To address the changes that have taken place in pornography's cultural status, the joint-Nordic research initiative has attempted to map out consumption patterns and attitudes regarding pornography as they are expressed among Nordic young people aged 14 to 18. At the centre of the project has been the issue of the proliferation of pornography and its effects on young people's perceptions about gender. In general, the picture that emerges on the basis of this project is a complex one and offers no easy answers.
Pornography turned out to be a well-known and actively debated phenomenon among Nordic young people, who cooperated willingly with the team of researchers concerning their own relationship to and attitudes toward pornography. Young people consume pornography in varying degrees, are familiar with various genres, and reveal themselves to be fairly reflective and critical in relation to what they see. At the same time, they point out that the consumption of pornography has become more standard, but that it continues to be viewed as more "normal" for boys than for girls. This is explained by saying, among other things, that pornography is after all produced by men and for men. In spite of the tendency toward normalisation, many things indicate that young people's approach to pornography is rather ambivalent. Among boys in particular, pornography works on the one hand as sexual inspiration in more private contexts, while at the same time it functions as a social rallying point, ridiculed and dismissed as containing exaggerated images of what sexuality really is in daily life. This ambivalence is not as marked among the study's girls, who, even when they are somewhat positively inclined toward pornography, express a critical stance toward it.
Distinguishing between pornographic images and the real world is something that young people of both genders are fairly explicit about. They do not swallow what they see whole. Also, pornography does not occur in a social or cultural vacuum, where other factors that influence young people are absent. All the same, many of the studies included in the project show that perceptions of what is fiction and what is true are not entirely watertight in young people’s everyday lives. Ideals regarding physical attractiveness imposed by pornography frequently colour their ideas of how people’s bodies ought to look – not least their own. But it is true of both genders that they express themselves and act in complex ways in relation to the problem. Boys are more likely to immediately state that they feel stung by the bodily requirements set by pornography in terms of the demands it places on their own bodies. They feel uncertain about, for example, penis size, worrying that girls use such criteria when choosing a partner. Girls, on the other hand, describe poor body image in relation to the ideal bodies presented in pornographic imagery. At the same time, as young people interact with other young people, they make soft-core pornographic code references with regard to body and gender – for example as they present themselves on the Internet – acutely aware that they are being judged by others their age.
A characteristic feature in the project's findings, and something that emerged in a number of the studies, was the highly gender specific ways in which young people use and view pornography. Even though previous Nordic studies have indicated that a new, more diversified culture of sexuality offers young people of both genders more choice – and even as we see girls approaching boys in their use of and views regarding pornography – it must nevertheless be concluded on the basis of the present project that gender continues to make a difference. Gender identity plays an important role in how young people encounter pornography, to what extent they use and consume it, what it is used for, how they interpret its depictions of gender, power and sexuality and what the potential effect of this is, and how critical they are to the pornography they watch. Whether this is a result of gender-specific socialisation that gives girls and boys different opportunities to feel, view and have attitudes about sexual desire is difficult to answer within the framework of this project. Future studies, in both sociology and cultural analysis, seeking to identify deeper reasons for why gender-specific differences continue to be so pronounced, could help us understand the sexual space in which girls and boys operate and thereby qualify our knowledge of post-modern sexual culture.
While gender is decisive, conversely, nationality is not. The research project identified no significant differences between the Nordic countries in the use of or attitudes toward pornography. This discovery was surprising in that, in light of the differences in legislation as well as in the political climate of each country surrounding the issue of pornography, one might have expected greater variation in young people's responses. The reason for the absence of national differences may be, that the political initiatives and the social and cultural movements which have affected all of the Nordic countries over the last 40 years, have produced largely identical discourses regarding sexuality. Here, we refer particularly to sex education in schools, access to free abortion, distribution of birth control pills – all in all, a liberalisation of sexual culture, which, perhaps more than we acknowledge, has created a number of identical threads across the borders of the Nordic countries. In other words, in terms of attitudes toward sexuality, our young informants and respondents were brought up and socialised within the same Nordic cultural sphere, and, very probably, this was also significant for their responses. Another reason for the cross-national homogeneity in responses is no doubt the global nature of the Internet. This media allows young people to share the same content, on the same terms – contributing to diminishing local differences or even rendering them irrelevant.
Against this backdrop there is good reason in the future to cooperate across the Nordic countries, not only in terms of youth and pornography, but also more broadly about sexuality and young people, through research projects, but eventually also through sex education campaigns, education initiatives in schools, development of educational materials and so forth.
