Columnists :: Realitycheck
Utah, cyber-porn capital of the U.S. by Jeff Epperly
contributing editorWednesday Mar 4, 2009 Being an longtime amateur observer of the odd ways of the human mind in all matters sexual, one of the most amusing things I noticed upon moving to the deep South for a year not long ago was the vast number of sexually oriented businesses that cater to the apparently soiled psyches of Bible Belt denizens.
Boston proper, hotbed of godless liberalism, has, as far as I know, only a smattering of adult bookstores. I’m not sure we have any adult movie houses left in the city now that the Combat Zone has gentrified to the point of only being full of panhandlers and the super-wealthy captains/thieves of industry rather than yesteryear’s guilt-ridden suburbanites looking for a quickie. But even at its peak, the Combat Zone never prepared me for the sheer number and variety of sex shops and movie houses that seem to dot the South.
Also, sex-oriented businesses in the South were often crammed into the oddest places (that is, when they weren’t clustered together in gaudy neon-lit groupings at an intersection near a major highway interchange). Whereas in this part of the country they tend to be stuck in out-of-the-way places in railroad yards and other industrial zones, in the South you’ll find them in strip malls squeezed in-between Radio Shack and Popeye’s Fried Chicken -- and surrounded, as always, by looming, accusatory billboards preaching sin and damnation to customers who can’t miss them as they slink in and out of the parking lot.
I wondered while I lived in the South whether these things I noticed about God-fearing conservatives were my own biases, or if they really are obsessed with religion and filthy dirty rotten sex. I got an answer of sorts March 2 when the Salt Lake Tribune, of all places, published an article under the headline "Utah is No. 1 - for online pornography consumption."
According to the article by reporter Dawn House, "Utah’s per capita appetite for online pornography makes it the nation’s run-away red-light state." The article adds that "a study by a Harvard Business School professor" -- go Crimson! -- "shows that Utah outpaces the more conservative states -- which all tend to purchase more Internet porn than other states."
House notes that "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."
Harvard researchers found that in Utah, even when researchers controlled "income, age, education, and marital status, Utah residents still consume disproportionately more than people from other states." They did, however, tend to consume their online porn on days other than the days they attended church services, which sort of surprised me since I had visions of conservative dads and husbands getting out of church and immediately needing to let off steam, so to speak -- akin to the tendency of gay men to head to bars for their homo fix after they’ve overdosed on the family at Thanksgiving.
None of this should be surprising to anyone who’s noticed the tendency among right-wingers gay or straight that the louder they complain about that which offends their sexual sensibilities, the greater the chance that they are getting freaky with those same sexual acts in their personal life.
Now and then, however, a conservative has the honesty to just come out and admit they’re a bit touched in the head when it comes to sexual issues. Take, for example, John Corvino, who is a "writer, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit" and one of the featured conservatives on the not ironically named conservative gay website Independent Gay Forum.
In a recent column titled "Gay Sex Isn’t Weird. Sex Is," Corvino wondered "[w]hy are our opponents so obsessed with ’butt sex’?" (Corvino also notes helpfully that he has "pondered this question more times than is probably healthy.")
Corvino then recounts his response to a 15-year-old correspondent equally obsessed with the alleged grossness of homosexual sex: "In the abstract, of course it’s weird (and from some perspectives, gross) to think of a man sticking his penis up another man’s bum. But isn’t all sex weird in the abstract? Sticking a penis in a vagina, which bleeds once a month? Sucking on a penis, something both straight women and gay men do? Pressing your mouth -- which you use for eating -- against another person’s mouth, and touching tongues, and exchanging saliva (i.e. kissing)? Weird! Gross! (In the abstract, anyway.)"
I know this is simply a gay conservative’s variation on the "we’re just like you" argument to heterosexuals, but somehow I think that "our sex is as gross as yours" is not the most effective argument in the world. But it says a lot about the person delivering it.
Jeff Epperly is the former editor of Bay Windows. He can be reached at jepperly@laquidas.com
|
|
|
