Exposure to and use of pornography is routine among young men. Males are more likely than females to intentionally use pornography, to do so regularly, and to first view it at a young age (Crabbe et al., 2024; eSafety Commissioner, 2023). In an Australian study of 15–29-year-olds, 100% of males and 82% of females reported ever viewing pornography (Lim et al., 2017). In another study among young people aged 15-20, over four-fifths (86%) of young men and over two-thirds (69%) of young women had seen pornography. That same study found that many young men are frequent users, with over half (54.4%) using pornography at least weekly and one in six (16%) doing so daily, whereas young women’s use is far less frequent (with 14.3% using pornography weekly and only 1.4% doing so daily) (Crabbe et al., 2024). More widely, the use of pornography has become increasingly normalised among young people, particularly young men. Among young people, males are more likely than females to see pornography use as ‘normal’ and acceptable, while females are more likely to be concerned about and more negative towards pornography, as documented in research in the UK (Martellozzo et al., 2016), US (Carroll et al., 2008), New Zealand (Meehan, 2023), and Sweden (Löfgren-Mårtenson and Månsson, 2010). Young men use pornography for a variety of reasons, including, for example, as a source of sexual gratification and sexual pleasure, as sexual education, as a form of leisure, to relieve boredom, and to bond with friends (McCormack and Wignall, 2017). […]
To the extent that the young men identified harmful impacts of pornography exposure or use, these involved addiction and brain development, negative views of women, distorted views of consent, and premature exposure to sexualised content. Several of the young men spoke of how their access to online pornography at an early age had affected them negatively, including offering narratives of addiction. Jamie (16, First Nations), who first encountered pornography at 11 years old, noted how this exposure and the saturation of adult content online more broadly is desensitising and can lead to struggles with “addiction”:
"a lot of people nowadays … have struggles with porn addiction and I feel like that itself has a big impact on the way we perceive content. And yeah, there’s a lot of unsolicited stuff that you see scrolling through which is mostly just advertising and all the main pages that post photos of like these chicks … I guess definitely desensitising … it’s so accessible and it’s such a common subject when it really isn’t that important. Life shouldn’t be that." (Jamie, 16, First Nations)
Toby (16, S) opened up about being exposed to online pornography “from the age of around 10”. He explained:
"unfortunately, I was one of those victims, because I did see it on social media, you know, I got curious and then it’s taken me six years and just now I’ve been just able to get over it, but the point is that’s how much of a toll it takes, it’s, you know, it really can be a bit of [an] addiction." (Toby, 16, S)
Kieran (19, S) also described his relationship with pornography as an addiction. He shared his personal battle with this addiction, emphasising the negative impact it had on his perception of girls and his ability to maintain healthy relationships:
"I was first exposed around 13 … I didn’t really know how to manage any of that, and hormones is a new thing, so I kinda got addicted and so that was a pretty negative thing for me that went on for a few years up and down … and so I’ve kind of always seen it as negative, even though I was addicted the whole time … like most addictions, you want to stop, and you feel ashamed every time but you can’t … not feeling capable of being able to stop is a very, very shameful and a real crap mental spot to be in … and that would negatively impact the way I saw, yeah girls around me, you know, like I’m, I would never make an advance on anyone or never actually mistreat them but just small things like picturing girls who, like good friends, but very platonic friends, just actually naked and that … and that happened because of that addiction. Yeah, and you know, and then it didn’t really stop until I did get in a relationship, and where I finally was able to talk to my girlfriend about the fact that, ‘Hey, I’ve been struggling with this for a few years’ and so, you know, like it negatively impacted that relationship for a little bit there." (Kieran, 19, S)
Brendan (20, S) similarly commented on the negative impacts of pornography when he was young. He explained:
"… when you [are] that young, you don’t even realise any of this shit, like what it’s doing to you … like, now [I’m] older, I look [back], okay, this is bad, like this, a lot of studies and shit showing, this is like bad for your brain, like you’re fucking yourself up a bit here. But I think when you’re young, you don’t know the impacts. So that’s sort of a desensitising. Getting kind of I guess addicted to it like because some people do it a lot man and when you’re a kid like it’s hard to self-control and, you know, you’re doing it in your room or like you’re doing [it] away from everyone so no one else knows." (Brendan, 20, S)
Along these lines, several of the young men noted how pornography dulled their emotional reactions to explicit content, as Scott (16, S) explained: “I was the kid with unrestricted internet access, so I saw a lot of like, a lot of things very early on in my life and I would say that that has really changed me a lot … it’s just made me a lot less like reactive to things … I feel like a lot less emotional about things”. Jamie (16, First Nations) also spoke of being desensitised: he doesn’t “get uncomfortable” seeing adult content, because of his “desensitisation” to such content. […]
There is no doubt that some users of pornography experience their use as compulsive or damaging in some way. In an Australian study among 15–29-year-olds, around 12% identified their pornography use as problematic, compulsive or concerning, indicating negative impacts on sexual function and relationships (Davis et al., 2017). In another Australian study among people aged 16-69, among respondents who had ever looked at pornography, 4% of men and 1% of women reported that they felt addicted to pornography (Rissel et al., 2017). Some individuals report problematic consumption of pornography, involving impaired control of the extent of their use, neglect of other areas of their life, and persistent use despite damaging psychological effects (Alarcón et al., 2019). There are debates over whether to understand these as an addiction (Love et al., 2015), an impulse control disorder (Alarcón et al., 2019), hypersexuality (Alarcón et al., 2019), or something else. There are also debates and contradictory findings regarding whether pornography is (Jacobs et al., 2021; Park et al., 2016) or is not (Dwulit and Rzymski, 2019; Landripet and Štulhofer, 2015) a significant contributor to men’s problems with desire, erection, and orgasm, and if it is, it may be particularly so for men with self-reported problematic use (Grubbs and Gola, 2019). In any case it is clear that, like others, some young men are troubled by their own patterns of pornography use.
Another theme in young men’s commentary on porn was its encouragement of sexist and objectifying views. Several of the young men commented on how pornography had led to negative views about girls and women. Benito (20, S, CALD) noted, especially for younger people, how pornography “twisted with reality” and “changes their perspective on women or certain situations … and I think that’s where the damage is”. Majak (21, S, CALD) noted how the accessibility and common use of pornography at his high school led to negative ideas about girls and difficulties in making genuine connections, as he explained:
"… when I was in high school, yeah, I went to a boys’ school so it was pretty casual the way guys would talk about it … but yeah, guys would just be in the back of the classroom … on the phone … I would say it implants like the wrong idea of how to interact with like girls and stuff. I think it gives you the wrong idea – not that you do anything crazy, but it’s sort of, I guess maybe dilutes your mind. I would say to some degree, and it shifts your focus away from just trying to actually make a proper connection and actually trying to get to know somebody." (Majak, 21, S, CALD)
Along similar lines, Nico (18, S, D, CALD) commented that “one of the major effects” from viewing pornography “is that it changes your view of women”:
"… it makes you view them more as a sexual object rather than a human being … and I think a lot of people grow up with it, and then they end up not having total respect for women, as just regular people at the end of the day. And it’s definitely toxic. It’s a bad habit to get into. It’s using your energies for something that’s not productive." (Nico, 18, S, D, CALD)
In Jordan’s (16, S) view, pornography “just really alters expectations of, you know, like what women should be … and, you know, obviously, it’s all scripted, and it’s fake”. Omer (17, S, CALD) shared a similar view, that online pornography “alters a lot of your perspectives on women as well. The second you see one, your first thought is, what would she look like with her clothes off instead of, you know? That’s actually a person. I think it’s the whole reason behind the objectification in today’s society”.
Young men’s views about pornography’s encouragement of sexist and objectifying attitudes are corroborated by scholarship, finding that pornography consumption among adolescents is associated with more sexually objectifying and stereotypic gender views of women (Maes et al., 2019; Peter and Valkenburg, 2007; Peter and Valkenburg, 2009). For example, in an experimental study among young adults, pornography consumption was shown to increase notions of women as sex objects and to be associated with significantly stronger gender-stereotypic attitudes and cognitions (Hald et al. 2013). The young men featured in this book who expressed disquiet about pornography’s effects in relationships also have grounds for concern, given the evidence that pornography consumption is associated with poorer relationship quality (Perry, 2020) and, in relation to joint pornography use among adolescent intimate partners, with lower skills in relationships and in refusing risky behaviours (Huntington et al., 2022).
A few of the young men raised concerns about how online pornography can distort young men’s understanding of consent. Trevor (17, B, D) described the “whole porn industry” as “kind of warping the minds of what especially young men expect” and making it “a lot harder for people to understand consent online through like text and photos rather than if you’re in person”. Jesse (18, S) similarly noted that the absence of consent in pornography can contribute to a lack of understanding about what consent means in real-life situations: “like I don’t think a lot of men understand it because they only, they just watch, and their idea of what consent is because there’s no consent in porn and so they don’t have that real concept of it”. Ibrahim (18, S, CALD) expressed similar concerns: “in my experience, [it’s] very toxic [in] how you view women”. In his view, the ways in which women are represented in pornography, as submissive, appealed to “a lot of guys”, as he explained:
"…it’s sad, but like [women are] obviously made to look like forced and that’s what appeals to a lot of guys who do watch porn like is someone who’s submissive and in a bad position. So, like to a lot of guys, it’s very appealing and that’s obviously what they [are] aiming for and they are acting but at the same time a lot of men don’t know that." (Ibrahim, 18, S, CALD)
Again, such concerns are warranted. Pornography use is associated with attitudes supportive or tolerant of sexual aggression (Hald et al., 2010; Malamuth et al., 2012). Moreover, pornography use is associated with the actual perpetration of sexual violence. A meta-analysis – of 22 studies, from seven countries, comprising over 20,000 participants – finds consistent evidence that pornography consumption is associated with acts of sexual aggression, in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies (Wright et al., 2015). Among young people, studies find associations between pornography use and the perpetration of teen dating violence (Rostad et al., 2019), online sexual solicitation and offline sexual harassment (Chang et al., 2016), sexual harassment (Kennair and Bendixen, 2012), and sexual violence (Bonino et al., 2006). Five longitudinal studies, including three among adolescents and teenagers, support the claim that pornography increases the likelihood that individuals will perpetrate sexual violence (Brown and L’Engle, 2009; D’Abreu and Krahé, 2014; Jongsma and Timmons Fritz, 2022; Waterman et al., 2022; Ybarra et al., 2011; Ybarra and Thompson, 2017). For example, in a recent longitudinal study of US middle and high school students over three years, young people who had viewed pornography were between 4.2 and 14.4 times more likely to go on to perpetrate sexual assault than young people who had not viewed pornography (Waterman et al., 2022). On the other hand, two longitudinal studies found no relationship between pornography use and subsequent perpetration of sexual aggression (Kohut et al., 2021) or intimate partner violence (Hatch et al., 2020). […]
The concerns voiced by the young men in this section highlight the pervasive impact of online pornography on various facets of their lives (eSafety Commission, 2023). The ubiquity of explicit content on the internet poses a challenge in navigating online spaces for young men, with algorithms seemingly directing them towards adult material (eSafety Commission, 2023; 5Rights, 2021). To the extent that the young men in this research describe pornography as having negative impacts, they concur with most other young people in Australia. A survey of and focus groups among young people aged 16-18 found that two-thirds to three-quarters of young people felt that pornography had negative impacts on young people’s understanding of consent (74%), ideas about intimate relationships (76%), expectations of sex (76%) and views on gender stereotypes (64%) (eSafety Commissioner, 2023).
The young men’s comments illuminate some of the potential harms of early exposure to online pornography. The most prominent of these involved struggles with addiction, with harmful impacts on mental health and relationships. Addiction also was a primary concern among boys in a New Zealand study (Meehan, 2023). This may reflect community and media focus on the harm of addiction rather than more feminist-informed critiques of pornography’s role in patriarchal gender inequalities, as well the presence of websites such as ‘Your Brain on Porn’ and ‘No Fap’ communities in which men swear off masturbation (Dashiell and Rowland, 2024).
Narratives of ‘addiction’ have been criticised for resting on a distinction between normal and addictive pornography use, which both endorses pornography use per se as unproblematic and, for those who are ‘addicted’, excuses them from responsibility for their pornography consumption (Meehan, 2023). In such narratives, ‘normal’ pornography use is shielded from critique and its ethical and political ramifications are sidelined (Meehan, 2023; Taylor and Gavey, 2019). Rather than addressing how pornography and its users may harm women, attention is moved to how pornography may harm men. Nevertheless, although the young men in our study who noted pornography’s potential harms emphasised addiction, they also acknowledged other forms of harm.
Many of the young men suggested that pornography fosters desensitisation and alters perceptions of women, distorting understandings of consent which reflects broader societal realities where sexual harassment, abuse and other forms of gender-based violence are highly prevalent (Flood, 2024). Such comments reflect a more critical response to pornography’s content than some studies among young men have found (Antevska and Gavey, 2015). It is possible, however, that young men in our research with more positive attitudes towards pornography did not speak up, and it may have been harder to voice enthusiastic and potentially stigmatising views about pornography in this research’s focus groups than in a one-on-one interview or anonymous survey. In the earlier Australian survey mentioned above, half of young people (51%) also thought that online pornography had some positive aspects, particularly in relation to learning about sex and exploring their sexuality (eSafety Commissioner, 2023).
Some participants in our research noted how the absence of representations of consent in pornography could contribute to a lack of understanding in offline/in-person situations. Young men emphasised the potential distortion of norms and expectations particularly among younger generations. Here, they show a similar pattern to the ‘third person effect’ evident in other research, in which young people position themselves as critical viewers of internet pornography while positioning other youth as at greater risk of being taken in by this material (Healy-Cullen, et al. 2023). [...]
Note: This text is an excerpt from the book Young Men’s Online Lives: Cultivating Critical Digital Dispositions for Gender Justice, by Amanda Keddie and Michael Flood. This text is part of Chapter 5, "Sex, intimacy and privacy". Omitted text is signalled by "[...]".
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