What do folks in the Bible Belt do in their spare time? Apparently, make amateur-porn videos and share them on the Internet.
According to a study commissioned by Homegrown Video, nearly one third of all sex tapes submitted to the website came from the Bible Belt region.
The numbers are the result of a six-month survey that looked at the demographics of its amateur performers by state. Although California and Pennsylvania churn out the highest percentages of aspiring porn stars (20.6 and 11.8 percent, respectively), the region of the American South known as the Bible Belt had a surprisingly high concentration of amateur performers: 29.6 percent hail from the area.
The results of the survey jibe pretty well with the findings from a recent Christian Post study on the sexual habits of the Bible Belt region. It concluded that the prevalence of those who committed one of the seven deadly sins, including lust, was highest in the region. (Of course, the Christian Post’s methodology for determining the concentration of “sinners” is somewhat, shall we say, suspect—counting the number of STIs per person—but given the correlation between increased rates of sexual repression and sexual behavior, the results are still noteworthy.)
Another striking result of the Homegrown survey: 56.9 percent, or more than half, of the site’s user-submitted content came from women. This tracks pretty well with other findings that an increasing number of women are watching online porn. (One in three visitors to porn websites is female, according to one study; though the number is probably much higher.) So if you take away one thing, perhaps the stigma surrounding women enjoying adult content is steadily waning.
Photo by ngupta/Flickr (CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0)