Pornography has become the default sex educator for large numbers of young people. Viewing pornography is routine, especially among boys and young men, as two Australian studies document. Children and young people are encountering pornography in greater numbers, at younger ages, and with a wider variety of content.
The effects of porn: what the research says
Pornography is a powerful sexual socialiser. There is robust evidence of pornography’s impacts, across seven domains, among young people and indeed adults. Some are relatively innocuous, and others are deeply troubling.
First, especially for the youngest children, some are shocked, troubled, or disturbed by premature or inadvertent encounters with sexually explicit material, although others are not.
Second, unsurprisingly, pornography provides sexual information and liberalisation. Young people who use porn develop greater sexual knowledge (including about bodies and practices) and more liberalised sexual attitudes than others, as longitudinal studies in The Netherlands and USA find.
Third, pornography can shift users’ sexual interests, behaviours, and relations. The most well documented example is that young men who use pornography are more likely than others to be interested in, and to try to have, anal intercourse. Studies also find links between pornography use and unsafe sex, and other behaviours including oral sex and intercourse. Pornography shapes its users’ ‘sexual scripts’, providing models of behaviour and guiding their sexual expectations.
Fourth, pornography can lower relationship satisfaction. A recent meta-analysis finds that pornography use is associated with men’s lower sexual and relationship satisfaction in relationships. Some studies also find that for women, male partners’ pornography use reduces intimacy, feeds self-objectification and bodily shame, or is accompanied by coercion into sexual acts.
Fifth, some individuals come to use pornography in ways that are compulsive, with damaging consequences for themselves or others. Whether we understand this as an addiction or an impulse control disorder, there is no doubt that some users experience their use as harmful. There are debates over whether pornography is or isn’t a significant contributor to men’s problems with desire, erection, and orgasm, and it may be particularly so for men with self-reported problematic use.
The last two areas of impact are the ones that concern me most.
Sixth, pornography teaches sexist and sexually objectifying understandings of gender and sexuality. It shapes how boys and men see girls and women, and how girls and women see themselves. In a randomised experimental study among young adults in Denmark, exposure to (nonviolent) pornography led to less egalitarian attitudes and higher levels of hostile sexism among young men. In a longitudinal study among US adolescents, increased use of sexually explicit media predicted more sexist attitudes for girls two years later.
Finally, pornography teaches sexually aggressive and violence-supportive attitudes and behaviours. Correlational studies find associations between pornography use and sexually aggressive and violence-supportive attitudes, in both meta-analyses and further recent studies among adolescents and adults. They also find associations between pornography use and actual violent behaviours, as meta-analyses in both 2000 and 2015 showed. Other research finds that men who use pornography more often are more likely to practise or desire dominant & degrading practices such as gagging and choking. Women who use pornography are more likely to practise or desire submissive practices such as being choked, slapped, gagged, and so on, especially if their first pornography exposure was at a young age.
Correlational studies cannot show the direction of causality, but experimental and longitudinal studies can. Experimental studies find that people shown pornography then show increases in sexually violent attitudes and behaviours. Finally, longitudinal studies find that pornography use predicts later sexually violent attitudes and behaviours. For example, in a longitudinal study of U.S. youth over three years, individuals who used violent pornography were over six times as likely as others to engage in sexually aggressive behaviour. In another among adolescents, males’ use of sexually explicit media predicted more frequent sexual harassment perpetration two years later.
The effects of pornography are neither inevitable nor all-powerful. The impacts of pornography are mediated by four factors: the characteristics of the viewer, their engagement with the material, its content, and the character and context of use.
Pornography is an important risk factor for sexual violence. But its risks are greater for some users than others. If a 16-year-old boy already has hostile and sexist attitudes towards girls, he is more likely to be drawn to violent pornography, and this pornography will have a greater influence on the likelihood that he will pressure or coerce girls into sex. Sexual violence is shaped by multiple social and cultural factors, of which pornography use is only one.
We need to know much more about how young people use engage with pornography. But in recognising their active use of sexual media, we should not pretend that pornography has no effects. As a recent review of 43 studies among adolescents and emerging adults documents, sexually explicit and sexually violent media have clear effects on domestic and sexual violence perpetration and victimisation.
How can we limit pornography’s harms among children and youth?
Leaving aside legal strategies, I focus on three. First, comprehensive sexuality education in schools is vital for providing alternative, age-appropriate content on sexuality.
Second, curricula on pornography can teach young people to respond more critically to pornography. ‘Pornography education’ seeks to support young people to critically evaluate and respond to pornography’s influence in order to minimise its harms and equip them for healthy relationships. There are already good Australia curricula here.
Such efforts do work. In a Dutch longitudinal study, the more a young person had learned about the use of pornography from their school-based sex education, the less likely they were to develop a view of women as sex objects. In a US evaluation of a five-session curriculum, students showed positive changes in their pornography-related knowledge, attitudes and behavioral intentions.
Parents may worry that teaching in schools about pornography will encourage students to seek it, but there is no sign that school curricula prompts them to seek out pornography for the first time, or that researchers asking adolescents about pornography encourages its use.
Third, we need better pornography, what some call “ethical pornography” – ethical in its production, use and distribution, and content.
First, participants should have consented to their involvement and not be harmed. The unethical production of porn is common: among Australians aged 16-49, 12% of males and 6.2% of females have taken a nude or sexual image of another person without their consent. Ethical pornography also involves ethical use and distribution. People consent to its viewing, and it is not distributed without participants’ consent.
However, discussions of ‘ethical pornography’ have largely ignored the issue of content. Yet physical and verbal aggression is routine in pornography. An analysis of top-selling and top-renting titles found that 88 percent of scenes showed aggression, largely by males and overwhelmingly against females.
So we must also hold the pornography industries to account. They must produce better pornography, which eroticises consent, respect, and intimacy rather than sexist hostility.
Parents have asked me: “My son is looking at porn. What kind of porn should he be looking at?” Maybe we need ‘free range’ pornography, even a ratings system, the “Healthy Sex Tick of Approval”?
Even depictions of consensual sex may perpetuate the sexual objectification of women and reinforce other sexist social norms. And in a sexist culture, even the most ethical images of sex may be understood in ways that affirm that wider culture. Still, it seems pragmatic to give attention to what might comprise ‘better’, or at least ‘less worse’, pornography.
We must prevent and reduce the harms of pornography and foster children’s and young people’s healthy sexualities.
NOTE: Also see the further resources on pornography collected here. A shortened, edited version of this piece was published in The Conversation on January 6, 2020.