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The Honolulu Advertiser
Updated at 1:27 p.m., Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Hawaii No. 2 in nation in online porn subscriptions, study says

Advertiser Staff

Hawaii has the second-highest rate of online pornography subscribers in the nation, according to a new study.

The study by Benjamin Edelman of Harvard Business School calculated Hawaii's rate at 1.37 subscribers per 1,000 residents. When looking at homes with Internet users, the rate was 2.19 subscribers per 1,000 homes.

Only Utah had higher rates in both categories, and that state topped two other categories in the study, which collected data from two years of credit-card purchases from adult entertainment Web sites.

The study also found that states that tend to be more conservative and religious are paying to watch slightly more porn than more liberal states.

However, "when it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," Edelman told NewScientist.

Eight of the top 10 pornography-consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election — Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions — while six out of the lowest 10 favored Barack Obama.

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays, a 1 percent increase in a postal Zip code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1 percent drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman found.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11 percent more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.

The study also found slight differences in online porn purchasing habits based on education, urbanization and income.