Survey Says: Porn’s “Moral Acceptability” Rising

In “Survey Says: Porn’s Moral Acceptability Rising“, the question is asked if you are honest with pollsters when they call your house? Does it depend on what they’re asking about? Calico wonders how widespread is the practice of blatantly lying in response to survey questions — and not just because she used to listen to her older brother bullshit pollsters for the fun of it.

According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who find pornography “morally acceptable” went up from 36% to 43% between 2017 and 2018. What explains this increase? Is it just the inevitable result of people being becoming more accepting of porn over time due to its ubiquity in internet culture? Is Stormy Daniels and the trouble she’s making for Donald Trump winning over Democrats under the theory that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend”? Or are people just gradually becoming less embarrassed to tell the truth about their attitude toward porn, now that they know how commonplace it is to watch the stuff? Put another way, what percentage of Americans who respond to survey questions from Gallup are simply liars and/or hypocrites?

Read more in Calico’s latest post, “Survey Says: Porn’s Moral Acceptability Rising”.

by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com Porn For Women

I remember well the first time I realized telephone surveys might not be the most reliable or accurate means of gathering information – especially when the survey results relied on respondents being honest with the pollsters.

I was sitting on the couch in my parents’ living room, watching some crappy early 80s television show when the phone rang. My brother, who was in high school at the time, answered the phone.

“Yes, this is Jack,” he said, winking at me and raising his index finger to his lips, making the universal symbol to keep quiet – something I immediately understood to mean he was pretending to be our father to whomever was on the line.

What followed was as hilarious as it was completely dishonest, as my brother informed the person conducting the survey he owned a veritable fleet of luxury cars, had an annual income of over a million dollars and was very passionate about his primary hobby, golf.

Not one of these things was true, of course. While dad made good money, it was far less than a million bucks a year. He also owned one (sensible, practical and quite cheap) midsize sedan and wouldn’t play a round of golf unless you held a gun to his head and made him do it.

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Still, people love to read about survey results and all kinds of government and private organizations alike rely on them. As such, people like my brother are bound to have plenty of opportunities to practice their deceptions.

Among the many outfits which regularly conduct surveys, one of the names most synonymous with the act of polling people is, of course, Gallup. Gallup polls people on all kinds of shit, including everything from their approval (or lack thereof) of the President’s job performance to how dangerous they believe the world around them to be.

Among Gallup’s annually-conducted polls, one of the most interesting to track over time has been the one which asks Americans whether they think pornography is “morally acceptable.”

Gallup has only been polling people on this question since 2011, so we don’t know how much the needle might have moved since the 50s, when a lot of Americans thought The Moon is Blue was too racy –because it included words like “virgin” and “seduce” and “mistress” in its dialogue.

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Still, I suppose it’s significant that between Gallup’s 2017 and 2018 surveys on this question, the percentage of Americans who said they find porn morally acceptable jumped from 36% to 43%.

What could account for the uptick? Gallup points a speculative finger at partisan politics.

“The partisan gap on the morality of pornography widened slightly this year (to 26 points), largely because of the sizable change in Democratic attitudes,” Gallup’s Andrew Dugan wrote in analyzing the survey results. “Why Democrats’ attitudes shifted is less clear.”

While “less clear,” the shift in attitudes isn’t so impenetrable as a question that Dugan can’t offer a little informed speculation, however.

“Another explanation is that Stormy Daniels, adult film star actress and fierce critic of President Donald Trump, has given pornography a sense of moral credibility that it previously lacked.”

I’d put this more bluntly: Because most Democrats hate Trump with a passion which makes their prior distaste for George W. Bush look positively quaint by comparison, anyone and anything who fucks with Trump shoots to the top of the Democratic approval charts.

What Percentage Of Americans Are Hypocrites And/Or Liars?

I have another explanation for what we’re seeing in the response to Gallup’s annual porn survey: Slowly but surely, Americans who respond to the survey are becoming less embarrassed to admit – anonymously, at least – that they think it’s OK to watch porn.

If you look at the traffic statistics for the most popular porn sites, the data sure laves you with the impression substantially more than half the world’s internet-connected adults are watching the stuff with regularity – regardless of whether they’re willing to admit such to a pollster at the other end of a phone line.

As such, maybe the real question isn’t whether people find porn morally acceptable. Perhaps the more salient inquiry is whether we find it morally acceptable to lie to Gallup representatives when they ring us up asking questions about porn.