Different Porn Careers? Girls' and Boys' Porn Consumption

This article focuses on some of the results that have emerged in a study based on conversations with Swedish young peo­ple about their experience and perception of porn. The study has been carried out as a part of NIKK's Nordic project on young people, gender and porn.

In recent years, “adult society's” con­cerns about the consequences that the increased exposure to porn might have for the next generation, for children and young people, have become increasingly explicit. The debate has created big waves. Expressions such as sexualisation and/or pornification of public space have been used to describe a perception of how porn and its visual language and sexual codes infiltrate and pervade everyday life and culture in late modern society.

We have interviewed 73 Swedish young people between 14 and 20 years of age, both individually and in focus groups. The purpose has been to gain knowledge about their experience with porn, what they use it for, in what kind of situations they consume porn and what implications and consequences young people perceive that it has for them and their views on gender and sexuality.

Our analysis sets out from a social-constructionist perspective on sexuality, sexual expression and behaviour (Weeks 1994, Lewin 1994). A basic assumption of this perspective is that it is through interac­tion with others that we learn how to think and act sexually in different situations. We employ Gagnon's and Simon's (1973) classical theory on sexual scripts. Through sexual socialisation we learn our scripts the same way actors learn their roles. We learn why some things make us feel sexy and others don't. Put simply, the script is a manual for the when, where, how, with whom and why of sexuality. However, the scripts are never static, and they are also different from culture to culture. And they can also vary according to the situation, who is involved and to the previous experi­ence with which an individual enters into a sexual situation. An interesting question, of course, is what role porn plays in the development and content of these scripts, for both men and women.

The interviews show that young people see themselves surrounded by and continu­ously exposed to images and messages with an explicit sexual content, both in real and virtual space, i.e. through advertis­ing, popular culture and the internet. All of them report that they have come into contact with porn, either voluntarily or involuntarily; voluntarily meaning that they have gone looking for it themselves, invol­untarily meaning that they were exposed to porn in the form of text or images without actively seeking it. Without com­parison, the internet turns out to be the most important force behind the explosive increase in exposure to porn in the last few years. On the net the consumer can come into contact with porn both anonymously and in a manner that has not been previ­ously possible. 

Overall, some clear differences bet­ween boys and girls emerge regarding behaviour patterns with respect to porn. This also goes for attitudes towards the phenomenon. In our investigation, signifi­cantly more boys than girls are more active consumers of porn and also more positive in their general attitude towards it. In this regard, the results are entirely in agre­ement with other contemporary Swedish and Scandinavian studies in the area (Hammarén & Johansson 2002, Rogala & Tyden 2003, Tydén & Rogala 2004, Häggström-Nordin et al 2005). Despite these differences, there is an agreement on one point; both boys and girls see it as “natural” that boys are more interested in porn than girls, not least because it is made “by and for men”.

We can identify three main uses for porn or functions of porn in young people's lives. These are: porn as a form of social inter­course, porn as a source of information and porn as inspiration for sexual arousal. Porn as a form of social intercourse is not pri­marily about becoming sexually aroused, instead the interaction between the view­ers takes centre stage. What happens on the computer or TV screen more or less constitutes a pretext for observation and testing one's own and others' reactions to the porn actors' and actresses' actions, looks and bodies. Through the comments made in the room, information is commu­nicated, both directly and indirectly, about what is regarded as normal or deviant. The jokes, laughs and sighs become a norma­tive guideline for the young and perhaps sexually inexperienced viewer.

Porn sometimes also works as a direct source of information for young people. They think that they learn things they didn't know beforehand. They get tips on, for example, new or different positions for intercourse and/or on how to satisfy a partner sexually. Our impression from the interviews is that this information is critically reviewed by the young people themselves; there is usually nothing that is digested uncritically. Information gathering through porn does not happen in a vacuum. Just like in other areas of life information on sex is acquired from different direc­tions, depending on what sources one has access to and consider reliable and useful – which in turn depends on one's previous experience. Clearly, porn is perceived as a “reliable” source sometimes. But more often young people judge the content as exaggerated, distorted or downright false. In some cases this knowledge engenders direct resistance in young people. They distance themselves or simply tune out. In this respect girls more often than boys are among the unsparing critics. The third field of application is, at least on the face of it, the most obvious, namely porn as inspira­tion for sexual arousal, either in solitude or with some partner.

Our interview material also displays some interesting differences between young people of different ages. Usually experience comes with age and to young people a couple of years can make a lot of difference. Against this background, we are of the opinion that one can talk about different “porn careers”. In this there is a correlation between age and sex. There is an observable pattern with boys. They watch a lot of porn in the early teen­age years. As their own sexual experience accumulates, their interest in porn seems to cool off somewhat. The use of porn as an information source and to some extent as a form of socialising decreases. Porn is mainly used as inspiration and to stimulate sexual arousal.

For girls this “career” appears differ­ent. In principle, it is the exact opposite compared to the boys. The older they get, the more they consume porn, although they still consume it considerably less than the boys. When they watch porn, it is usually together with someone they are going steady with and/or have a sexual relationship with. The girls who had the most positive attitude towards porn were among the older ones in our material. At the same time it is among the older girls that we find those who are the most criti­cal to porn. Throughout, there is a much greater ambivalence towards the entire phenomenon among the girls than among the boys. Sometimes porn can be viewed as sexually arousing, interesting and excit­ing, but more often it is seen as disgusting and off-putting (see also Svedin & Åkerman 2006). Nevertheless, there seems to be a certain degree of convergence between girls and boys in the later teenage years. Girls become somewhat more positive towards it the older they get, whereas the boys become more critical and negative, which means that they meet somewhere in the middle of the scale.

So how should we interpret the fact that some girls become more positive towards porn the older they get? Does it mean they get more liberated, independent and open to different descriptions of sex? Or on the contrary, should it be interpreted as an adaptation to the partner's desires and needs to watch porn? The girls we have interviewed reported that it is above all when they are together with a boyfriend that they have watched porn, not when they are on their own. Perhaps it is still not socially acceptable for girls to openly admit that they consume porn on their own? In Berg's (1999) research on girls and porn the girls' ambivalence towards sexual arousal associated with porn emerged. After some “probing”, the girls told Berg that they actually do get aroused by porn, things happen in their bodies. But at the same time they were careful to maintain that it was not something one should talk openly about, if one wanted to keep one's honour intact.

There is evidence suggesting that the girls', and some boys', scepticism towards porn is, to a great extent, caused by the actual content, that is the pornographic script in the form it takes in most com­mercial porn. The obvious question is whether more women would consume porn if it was made in another way, i.e. if the imagery, aesthetics and the sexual interac­tion between the actors/actresses were different. But what might then these films or pictures look like? What or which scripts would they follow and what form would the actors/actresses roles take? 

In such a discussion there is reason to examine exactly what is eroticised in the male dominated porn script. Dworkin maintains that submission and degrada­tion is the very core of the image of sexual pleasure communicated in porn. In that perspective it is not hard to understand why pornography doesn't normally attract women, other than for very specific rea­sons. Furthermore, our culture is steeped in sexist misconceptions about women's sexuality (Kimmel 2005, 84). In these are included conflicting fantasies about women as, on the one hand passive and asexual and on the other hand insatiable and demanding. These misconceptions confuse both men and women. In extreme forms they tend to paralyse women and suffocate the right to their own sexuality. When we observe that these misconcep­tions are the basic elements in most of the male-oriented pornographic material distributed to adults and young people in our society, we understand that its erotic attraction for women is limited.

We also know that porn is an important part of the male sexual script, which in turn works as a vital, not to say essential, confirmation of masculinity. Against this background, we understand that no area of sexuality, and certainly not porn, can be separated from the implications of the relations between the sexes in our society. Certainly, we know that the pornographic scenario is more about fantasy than real­ity. But the material for this fantasy is not without a basis in real life. Rather, it is a case of real encounters being recre­ated and eroticised in the fantasy. Thus, porn tends to legitimise and reinforce an unequal and prejudiced view of sexuality and the relationship between the sexes.

How young men and women deal with these messages is, naturally, an important question. The overall picture our study presents tell us that porn, in a way never before seen in history, is a part of young people's everyday reality. The penetration of the pornographic script is clear. All the young people we have spoken to have been influenced to the extent that the script has brought out the duality and ambivalence that is found in the individual herself and in her environment, as regards sexuality in general and porn in particular. Porn's characteristic of forbidden pleasure, the tension between danger and desirability is both enticing and offensive. On the one hand the dangerous and destructive ele­ments are emphasised, on the other hand the normal and everyday characteristics are pointed out – “everybody watches it, everybody does it, it is everywhere”.