More Americans consider porn “morally acceptable” than ever before—or at least since 2011, when the Gallup polling organization began asking Americans whether they approve of porn, according to the new Gallup Values and Beliefs survey, which the research group has conducted each year since 2001. The survey has shown a steady trend toward more liberal U.S. views on social issues such as pornography, gay and lesbian relationships, marijuana use and others, according to Gallup.
The moral approval of porn reached 43 percent in the survey taken during the first 10 days of May—up a full seven points from 2017, when 36 percent of Americans said they found porn morally okay.
Interestingly, the latest Gallup poll measuring Donald Trump’s approval rating places him at only 41 percent — giving Trump a lower overall “approval rating” than porn.
Gallup was at a loss to explain what accounted for the sudden seven-point spike in porn’s approval rating among Americans. Previously, the largest single-year jump was only two points, when the percentage of Americans registering their moral acceptance of porn ticked up from 31 to 33 percent between 2013 and 2014, and again between 2016 and 2017 when the number inched up from 34 to 36 percent.
But the Gallup pollsters have a theory. They suggested that Stormy Daniels, and her highly publicized lawsuits against Trump, may have “given pornography a sense of moral credibility that it previously lacked.”
Among people declaring themselves Democrats, the thumbs-up for porn jumped by 11 points, with more than half of all Democrats—a full 54 percent—saying for the first time that they find porn morally acceptable. But the percentage of Republicans remained unchanged at 27, according to Gallup.
Political independents gave porn their seal of approval at a 45 percent rate, up five points from 2017.
The demographic group that showed the most liberalization in its approval of porn was, perhaps predictably, males between the ages of 18 and 49, whose “moral acceptance” of pornography jumped 14 percent. But among men 50 and over, that percentage moved only a single percentage point upward.
Half of all non-married Americans in the poll said said they now found porn morally acceptable. That’s up 15 points from last year. But among married people, the moral acceptance of porn dropped by two points to 35.
The Gallup poll also measured attitudes toward the morality of marijuana use for the first time, finding that a solid 65 percent of Americans consider pot use okay, while 31 percent still consider using the drug “morally wrong.”
But alcohol remains even more acceptable to Americans than cannabis, with 78 percent saying that they have no moral problem with drinking booze. Record numbers of Americans also said they approved of birth control, divorce, premarital sex, having a baby without being married, and polygamy.
One category of behavior, however, hit a record low in the survey: medical testing on animals, with just 51 percent of Americans now believing that animal testing remains morally acceptable.
Photo by Gary/Wikimedia Commons
