Utah & Pornography
Does Utah have the highest porn usage?
⚠️ Due to the nature of this topic, this post includes sexually explicit terms and may not be appropriate for those below a certain age ⚠️
Introduction
Pornography is a very interesting topic for Mormons. It is condemned by the Latter-day Saint church who says “pornography is a tool of the adversary, and its use causes the Spirit of the Lord to withdraw from us.“1Yet, in the past, Utah - a state in which 64% of the population is on church records - was marked as the state with the highest pornography consumption. This finding was later debunked looking at other similar studies and accounting for other factors such as commercial pornography availability as the original study was based off of online paid subscriptions by state.2
The original study was based on data from 2008. So, where is Utah with pornography usage now?
Data
Today, we look at google trends data which has the volume of worldwide searches of various google searches from 2004 to the present date. This data can be viewed by state and in any other time period inside that interval.
I also included a few charts from PornHub Insights, a popular pornography site’s data arm. They give ad hoc and yearly summary reports of which are quite interesting if you have time. In theory, these reports show how the ideas of sexuality and beauty are shifting over time and by region/country.
Charts
First, let’s look at porn usage by state specifically on the Pornhub site. This chart is the last chart to date released by Pornhub with state-level porn usage data in 2014.
It is from an ad hoc report where they looked at pornography consumption by red vs. blue states. With the exception of Kansas(?), blue states typically had a higher consumption of pornography.
Looking at page views controlling for population size, Utah has one of the fewest page clicks compared to other states.
Now, let’s look at some google search data for the word “porn.“
Looking at a state by state breakdown of all of 20 years of google search data (2004-2024), Utah is the lowest state for searches of “porn.” This chart doesn’t show a large color difference, but if you look at a list of states, it is ranked dead last (not shown for brevity’s sake). Clearly, there are a lot of people searching for porn in Utah as the state color is still quite red, but not as red as other states.
As a few other interesting tidbits, below I compare the search “news“ to the search “porn“. Researchers of google trends (cc: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz) have recommended comparing search word with “news“ because it is relatively stable over time and a large volume of searches - many people search for “news“ every day.
As you can see, a large volume of people also search for “porn“ every day. And, by the looks of it, it has ebbed and flowed over time. In the last 8 years, people searching for porn has decreased. This is suggestive of a decrease in porn consumption overall or perhaps more people access porn another way.
Below I have the same chart, but filtered only to the state of Utah
We can see a similar trend as the national, but the porn line looks lower when compared to the news line - especially recently. Perhaps Mormons are now consuming less porn than they ever have.
I’ll leave one last tidbit relevant to our Mormons & Pornography topic. This last chart is from the “Year in Review“ Pornhub data report for 2023 showing the most popular search term on Pornhub relative to other states…
(viewer discretion advised of chart below ⚠️😂)
Not sure what I expected with this graph, but here you go.
Conclusion
Though I often hear it said that Utah consumes the most pornography, this stereotype likely came from an outlier study referenced in the introduction. And, not only have several studies around that time period and more recently not supported the conclusion, but the data we looked at today did not support it.
Utah surely consumes a sizable amount of pornography per capita, but is generally on the lower end of states in the data we saw.
We also saw that - in terms a google searches - fewer people are searching for “porn” than ever before in the US and in Utah. This could mean that fewer people are consuming pornography or are just accessing it a different way.
Discussion
Did I miss anything in the analysis here? What did you find most interesting?
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/pornography
https://www.deseret.com/2023/5/2/23708030/utah-pornography-usage/
Doesn't Pornhub block Utah? Where did the 2023 data come from?