What do Utah and Pakistan have in common?
by David Atkins
Pakistan and Utah have an interesting thing in common: porn and repression.
Pakistan, world volume leader in searches for gay porn:
Among the least tolerant nations surveyed was Pakistan, where only 2 percent of those surveyed said society should accept homosexuality. That statistic might be unsurprising, considering that gay sex is illegal under the Pakistani penal code. But what is surprising is how those views compare to Pakistani search traffic around gay-porn related terms.
As of this writing, Pakistan is by volume the world leader for Google searches of the terms “shemale sex,” “teen anal sex,” and “man fucking man,” according to Google Trends. Pakistan also ranks second in the world (after similarly gay-intolerant Kenya) for volume of searches for the search term “gay sex pics.”
In its report, Pew noted that countries exhibiting the highest levels of gay tolerance are largely secular, whereas nations where religion is central to public life—such as Egypt, Nigeria, and Pakistan—tend to reject homosexuality. But in Pakistan, what’s even more peculiar is that the highest number of hits for some of these terms, including “shemale sex,” come not from Pakistan’s cosmopolitan centers, but from Peshawar, a bastion of conservative Islam, lately known in the West as a counterterrorism frontline.
Utah, porn consumption capital of America:
Besides its political bent, Utah’s per capita appetite for online pornography makes it the nation’s run-away red-light state.
A study by a Harvard Business School professor shows that Utah outpaces the more conservative states — which all tend to purchase more Internet porn than other states.
Online porn subscription rates are higher in states that enacted conservative legislation banning same-sex marriage or civil unions and where surveys show support for conservative positions on religion, gender roles and sexuality, according to an analysis published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
The Beehive State briefly experimented with a state-funded porn czar until 2003. The study examining online porn usage from 2006 to 2008 shows those efforts apparently failed.
While Utah may not be the top state in the U.S. for gay porn searches, Utah is one of only three states (along with Oklahoma and Delaware) where anal sex is among the top three search terms.
It’s fascinating to learn just how much conservative fundamentalists have in common with one another.
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