title: Do American States with more religious or conservative populations search more for sexual content on google?
abstract: In America, religiosity and conservatism are generally associated with opposition to non-traditional sexual behavior, but prominent political scandals and recent research suggest a paradoxical private attraction to sexual content on the political and religious right. We examined associations between state-level religiosity/conservatism and anonymized interest in searching for sexual content online using Google Trends (which calculates within-state search volumes for search terms). Across two separate years, and controlling for demographic variables, we observed moderate-to-large positive associations between: (1) greater proportions of state-level religiosity and general web searching for sexual content and (2) greater proportions of state-level conservatism and image-specific searching for sex. These findings were interpreted in terms of the paradoxical hypothesis that a greater preponderance of right-leaning ideologies is associated with greater preoccupation with sexual content in private internet activity. Alternative explanations (e.g., that opposition to non-traditional sex in right-leaning states leads liberals to rely on private internet sexual activity) are discussed, as are limitations to inference posed by aggregate data more generally.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada, cara.macinnis@utoronto.ca.
authors.forename: Cara C
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: MacInnis
authors.forename: Gordon
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hodson
mesh_terms: D004882:Erotica; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011057:Politics; D012067:Religion; D057386:Search Engine / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012725:Sexual Behavior / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology