Utah’s porn problem Stats show porn consumption fell in recent years
D
espite our reputations as political conservatives who extoll family values, a 2009 study out of Harvard University assigned Utahns the unflattering status of being number one in the nation for online pornography consumption. But a more recent analysis by PornHub.com, one of the world’s largest purveyors of pornographic material, says the online viewing of porn has dropped 68 percent in Utah, now placing us at 40th in the nation.
Too conservative? When porn consumption in Utah was at its peak, Pamela Atkinson, former chair of the Utah Coalition Against Pornography, believed that Utah’s repressive religious culture pushed people to
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view prurient material, especially on the Internet. “It’s because we don’t have the adult movie stores as much as they do in other states,” she explains. “And people have come to realize that you can access this material quite easily.” Others dispute the religion factor, citing instead Utah’s higher-than-average porn-viewing population of 15-to34-year-olds, and the fact that 80 to 90 percent of online pornography, unlike magazines and videos, is free and can be accessed anonymously.
More than a “bad habit” Ironically, the same Latter-day Saint culture that some say nudges its members to indulge in porn to satisfy a stifled curiosity about sex, especially
ILLUSTRATION BY DUNG HOANG
By David E. Jensen
