I think Dave’s point that Latter-day Saints ought to be exceptional in this realm, and instead they are probably very near average, is very good. We ought to be well below everyone else.

And I agree with Stephanie that intimacy is beautiful, natural, and divine, when it is kept within divinely appointed bounds, though I suspect that there are ways in which it could be dirty and bad, but at that point it probably ceases to be intimacy, and transforms into something else. Let’s not go any farther in that direction.

I’ll have to look closer at the study, but I do wonder if there is a difference between the numbers paying for a subscription to lascivious online material, and those who seek it out, but do not pay for it– which is probably more difficult to measure?

This is a topic my girlfriends (well – the ones I know aren’t afraid to talk about it) and I discuss, often. There’s a huge lack of communication about intimacy. I’m a big believer that since we believe in eternal marriage, we should be chattering all the time about the beauty and pleasure of intimacy. If anyone should be talking about this without shame it should be us.

There’s a huge education gap for married people who either don’t understand the joys and pleasures of intimacy, or who feel ambiguous based on how they were taught about human intimacy. So…this trickles down to their children… and instead of talking, teaching about healthy intimacy, they don’t speak about it – except to say it is wrong, etc… and so the children learn from other sources.

That’s my take. And… I think I need to get a bunch of women together to do a take on intimacy from a mormon woman’s perspective… you know, for those of us that love it and aren’t afraid to speak out about it. So far, the intimacy books you find in any Church bookstore are authored by men…

I think we need to teach that intimacy is beautiful, natural and divine… within the bounds the Lord has set up. It is never, ever dirty or bad.

Utah is about 62% Mormon and about 42% active Mormon (according to a 2005 SLT article which may not be perfect but is probably not totally crazy: http://www.sltrib.com/ci_2886596).

Given the steep decline of internet video sales and the tiny fraction of the market made up by magazines (Table 1 in Edelman’s actual paper http://people.hbs.edu/bedelman/papers/redlightstates.pdf), I wouldn’t expect the substitution effect you describe (people using online porn because they can’t get it elsewhere) to be massive (although I’m not saying it doesn’t exist).

While I agree that we cannot conclude from this that active Mormons are the highest users of internet porn in the nation, I think we can conclude that they are far from zero and – in fact – probably not far enough below mean to be exceptional, which is what we would like to be. If there were, then the rest of Utah would have to be substituting HUGELY into online porn. I.E., I think we are fooling ourselves if we seek to be too apologist rather than seeking the sources of weaknesses among ourselves.

Just my opinion; always a bit of a gadfly.