Rates, Age, & Impact of Exposure to Pornography

Open Access: No.

Abstract

Mainstream pornography is popular, freely accessible, and infused with themes of male dominance, aggression, and female subservience. Through depicting sex in these ways, mainstream pornography has the potential to influence the further development of harmful sexual scripts that condone or endorse violence against women and girls. These concerns warrant the adoption of a harms-based perspective in critical examinations of pornography’s influence on sexual experiences. This chapter reports on findings from interviews with 24 heterosexual emerging adults living in Aotearoa/New Zealand about how pornography has impacted their lives. Despite a shared awareness among participants of mainstream pornography’s misogynistic tendencies, and the potential for harm from those displays, men’s and women’s experiences were profoundly gendered. Men’s reported experiences were often associated with concerns about their own sexual behaviors, performances, and/or abilities. Conversely, women’s experiences were often shaped by how pornography had affected the way that men related to them sexually. Their experiences included instances of sexual coercion and assault which were not reported by the men. These findings signal the need for a gendered lens, situated within a broader harms-based perspective, in examinations of pornography’s influence.

Relevance

“Women’s fears about pornography related to female performer’s safety, but
also their own safety in their of ine relations with men. Many expressed a strong aversion to aggressive pornography, and several women were anxious about whether such videos depicted real experiences of violence or aggression.”

The “negative offline harms reported by men largely related to their own sexual functioning or their attitudes toward sex.” Several of the men, but not women, reported that they compulsively used, or were addicted to, pornography, which negatively impacted their lives. “By contrast, many of the negative harms reported by women related to how men used pornography and subsequently treated them in sexual encounters and/or relationships.” Many of the women, too, spoke about how pornography caused their partners to engage in violent, rough, or degrading sex.

Citation

Keene, S. (2022). Just Fantasy? Online Pornography’s Contribution to Experiences of Harm.I n J. Bailey, A. Flynn, & N. Henry (Eds.), The Emerald international handbook of technology-facilitated violence and abuse (pp. 289–308). Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83982-848-520211021