Porn and Republicans

One of the most interesting stories of the 2008 election in Denver that I never got around to blogging was relentless pro-McCain and anti-Obama campaigning on the street sign for Shotgun Willies, a strip club at the corner of Colorado Boulevard and Virginia Avenue in Glendale, Colorado (a small Arapahoe County enclave surrounded on all sides by the City and County of Denver). It is a prominent sign. One of my previous employers who had an office nearby used it as our main landmark when giving people directions to our office for years. One or two other strip clubs also had pro-GOP signage when they had any political messages at all.

At the time, I'd chalked it up to the adultery factor. McCain has had lots of wives and admitted in his memoirs to having numerous affairs while married. Obama's romantic life was decidedly more monogamous.

Well, it turns out that the connection between the porn industry and the Republican party is more than mere coincidence. It wasn't just based upon personal factors that distinguished particular candidates in a particular election either. The proof comes from yet another red state, blue state comparison that undermines the image of Republicans as morally virtuous family values types:


Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. . . . Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32. 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 favoured Barack Obama.


Hat Tip: The Big Orange Giant.

Also, while high per capita porn consumption rates are associated with conservative turf, the same is not true when it comes to per capita condom consumption. Reliably Democratic Denver leads the nation on the measure, at at 189% of the average for the nation's 50 largest cities. As in economics, Republicans are big on talk, and Democrats prefer action.

http://washparkprophet.blogspot.com/2009/03/porn-and-republicans.html

http://www.republicansexoffenders.com/

pretty interested to see the endless billboards for porn shops in the red states. Anecdotal, of course, but it did catch my attention.

Some guy, a pastor from Texas, wrote a book called 'My Struggle, Your Struggle', all about the "sins" of porn.
So cali, how was the trip?

from all those porn shops!

:hi:

male and his porn. hmmmm, lets see. the repug pig male that is into dominance of females and subjugating and degrading female loves his porn. big surprise here.

it is an affirmation exactly how porn is used and abused and the people on du cant see beyond their love of porn exactly what is being said about them.

if it wasn't so sad, it would be funny.

unless of course the only point is the shallowest in the hypocrisy of the party

For all the patter about red-state women who "stand by their man," the fact is that it's not true.

Women all over the planet would much rather leave a man who has a porn addiction than stay with him - if she can afford (or in some countries, is allowed) to do so.

the male cries and cries (in his beer) that he treated his woman so well and she left him.... why oh why

'to go find herself', quote from a beer teary Amarillo gentleman circa 1984. He was trying to pick me up.

He couldn't figure out why she would need to do that. Maybe the porn and the breezy macho masculinity had something to do with it?

Edit to add: I don't think it's the porn, that's a symptom. It has more to do, IMO, with the stereotypes that they impose on people iin those places. They don't want to think of their wives as sexual-not what a frail southern flower should be. So they find sexual women in a vicarious and often distorted manner. A manner where there is no doubt left that these women aren't pale southern flowers and it's all OK because they're whores.

It's all hypocrisy, probably tied to their religious problems.

i have seen it time and again. oh, just a month ago with a friend of hubby. married 16 yrs. she had enough. now he calls crying to hubby, drunk, late at night.

I lived there for 6 months. Beautiful scenery such as the local canyons. The locals were scary. We moved after a guy gunned down a store clerk and two witnesses for a six-pack and a ride back to prison. This was after the brother of a friend was gunned down by a guy who was shooting for the dude who was further down the bar. We midwesterners gave up good TX jobs and fled.

Someday you gotta come and visit us in canuckistan. That doesn't happen here. Well, maybe once every 20 years, but not that much. :)

Somedays I wonder if "bobby" jindal would have been such a prick if his parents had settled in Peoria or Spokane.

PPS: Liberal in Amarilllo. you ARE brave! :hug:

working on two decades my hubby said a couple months ago he doesnt think i can last much longer. total isolation is what it has become. and hten to see the same mentality on du, ... my only escape from this place... well, puts me in a bad bad place. lol

i have lerned to be confrontational and aggressive in a peaceful kinda way. about the time i ask a worker a question and he looks over my head to give answer to hubby, lol hubby is backing up and off i go.

We don't know of those porn viewers are conservative because it was anonymous. It could very well be the liberals in those states viewing the porn, as an escape from the reality of having to live among the crazies.

no interest, in fact resent being conditioned to dehumanize female.

don't peddle this stuff where we selectively ignore the males that exist in porn and only focus on the females.

dont tell me what to post....

The idea that porn conditions men to see women as mere sex objects seems to make a lot of sense...until you look at gay porn.

Then, you find yourself in the curious position of believing that our culture encourages gay men to see their own sex as mere objects to control and use. Which is true, in a sense, people often view each other as mere tools, a means to an end. But that is my point: abusive and domineering behavior does not rest on our ideas of gender. Rather, our ideas of gender, like most of our social institutions, rest on our tendency to dominate each other and organize people hierarchically.

I can remember telling you this before, seabeyond: sex and society are more complicated than "men are taught to abuse women." Certainly plenty of men abuse women, and see them mostly as sex objects. But, plenty of PEOPLE abuse other CREATURES period.

From what I have seen of life, you cannot analyze porn just in the context of sexism if you want to reach a meaningful conclusion. Hell, even analyzing spousal abuse just in the context of sexism does not work out.

I believe that all forms of hierarchy, dominance and oppression are related. The man who abuses his wife feels much like the owner who exploits his poor workers, or the priest who kills any "heathen" he can find so that everyone will donate to his church. I believe that a straight man who beats his wife and a gay man who beats his boyfriend feel pretty much the same. So, spousal abuse is not rooted in sexism, it is rooted in the fact that no matter where you go you find people taking advantage of one another. Sometimes, however, people use sexism to justify their behavior.

That is all sexism is to me, one of many justifications we use to exploit one another. If I cannot justify exploiting you on the basis of gender, then I will find some other excuse.

In our culture men do indeed learn early on that they are expected to lead while women are more likely to follow. However, it is more important to focus on the fact that PEOPLE learn to get what they want however they can, with no regard to the feelings of others. This is the true problem and it transcends sex and gender. If we were all nice to each other, I think porn would be nicer as well.

and i can agree with all that you are saying, and i can also say that i think as a society we are working very hard at conditioning all of us to see females as merely and only sex object, ergo dehumanizing and that it is going beyond just those baring all in porn. but it is just feeding the appetite.

i do enjoy your posts though

i have two sons, 11 and 13. i am seeing the harm of sexualizing our very young girls and conditioning them that their worth is in being a sxual object and conditioning our boys to "they think with their little head", and boys will be boys, cannot help it, is who they are. you may see it as simple human behavior. i do not. i think our children are capable of learning respect not only for each other but for themselves.

There is no doubt that women are presented as sex objects more than men in our daily lives. And, I know that what I am saying is really more theoretical than practical. Saying "we need to focus on ending hierarchy/dominance/abuse as a whole" is all good and well, but what can you really do about THAT? Instead we must behave differently in specific, limited ways and do the best we can.

Eventually, though, you realize that alot of these behaviors are interrelated, which is what my post was getting at. I definitely see where you are coming from though, because in many cases my kind of talk seems too complicated and unnecessary. If you are teaching your kids, like you said, you need to focus on simple maxims like "don't buy in to our media's general presentation of women, it demeans them and turns them in to property to be fought over." The same holds true for passing specific policies/laws irl, at least for now. So, keep up the good work yourself :).

It's because liberals know how to find porn for free.

the whole point of the OP is the prudes that whine about porn are its biggest consumers.

a texan, reformed repug and all around good guy sent this to me last night. he hadnt heard it either. told him was the umpteenth time i had seen it, and even his was scorn on the repressed repug.

though he was able to recognize and acknowledge the the various reasons that are significant and not just a chuckle.

it certainly will be ammunition for me in this area when talking to the repugs and the christians but no more so than studies stating the red states takes the most out of fed govt and puts the least in.

If you turn sex into some taboo, dirty thing, people are going to find alternate avenues. In an odd way, I expect it actually reinforces their hatred of liberals. I mean, here they are, bottling up their impulses and buying porn so they can fantasize about all the things they dare not do, and then they see people who aren't even concerned about these things. I expect they actually see themselves as morally superior as a result.

Reminds me of a few former hard-partying Born Agains I've known. These were people who'd selfishly hurt the people around them in pursuit of their fix, or their lust, or whatever. They'd later cleaned up, found Jesus, and then spent all their time moralizing to people who'd never done these things. Their rational was that they "knew more about" morality than most people, because they'd shit on it so thoroughly.