Youth Gender and Pornography

Finding out what young people think of pornography, what they have viewed as pornography, how often the view pornography has been difficult. This of course means that we make assumptions about how young people are responding to the easily accessablre pornography of today. Perhaps our assumptions are wrong. Below is some interesting information from 'The Nordic Gender Institute NIKK

"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. "

Go here to read a bit more about thier research: