Republicans' Telling Sexual Fantasies

As numerous posts over the years have noted, the great majority of political sex scandals involve Republicans, including "family values" Republicans caught in same sex scandals (think GOP Senator Larry Craig or former Virginia 2nd district GOP Congressman Ed Schrock for starters).  At the same time, numerous reports find that the highest Internet porn usage is in the Bible Belt.  What's going on?  I've always believed that both phenomenon were a function of the repressive political and religious atmospheres in which the right wing types live: they are supposed to be monogamist who wouldn't even dare "lust in their hearts" over anyone but their spouse.  Yet, in reality, they want to have forbidden sex - seemingly lots of it.  A new study which looked at sexual fantasies of Republicans and Democrats seems to bear out this view of Republicans longing for "forbidden sex."  Less sexually repressed Democrats have far less longing for sex that involves infidelity.  A piece in Politico looks at the findings.  Here are some excerpts:

I surveyed 4,175 adult Americans from all 50 states about what turns them on and published the findings in a book entitled Tell Me What You Want. As part of this survey, participants were given a list of hundreds of different people, places and things that might be a turn-on. For each one, they reported on how frequently they fantasized about it.

I learned a lot about the nature of sexual desire in modern America, but one of the more intriguing things I uncovered was the political divide in our fantasy worlds.

While self-identified Republicans and self-identified Democrats reported fantasizing with the same average frequency—several times per week—I found that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to fantasize about a range of activities that involve sex outside of marriage. Think things like infidelity, orgies and partner swapping, from 70s-style “key parties” to modern-day forms of swinging. Republicans also reported more fantasies with voyeuristic themes, including visiting strip clubs and practicing something known as “cuckolding,” which involves watching one’s partner have sex with someone else.

As I argue in Tell Me What You Want, the supersized sexual appeal that non-monogamous and voyeuristic acts hold for Republicans likely stems from the fact that sex outside of marriage and multi-partner sex are huge no-nos in a political party that continues to make “traditional marriage” one of the cornerstones of its official platform and regularly funnels federal funds toward abstinence-only sex education. Nothing makes us want to try something like being told you can’t do it. This is why taboos, no matter what they are, often become turn-ons.

The appeal of the taboo stems from a long-standing principle of psychology known as reactance—which stipulates that when our freedom is threatened and we’re told we can’t do something, we want to do it even more. Many a parent has discovered this principle and used it to their benefit in shaping their children’s behavior through reverse psychology: Frame the desired act as something your child isn’t allowed to do and you just might get what you want.

To be sure, sexual fantasies have complex origins. They aren’t just a product of our political affiliation and what we’re told we can’t or shouldn’t do—there are myriad other factors that contribute to why we develop the turn-ons that we do. But my research suggests that politics certainly seems to play some role.

Following [Sarah] Palin, the next most frequently mentioned politicians in Republicans’ fantasies were John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Nikki Haley. . . .  (Note that my data were collected in 2014 and 2015 before the Trump presidency began and only into the early days of his campaign. At that time, I only received one fantasy about Donald Trump in the entire dataset.)

Again, it was nice to see my analysis about sexually repressed Republicans - and by extension, Christofascists - borne out.

How a Porn Star Became More Credible Than Trump

A piece in Vanity Fair takes a look at why Stormy Daniels is viewed by many as more credible than Donald Trump (I never give him the title "president" since it diminishes the office).  True, Trump is a pathological liar and lies about countless things where only someone brain dead and utterly incurious would know in a heartbeat - or after a quick Google search - that the words flowing from Trump's lips are complete lies or, at best, half truths.  Instead, the piece suggests that porn and porn performers have become more respectable and that as a consequence stigma that once might have destroyed Daniels' credibility has greatly abated.   Indeed, the Bible Belt has the highest use of Internet porn.  Here are article highlights and I'd like to know what readers think:

It wasn’t so long ago that the sort of person who made their livelihood by starring in a film called Sexbots: Programmed for Pleasure, or who staged a nationwide strip-club tour under the banner “Make America Horny Again,” would have had some serious credibility issues. Yet ever since she emerged as a fetching national figure, Stephanie Clifford, the adult-film actress and exotic dancer known as Stormy Daniels, has resoundingly appeared more credible than [Trump]the president. It’s the result, certainly, of Trump’s own complications with honesty, . . . . And it also has something to do with Clifford’s sangfroid as a canny, press-savvy entrepreneur and entertainer.

She seemed preternaturally collected during her much-hyped appearance on 60 Minutes. Indeed, after federal agents raided the office and hotel room of Michael Cohen, who offered Clifford $130,000 in hush money, it is [Trump] the president who has seemed ruffled and the porn star who seems demure. One presumes they will both be watching her appearance on The View on Tuesday.

But Clifford’s credibility also owes to a less obvious transformation that took place during the 1990s, when the culture, if inadvertently, was beginning to normalize porn. Long considered a medium that degraded women, exploited actors, and de-valued sexual intimacy, pornography began gaining mainstream traction in the 1980s. It became inexpensive and ubiquitous thanks to videotapes, cable, satellite, pay-per-view, and CD-ROMs, developing into a multi-billion-dollar industry.

After the introduction of the World Wide Web, in 1991, a new boom followed: online porn, which opened the kimono to every age, demo, geographic region, and kink. And with a culturally progressive president occupying the White House, porn prosecutions—which had been on the rise under Ronald Reagan—virtually dried up.

At the same time, baby boomers were coming of age, and many of them, children of the counterculture, considered porn a form of pop-culture camp. The guy and gal next door suddenly realized that they, too, could make a career for a while by getting down and dirty in front of a video camera.

The 90s was also a period of peak erotic indulgence and adult entertainment. Massage parlors and “spas”—fronts for sexual favors—set up shop in suburban strip malls. Several thousand gentleman’s clubs, many of them decidedly upscale, operated across the heartland. The stories and struggles of exotic dancers, adult-film performers, escorts, and sex workers—who were often socially and economically disadvantaged to begin with—surfaced in the press and on the screen.

Which is another way of saying that Clifford’s stock-in-trade had become rather ho-hum—a career so common that it would not disqualify someone like her from comporting (or posing for pictures) with a future president—a man whose name until recently graced Atlantic City’s Taj Mahal, once home to a strip club.

All of this occurred against the backdrop of the tabloidization of the news. In the 80s and 90s, news items that involved infidelity, crime, violence, or graphic footage were referred to, among America’s editors and news directors, as sexy. . . . . Meanwhile, TV newsmagazines and supermarket tabloids were turning the nocturnal exploits of public personalities into addictive serials.

And now, of course, Clifford seems almost a conventional player in a Trump-era news cycle that has brought us Anthony Scaramucci, Don King, and the Mnuchins taking selfies at the U.S. Mint. During these crazy days, a scandal with a porn star is at least a crisis [Trump] with precedent.

Add to all of this Trump's own sleazy escapades and serial adulteries, and perhaps the author is on to something. 

Blue States Practice the Family Values Red States Pretend to Preach

One of the ironies - and signs of the sick hypocrisy of the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who dominate politics in so-called  red states - is that red states have some of the highest levels of societal dysfunction in the country: highest teen pregnancies, the most child marriages, highest divorce rate, highest poverty levels, etc.  Meanwhile, red states also have the highest Internet porn usage and levels of prostitution.  In contrast, the blue states - godless states controlled by Satan if one believes the rants of Christofascist - have nowhere near the levels of societal dysfunction.  Stated another way, the majority of residents of blue states practice the family values the evangelicals claim to support while it is the evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians who most frequently trash true family values.  A column in the New York Times looks at the role reversal of who actually puts so-called family values into practice.  Here are excerpts:

As we watch Roy Moore thumping his Bible to defend himself from accusations of child molestation, let me toss out a verbal hand grenade: To some degree, liberals practice the values that conservatives preach.

This is complicated terrain with lots of exceptions, and the recent scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Al Franken underscore that liberals can be skunks as much as anyone else. Yet if one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it’s striking that conservatives champion “family values” even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast, people in blue states don’t trumpet these family values but often seem to do a better job living them.

[O]f 32 states, those with the highest percentage of high school students who say they have had sex are Mississippi, Delaware, West Virginia, Alabama and Arkansas. All but Delaware voted Republican in the last presidential election.

Meanwhile, the five states with the lowest proportion of high school students who have had sex were New York, California, Maryland, Nebraska and Connecticut. All but Nebraska voted Democratic.

When evangelical kids have sex, they’re less likely to use birth control — and that may be a reason (along with lower abortion rates) that red states have high teen birthrates. Nine of the 10 states with the highest teen birthrates voted Republican in 2016. And nine of the 10 states with the lowest teen birthrates voted Democratic.

“Red regions of the country have higher teen pregnancy rates, more shotgun marriages and lower average ages at marriage and first birth,” Naomi Cahn and June Carbone wrote in their important 2010 book, “Red Families v. Blue Families.”

“Blue family values bristle at restrictions on sexuality, insistence on marriage or the stigmatization of single parents. Their secret, however, is that they encourage their children to simultaneously combine public tolerance with private discipline, and their children then overwhelmingly choose to raise their own children within two-parent families.”

Liberals, in other words, may be wary of strict moral codes, but they want to make damn sure that their own kids don’t have babies while in high school. It helps that they believe in comprehensive sex education and reliable birth control.

[T]he dozen states with the highest rates of child marriage, all voted Republican in 2016.  “Child marriage is happening at an alarming rate across the U.S., but available marriage-license data show more parents, judges and clerks in red states than in blue states seem comfortable with this human-rights abuse,” said Fraidy Reiss, founder of Unchained at Last, a nonprofit that fights child marriage.

Divorce rates show a similar pattern: They tend to be higher in red states than in blue states, with Arkansas highest of all. “Individual religious conservatism is positively related to individual divorce risk,” according to a 50-state study reported in the American Journal of Sociology.

Then there’s adultery and prostitution. One large international survey found that the largest group of customers on Ashley Madison, the dating website for married people, were evangelical Christians. And a major 2013 study found that men in the Houston and Kansas City metro areas were the most likely to call sex ads, while men in San Francisco and Baltimore were the least likely to.

[S]tatistical analysis suggests that religious conservatives end up divorcing partly because they marry early, are less likely to go to college and are disproportionately poor.

So the deeper problem seems to be the political choices that conservatives make, underinvesting in public education and social services (including contraception). This underinvestment leaves red states poorer and less educated — and thus prone to a fraying of the social fabric.

Liberals and conservatives alike don’t want kids pregnant at 16, and we almost all seek committed marriages that last. It’s worth noting that Bible-thumping blowhards like Roy Moore don’t help achieve those values, while investments in education and family planning do.

Here in Virginia, if one contrasts the conservative Christian/Republican areas of Southwest Virginia with the much more liberal so-called urban crescent, similar finds result.  The areas whining about family values practice them the least and are the most socially dysfunction.  Pretend piety in the pews does not translate into practice in everyday life.

Trump Internet Trolls Upset Over Gutting of Online Privacy

I'm less than thrilled with the Republican move to gut online privacy protections put in place under the Obama administration.   Der Trumpenführer has promised to sign the GOP passed legislation. Some have argued that the move will be a boon for the FBI.  Meanwhile Verizon, Comcast and others will be racking in the cash.  Ironically, some Trump supporters are up in arms and, if you think about it, rightly so.  All those Trump supporters frequently white supremacist websites will have their data tracked and sold.  Even more humorous is that fact that all the evangelical Christians in the South - you know, the anti-LGBT "godly folk" who use more Internet porn than anyone else - will likewise have their Internet usage tracked and sold (one can only hope they get some "interesting" marketing materials mailed to them via the Postal Service!).  Lastly, there are the true political trolls at sites like Free Republic and other wacko right wing sites who will similarly be tracked.  As Think Progress reports, many of these deplorables are not happy.  Here are excerpts:

Of all the constituencies that supported Donald Trump last November—working class white voters; anti-establishmentarians; the Ku Klux Klan—perhaps none displayed more unwavering, unyielding loyalty than his army of online trolls.

You know the ones: the Pepe-loving, hashtag-tweeting deplorables. They weaponized memes the way political operatives typically weaponize phone banks, and their effectiveness was rewarded by the loving embrace of Donald Trump himself, who bent over backwards to engage with the internet’s most vile users.

Even as some voters began expressing remorse for entrusting a misogynistic failed businessman with improving their health care and saving jobs, Trump’s army of trolls—on 4chan, on gab.ai, and, most notably, on the r/The_Donald subreddit—remained steadfast.

At least, until this week.

Earlier this week, Republicans muscled a bill through Congress that strips away Obama-era protections on users’ online privacy, opening the door for internet service providers to begin selling their customers’ private information to the highest bidder. Everything from a user’s location to their shopping habits to their browsing history will be on the menu.

For a group of people whose cretinous online behavior is predicated on remaining largely anonymous, such a disruption would be unwelcome to say the least. And the fact that the Trump administration has vowed to sign such a bill into law has proven to be a very triggering turn of events.

Now, users in Donald Trump’s online safe spaces are cycling through all seven stages of grief.

But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, a scam artist who bilked hundreds of people by creating a fraudulent university atop a charter of “trust me, I got this.” Is it any wonder, then, that some Trump supporters still assume the president knows what he’s doing, even when all the evidence suggests otherwise?

These folks wanted "deregulation" and that's what they are getting.  Sometimes one needs to be careful what they wish for.  Before it's over, these folks may realize they brought a nightmare on themselves. 

Porn Site Bans North Carolina Users

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Is "Sex Addiction" a Myth?

It seems that so many times when a right wing, "family values" Republican or a member of the professional Christian crowd gets caught in a sex scandal, they immediately claim to suffer from "sex addiction" and run off to some loony "Christian" ministry to get "cured."  Nasty pig Josh Duggar is but one recent example.  But does "sex addiction" really exist?  A piece in Salon noted that it is NOT in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Yet the godly folk and their political whores in the GOP seem to use it constantly as an excuse for their bad behavior. Too me, the real truth may be that those who use the excuse are merely masking their rebellion from sexually obsessed conservative religious dogma and constantly repressed sexual urges that find little outlet except via porn or adulterous affairs (or molestation of altar boys if one is a Catholic priest).  Here are highlights from the piece:

Porn addiction does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And yet the label seems to pop up everywhere. There are counselors who warn against the addictive nature of pornography. Anti-porn advocates have been quick to blame the industry for the degradation of human relationships. And others have begun advertising treatment plans to remedy the “disorder.”

There are individuals who lose hours — even days — to pornography. There are also a number of individuals who have spent all their money on porn products and escorts. That’s a real problem. Compulsive behavior patterns are a real problem. And those consumed by them need professional help.

What’s curious, however, is that these individuals don’t seem to make up the majority of self-identifying “porn addicts” out there.

Joshua Grubbs of Case Western has been examining the concept of porn addiction for the past five years. He told AlterNet, “I noticed that people, particularly religious people, were really quick to use the addiction label. They were really fast to say, ‘I’m an addict, I’m an addict, I’m addicted to this. I can’t control myself.’ And I started to think, ‘Well, something’s not adding up.’”

He added, “You know how hard it is to convince [an addict] that they have a problem? They don’t just come out and say, ‘Oh, I’m an addict.’ They don’t do that until they’re in recovery.”

So when are these labels most likely to come up? And by whom are they assigned? Some experts suggest that the concepts of “porn addiction” and “sex addiction” are used to explain away behaviors condemned by socially (and sexually) conservative societies. Think about celebrities like David Duchovny and Tiger Woods, and what led them to come forward with their “addictions.” Dr. Mark Griffith writes, “It becomes a problem only when you’re discovered.”

Grubbs suggests most self-identifying “porn addicts” simply don’t meet a clinical criteria.
In January 2015, he published research finding that religiosity tended to be more closely related to porn addiction than porn consumption itself.

“Porn addiction, sex addiction are so closely related to religious and moral beliefs about sexuality,” Grubbs says. “If you’re coming from a religious tradition that says that indulging sexual desires outside the confines of heterosexual committed marriage is wrong, any sexual impulse that you have that doesn’t fit that prescribed criteria is going to produce guilt and distress.

“Conceptually, it would make sense that it’s easier to say ‘I’m an addict’ than to say that what I believe about sex is maybe not the healthiest belief.”

[W]e went to Amazon to check out its selection of books on “porn addiction.” No fewer than 404 results popped up in the Religion & Spirituality category. Less than half that number appeared in the Psychology & Counseling section.

Grubbs and his team found that the “psychological distress” caused by porn addiction relates to the label itself, not the material it refers to. According to his research, identifying as a porn addict was likely to bring on feelings of depression, anxiety, anger and distress. Porn use itself had no “reliable relationship” to these symptoms.

Clinical psychologist David Ley, author of “The Myth of Sex Addiction,” told AlterNet in an email, “Decades of research shows that sex and porn are not addictive. Instead, the notion of porn addiction reflects people’s moral and social fears of sex.”

Grubbs says, “Ideally what we’re doing now will help people change their approach to treatment. Just because someone identifies as a porn addict doesn’t necessarily mean you need to treat them like an addict. You need to treat them like someone who is experiencing a lot of self-stigma.” 

I continue to view deep ultra conservative religiosity as a form of mental illness. Claims of "sex addiction" might be better described as symptoms of "post-traumatic church syndrome" since the real root cause of the guilt and anxiety is insane religious brainwashing.

 

Vladimir Putin Bans Internet Porn in Russia as He Prostitutes Himself to Russian Orthodox Church

Seemingly there are no limits to what Vladimir Putin will do to stay in power or what lengths he will go in order to prostitute himself to the Russian Orthodox Church, long the opponent of modernity and democracy.  Now, in a move that will no doubt be applauded by the overweight, bearded, bigoted  men who seem to make up the Orthodox clergy in Russia, Putin (technically, it was a court, but nothing happens in Russia without Putin's blessing) has banned Internet porn in Russia.  While the move may play well with the overfed meddling clergy, the average Russian who needs vodka and a computer to escape Putin's Russia may well not be so pleased.  It's as if Internet porn were banned in America's Bible Belt: the Baptist clergy would be outwardly rejoicing while the sheeple in the pews - the highest users of Internet porn in America - would secretly be most unhappy.  Here are highlights from the International Business Times:

A Russian court has instructed Roskomnadzor, the country's state-controlled Internet watchdog, to block 136 websites hosting “pornographic material” under the terms of international conventions signed in 1910 and 1923. Vague language in the ruling, first reported by the newspaper Izvestia, means all Internet pornography could soon be illegal in Russia.

The ruling comes after a district attorney in Tartarstan's Apastovksy district cited the regulations put in place in the early 20th Century in Czarist Russia and then the USSR, respectively. All of the websites on the list, including some of the most frequently visited in the world, must be blocked within the next three days, Global Voices Online reported.

The court banned the illegal distribution of pornography, though it failed to precisely define what “legal distribution” of pornography is, meaning millions of other Russian pornography websites could soon be knocked offline as well.

This restriction on Internet activity is just the latest example of Internet crackdowns in Russia since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. The Kremlin recently enacted a “law on bloggers” that forces popular online writers to register their home address with the government, offers a bounty for anyone able to crack the increasingly popular Tor anonymity software and is forcing Western technology companies to collect and provide information on Russian Internet users.

The porn prohibition also coincides with a law that prevents using a photo of a celebrity in a meme “when the image has nothing to do with the celebrity's personality.”

Again, the parallels between Putin's agenda and Hitler's agenda of attacking "degenerates" and freedom of the press is chilling.  First it was gays, now its porn - who and what is next? 

Why Porn is Exploding in the Middle East

Here in America, Internet porn usage is highest in the Bible Belt where all the sexually repressed "godly Christians" apparently cannot get enough porn to satiate their otherwise sexually frustrated lives.  Thus, it should not be surprising that porn is exploding in another repressed part of the world - Muslim countries in the Middle East.  Whenever myth based religion deprives individuals of sexual outlets, nowadays, the Internet provides an escape valve although admittedly porn tastes in Pakistan are beyond a bit bizarre and would certainly get Rick Santorum foaming at the mouth.   The more religiously oppressed - think Catholic priests - the more strange the "turn on" it would seem.  A piece in Salon looks at the Middle East's porn explosion.  Here are excerpts:

Porn is being made and watched in the Middle East, and millions more are watching it around the planet. In fact, some of the world’s top porn consumers come out of the Middle East. According to data released by Google, six of the top eight porn-searching countries are Muslim states. Pakistan tops the list at number one, followed by Egypt at number two. Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey come in at numbers four, five, seven and eight, respectively. Pakistan leads the way in porn searches for animals like pigs, donkeys, dogs, cats and snakes.

According to research put out by PornMD, the terms “creamy squirt,” “blowjob” and even “Kendra Wilkinson” (Hugh Hefner’s former girlfriend) appear on the top 10 most-searched terms coming out of countries like Iraq, Syria and Iran. The word “Arab” is the number-one searched porn term in Egypt, Iran and Syria. Some get a little creepier. “Pain” lands at Iraq’s fourth most-searched term, while “father daughter” and “brother sister” come in at numbers four and five for Syria. Both the words “mother” and “mom” appear on Egypt’s top 10 list.

The specifics are representative of a broader change taking place in a society all but defined by extreme “moral” standards. The fact that porn trends within the region can even be tracked is impressive, given that the sale of erotic material is banned in nearly every Arab country except Lebanon and Turkey.

[R]ecently, the Saudi Arabian government announced that it had hacked and disabled about 9,000 Twitter accounts associated with the publication of pornography and arrested many of the handles’ owners. The move was organized by the Commission for the Promotion and Prevention of Vice, also known as Haia, the Saudi religious police.

The good news for porn fans in the region is that a lot of these restrictions seem fairly easy to overcome. It’s not uncommon to find vendors lining the streets armed with pornographic videos. Nor is it rare to find young men hanging around popular shopping centers, selling cards to disable Internet blocks.

Is this a sex problem? Or is it a porn problem? Or is it just another hiccup in the long, thorny path to gender equality? Women are given center-stage in a lot of pornography, after all. Maybe some in the Middle East aren’t interested in seeing that happen. Or maybe they feel that sex should be restricted to a more private and procreative space. Many Muslim states declare that cemented social morals should not be violated. The data out there, however, suggest their public may feel otherwise.

Yet Another Study Confirms that the Bible Belt is the Porn Belt

One of the goals of this blog is to expose hypocrisy and the Christofascists and other self-anointed "godly folk" never disappoint in providing a treasure trove of hypocrisy that needs exposing.  Now, yet another study has found that the so-called Bible Belt is also the "Porn Belt" of America, meaning that the Bible Belt has the highest per capita number of porn searches in the country.  Deliciously, internet porn searching correlates wonderfully well with where Southern Baptists represent the highest percentage of local church bodies.  A piece in Patheos looks at the phenomenon- which ultimately causes wrongheaded public polices -  that needs to thrown in the faces of ranting Baptist pastors whenever they launch into homophobic rants.  Here are article excepts:

According to a new study, the more you say you literally believe in the Bible, the more you watch porn. At least that’s the inevitable fact-based conclusion drawn from the biggest study of internet Google porn searches by region.

In October, two Toronto researchers, Cara MacInnis and Gordon Hodson, published a study in which they used Google Trends to analyze porn searches. Individual search records are protected by privacy laws, but it is possible to compare the popularity of search terms across various regions or states, which is what they did.

Specifically, MacInnis and Hodson linked state level information from Gallup polls asking about religious and political attitudes together with a variety of sex and porn-related search terms… their findings are in keeping with information from other sources: Business professor Benjamin Edelman at Harvard found that states with more traditional views of sex and gender have higher rates of paid porn subscriptions—meaning people who are willing to put porn on a credit card…

Smut in Jesusland: “The honest truth is that we all have our failings, Christian or not, liberal or conservative. None of us live up to our best intentions or deepest values. What’s shameful is not the fact that people find sex arousing and seek it out, even when they feel compelled to do so on the sneak. The problem is hypocrisy and the way that it distorts public policies and parenting, causing real harm to real people. For over a decade, conservatives forced abstinence-only education on young people, insisting that hormone-ravaged teens could ‘just say no’ when they themselves can’t.”

This epic public health fail contributed to the United States having the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world, with devastating economic consequences for young mothers and their offspring. Some thrive despite the odds; many do not. We can do better.

Denying young people information about their bodies doesn’t stop them from having sex. We know that. What it does is create a fog zone, a “haze of misperceptions, magical thinking and ambivalence” that puts teens at risk for sexually transmitted infections and surprise pregnancy. Teens are notorious risk takers. The army sends recruiters into high schools because at age 17 or 18 kids think bad things happen only to other people. Or they simply don’t think. Cognitive scientists tell us that the frontal lobe doesn’t develop fully until the early 20s.

Add to that a conservative, paternalistic “virginity code” that traces back to ancient times, layering shame, denial and secrecy around sexual exploration. Religious and cultural codes prizing virginity may once have helped to ensure that children were born only when parents could provide for them. But in today’s world, an antiquated purity myth can actually have the opposite effect…

Pornhub Study: Anal Sex Porn More Popular in Russia than Any Other Country

Apparently, folks in Russia are just as big of hypocrites as folks in America's Bible Belt.  Here in the USA, online porn use is highest in the Bible Belt even though the "godly folk" feign an aversion to all things sexual and "impure thoughts"- at least in public.  In the privacy of their homes, it's another matter.   Now, a new analysis done by Porn Hub - a site that is a clearing house of sorts for porn sites - indicates that more searches for anal sex originate in Russia than any other country.  Vladimir Putin's anti-gay laws outwardly have public support at least among the political whores in the Duma and numerous city councils, but among the populace, porn searches suggest that many, many Russians seek the proverbial forbidden fruit.  Here are highlights from The Independent:

Internet porn users in Russia are more likely to search for videos featuring anal sex than people from any other country, it has been reported.

According to user data collected by the website Pornhub, Russian users made a proportionately greater number of searches for anal-related material than anywhere else covered in the study.
The website said Russian users showed a greater preference for anal sex videos than those from Western countries including the US, UK and Canada.

Pornhub’s Insights team, which analyses the data, said in a statement: “Proportionately speaking, Pornhub gets more requests for anal sex from Russia than any other country,” according to a report by Pink News.

It came as Russia was condemned by the veteran campaigner Bob Geldof for its anti-gay laws, which have been used to make it illegal to provide education to children about homosexuality.

Speaking at the International Aids Conference in Melbourne, Australia, Geldof described the Russian President Vladimir Putin as “that brute in the Kremlin”, and criticised the country for the “disgraceful” level of its donations to the Global Fund to Fight Aids.

Even the Moscow Times noted the porn usage:

Anti-gay laws or not, Russians are statistically the most ardent consumers of anal sex pornography, according to a study by popular porn site PornHub.com.

The survey is based on traffic for the Canada-based PornHub, which currently ranks 75th on the list of the world's most popular websites, according to the Alexa.com Internet analysis site.

PornHub did not give any solid figures, saying only that "proportionally speaking, PornHub gets more requests for anal sex from Russia than any other country."

Given that Putin's unmarried, I cannot help but wonder what he searches on the Internet.  As they say, he doth protest too much!

Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia Watch the Most Gay Porn in America

Click image to enlarge

Once again we see more proof that hypocrisy is the norm in the Bible Belt.  Not only do we see higher divorce rates and higher teen pregnancy rates in the Bible Belt - despite supposed religiosity and adherence to the Bible as the "inerrant word of God" - but some of the Bible Belt states have the highest levels of gay porn watching in America.  The liberal northwest states of Oregon and Washington and the liberal states of the Northeast have considerably lower usage rates.  I guess it must be all the closeted married men - and, of course conservative pastors - in the Bible Belt that push the levels so high.  As the story notes, a similar phenomenon has been found in countries with the most anti-gay laws.  Here are details from Gay Star News:

A new study by PornHub and Buzzfeed has found that, on average, people in the US South watch more gay porn than people in states that have legalized same-sex marriage.
PornHub found that out of all 50 US states, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia had the biggest number of people searching for gay porn on the internet.
5.58% of porn searches by Mississippians was for gay porn, compared to 5.44% in Louisiana and 5.38% in Georgia.
Florida, Alabama and New Mexico also made the top ten gay porn watching states.
- See more at: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/mississippi-louisiana-and-georgia-watch-most-gay-porn-america130314#sthash.1FIRc5Fm.dpuf

A new study by PornHub and Buzzfeed has found that, on average, people in the US South watch more gay porn than people in states that have legalized same-sex marriage.

PornHub found that out of all 50 US states, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia had the biggest number of people searching for gay porn on the internet.

5.58% of porn searches by Mississippians was for gay porn, compared to 5.44% in Louisiana and 5.38% in Georgia.

Florida, Alabama and New Mexico also made the top ten gay porn watching states.  But some states that had legalized same-sex marriage also had high rates of internet searches for gay porn.

New York state had the fourth largest number of people searching for gay porn and California the sixth – not surprisingly considering those states’ large LGBTI communities.

Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Idaho had the lowest percentage of gay porn users, all below the 3% mark.

Previous research by Google found that the highest levels of internet searches for gay porn were often from those countries that are most intolerant to gay people such as Uganda, Ghana, Kenya and Zimbabwe.

The Christofascists' Obsession with "Porn Addiction"

If one peruses any number of Christofascist cites in addition to seeing numerous promotions of "ex-gay" conversion programs one also sees many promotions for programs that will "cure" porn addiction.  Here's a sample "ministry."  Here is another.   I guess it should come as little surprise that these repressive Christofascists organizations should be obsessed with porn because (i) the Internet has made it harder to control the private activities of their sheeple, (ii) Internet porn usage is highest in the Bible Belt, and (iii) there is LOTS of money to be made - just like with "ex-gay" conversion programs (just ask Marcus, a/k/a Marcia, Bachmann) - by marketing fraudulent programs.  A piece in Salon looks at the topic and finds that there is no proof that "porn addiction" exists.  But you will never hear that from the Christofascists.  In the last analysis, with these folks it is ALWAYS about control of others and money. Also note the pathologization of being gay.  Here are some article highlights:

Porn addiction is arguably the diagnosis of our time. The idea has thrived in a time of anxiety about the proliferation of free, ever-intensifying adult material — and how it might be changing our relationships, our sex lives and our (zombie voice) braaains. . . . . But a new study suggests there is no evidence that it actually exists.

With the help of an addiction specialist and an expert in neurophysiology, clinical psychologist David Ley did a survey of the existing investigations into porn addiction. The resulting paper is published in the scientific journal Current Sexual Health Reports and concludes that research on “porn addiction” is hindered by “poor experimental designs” and “limited methodological rigor.” Ouch. The burns don’t stop there: The authors argue that the porn addiction model ignores the real issues underlying compulsive smut-watching, and that the “lucrative” treatment industry that has arisen to address this new diagnosis has no evidence of effectiveness.

The literature is weighted with moral and cultural values. There are tons and tons of theoretical statements that are made but never evaluated. The exact same thing is true for what literature there is on porn addiction.

[W]e found what I expected to find, which is that the literature is so poorly organized and uncritically produced that there is not a lot of clinical or research usefulness to the concept of porn addiction. The overwhelming majority of articles published on porn addiction include no empirical research — it’s less than 27 percent. Less than one in four actually have data. In less than one in 10 is that data analyzed or organized in a scientifically valid way.

What we find is that individuals who are reporting or being reported as having problems with excessive porn use are likely to be male, gay or bisexual, have experienced negative life events in the past, have a high libido and a relationship mismatch around sexual desires.

Lastly, and this is one of the ones that is gonna be controversial, there is a large, lucrative industry that experiences tremendous secondary gain from the promulgation of this concept. As part of this paper we had a grad student call porn addiction facilities around the country and get an idea of the cost — and the costs were extraordinary. The average was $675 a day. These facilities were recommending or requiring stays anywhere between 15 and 90 days. Insurance doesn’t pay for this; it is cash only. The other thing that is really troubling is that there is no data to show that these very expensive programs generate positive results. There is an industry — and unfortunately I count the media in that as well, because the media makes lots and lots of hay by touting the issue of porn addiction, and even by raising the controversy of “is it real or not?” There is a lot of money to be made in keeping this thing alive.

What we’re finding more and more these days is that the claims of sex addiction are based on the pathologization of gay and bi males, . . . .  these are concepts that are turning being a gay or bi male into a disease again. Even with pornography, the research is very clear: gay and bi men use pornography much more than their heterosexual counterparts — but that use of pornography is not pathological, it’s part of their coming out process, their seeking out normative or consistent depictions of sexual behavior that meets and matches their internal desires, which isn’t present in the general media. Consistently, the research shows that gay and bi men are at far greater risk of being called porn addicts than are their heterosexual counterparts, and that is troubling.

The NSA's Porn Problem

I have often lamented the domestic spying that has been engaged in by the NSA and the invasion of citizens' privacy that has been a direct result.  The usual suspects who rally around the flag and support anything alleged to be helping in the "war on terror" simply don't want to admit that such spying can be - and not seems to have been - misused to smear those the NSA decides it doesn't like.  A case in point: the NSA has been monitoring the use of Internet porn by Muslims who the NSA labels as "radicalizers."  No proof of wrong doing by the targets seems to have prompted the spying.  Rather, the targets merely have said things the powers that be do not like.  And the details of porn usage was intended to be used to destroy the targets' credibility in their communities.  Using this standard, the NSA ought to be spying on the porn use of fundamentalist Christians in the Bible Belt who support Tea Party calls for secession and who at the same time use more Internet porn that nearly anyone else in America.  Slate looks at the NSA's porn problem.  Here are excerpts:

In the Huffington Post today, Glenn Greenwald, Slate contributor Ryan Gallagher, and Ryan Grim have an investigative piece reporting that the NSA has been tracking the online porn-viewing habits of several Muslim leaders whom it views as radicals. A top-secret document shows that the agency was considering exposing these firebrands’ Internet dalliances as a way of discrediting them. Whether it followed through on that proposal is not clear.

At first blush, this seems rather ho-hum as spying scandals go. Gathering dirt on an enemy’s sex life is one of the oldest tricks in the spying book. That the NSA carried out its surveillance via the Internet does not inherently any better or worse than bugging someone’s bedroom ceiling fan. And it’s certainly less messy and ethically troubling than trying to ensnare someone by sending a sexy double-agent to seduce him. . . . . The unstated subtext: Remember, we’re talking about people who are trying to kill us here.

 But are we really? It’s one thing to crow about Osama bin Laden’s apparently extensive library of explicit content. But from the Huffington Post’s report, it’s far from clear that the objects of the NSA’s latest porn-hunt are “valid terrorist targets.” Of the six people mentioned in the secret document, none were accused of being personally involved in any terror plots.

Yet the NSA document justified targeting all of them on the grounds that their audience “includes individuals who do not yet hold extremist views but who are susceptible to the extremist message.” Well then!

Will the NSA be publishing their peccadillos next?  Of course not, insist government officials, brushing aside reminders that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI once infamously collected quite similar dossiers on the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. “The abuses that involved Martin Luther King occurred before Edward Snowden was born,” snorted Baker, the former NSA general counsel. He said there’s no reason to believe the agency would overstep its authority by spying on U.S. citizens for political reasons today.

Actually, there is. The whole cascade of Snowden revelations amounts to a glaring reminder that secret agents with broad access to people’s personal information and little to no public oversight have little incentive to err on the side of caution or respect for privacy. The scandal here has little to do with the agency’s methods—snooping on people’s porn habits via the Internet—and much to do with the trouble it has distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate targets.
Ask yourself this: Would you be shocked if the next expose revealed that the NSA had also collected records of porn sites visited by some U.S. citizens with no connections at all to militant extremists? If so, then you and Stewart Baker can rest easy. If not, it’s clear we have a bigger problem here than the NSA and its apologists would care to admit.

I for one would not be surprised or shocked by anything the NSA might do.  It seems to see itself as above the law and entitled spy on anyone it wants, be they foreigners or American citizens.