina 79 85 80
Tennessee 77 93 79
Arkansas 88 91 78
Louisiana 90 63 78
Georgia 82 77 76
North Carolina 81 76 76
Oklahoma 79 79 75
Texas 93 77 74
Kentucky 90 72 74
West Virginia 89 67 71
Kansas 75 60 70
Utah 61 24 69
Indiana 75 66 68
Missouri 80 64 68
Virginia 64 62 68
South Dakota 63 60 68
North Dakota 59 48 68
Nebraska 68 51 67
New Mexico 91 47 66
Florida 100 60 65
Ohio 85 57 65
Maryland 59 50 65
Pennsylvania 80 48 65
Michigan 78 58 64
Iowa 63 50 64
Illinois 76 49 64
Minnesota 58 48 64
Arizona 80 45 61
Idaho 58 44 61
Wisconsin 65 43 61
Delaware 65 40 61
District of Columbia 56 40 61
New Jersey 77 34 60
Wyoming 66 49 58
California 75 48 57
Colorado 78 44 57
Hawaii 76 40 57
Montana 68 50 56
New York 83 38 56
Connecticut 66 28 55
Nevada 88 33 54
Oregon 57 46 53
Rhode Island 85 25 53
Washington 67 46 52
Alaska 57 49 51
Maine 78 29 48
Massachusetts 71 25 48
New Hampshire 66 28 46
Vermont 74 24 42

4 comments:

  1. Maybe the non-religious people that live in religious states feel alone in society, so they search for gay porn.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the comments!

    Yes. And I agree. I believe suppressing people only makes them more curious.

    ReplyDelete
  3. People love sex....duh!

    ReplyDelete