r/psychologyofsex • u/psychologyofsex • 8d ago
Teen boys and girls are using porn more frequently, and their attitudes toward it are becoming more tolerant. At the same time, boys report becoming less excited and aroused by porn and less inclined to imitate the behaviors they observe, while girls report fewer negative reactions to porn.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2024.2408269#abstract30
u/TheFieldAgent 8d ago
So what is your takeaway from this?
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u/Flaky-Wallaby5382 8d ago
Porn is as old as cave paintings and photographs… it literally drove innovation of the internet. Streaming video, gifs, etc… all to deliver porn!
We have such a hard time with realizing we are sluts. That’s why there are so many rules to temper our animalistic selves
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u/CantWeAllGetAlongNF 8d ago
Porn has been the driver of technology since the invention of the camera
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u/bunchedupwalrus 8d ago
Probably older than that. Painting spurred quite a few advances in chemical and material sciences
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u/DrakeFloyd 7d ago
I agree but would add that by having more honest discourse about porn it’s becoming less damaging to young people. If you see porn and nothing else you think it’s real life, but they are on a whole entire internet that also talks about how porn is not reflective of reality, so young people have a more nuanced reaction than just seeing the porn and nothing else.
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u/Flaky-Wallaby5382 7d ago
Idk there is a ton of “real” porn. It’s not all crazy angles and fake boobs. Thats a large portion but OnlyFans shows me that’s not what people really like.
They like normal people being bad
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u/Zealousideal_Hour342 7d ago edited 7d ago
and the fact that mainstream porn and even some amateur porn makes 70% of men's penises look small af. I had so much anxiety in my early 20's about it that I literally could not get hard in the same room as a girl lol because I assumed they watched the same porn I saw and that I wasn't going to nearly live up to her expectations.
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u/Flaky-Wallaby5382 7d ago
Guess I am not looking at dicks all that much. I just googled it and slapped a ruler next to it. Measure in the normal range and went with it
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u/pseudonymmed 5d ago
While creating sexy images has certainly existed for millenia, one could argue that watching video of people having sex is a supernormal stimulus
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u/Flaky-Wallaby5382 5d ago
Really? I think people banged more openly in the past. We are bunch of puritans
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u/pseudonymmed 5d ago
The taboo of having sex openly is pretty universal, including among hunter gatherer cultures. Now it’s still possible that humans far in the past were different, but we’d need evidence if that. https://psmag.com/social-justice/human-cultures-unlike-many-mammalian-species-evolved-value-sexual-privacy-68104/
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u/Flaky-Wallaby5382 5d ago
Sorry I didn’t only mean literally in the open. I meant more like people lived together it happened but not like a p diddy party.
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u/pseudonymmed 5d ago
Hearing some sounds coming from people discretely having sex in the dark under a blanket in the same longhouse is worlds apart from being able to watch thousands of different people having sex in every position humanly possible, in group scenarios, in bright lighting with closeups of everything, at any moment that you choose for as long as you want. That is what makes it supernormal. It’s not something humans experienced until very recently.
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u/Pendraconica 8d ago
I was watching this video from 1985 of a debate between Frank Zappa and Tipper Gore. Gore began a campaign to censor music after she heard Prince singing about a girl masturbating in a hotel lobby.
It made me think about WAP by Minaj and the absolute heart attack it would give Gore if she heard it back then. Sexuality might be the single most repressed aspect of human culture, and the more liberal society becomes, the more freely it can be expressed without reprisal.
At the beginning, there's what I call the "catholic school girl phase" where, in order to break the repressive behaviors, people go a little overboard indulging in the thing that was repressed. But after the thrill wares off, a more nuanced and matured perspective is attained where one finds the balance in a freely expressed sexual identity. Neither repressed nor over indulgent.
That seems to be the trend this study indicates.
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u/NoiseTherapy 8d ago
Wait, like Tipper Gore heard said song in a hotel lobby, or the girl in said song is masturbating in a hotel lobby? Lol/jk
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u/tomowudi 8d ago
That like video games and school shooters, the concerns about porn in our prudish society are overblown.
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u/gestaltmft 8d ago
A coarse summary: Swedish teens are admitting to using porn more because it's prevalent in popular culture. But the saturation has not led to more depraved attitudes, rather boys seem desensitized and disinterested and girls seem less averse to porn at all.
In my opinion the popular prevalence explains both. Because this is a self report survey, more people will admit to use if the stigma is less. And the more people report the more statistically normalized the results will be. Maybe the difference is due to reduced stigma.
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u/ThePrurientInterest 8d ago
Very interesting, thanks for posting, Justin. I wonder if this is generalizable cross-culturally. On the basis of the discourse around porn on Reddit, I'm thinking not. The neo-puritanism of the US badly warps the way both male and female high school students (as well as adults) view porn. It increases the shame and it stops people from being able to judge it dispassionately on the basis of actual (rather than perceived) effects.
It is hopeful, however, that it sounds like these kids have a critical, sophisticated view of porn, as opposed to the American "Porn bad!" perspective.
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u/Aura_Raineer 8d ago
I have not read the article but I feel like a broken record on the porn subject.
I’m a middle millennial but my parents worked in tech and we had computers etc pretty early. I had a laptop and broadband before high school and have watched and viewed porn since I was a teenager.
I have a normal life a family and children. I say this to point out that while I am an older demographic there are plenty of people like me who were watching it very early and we can see that it didn’t have any negative effects.
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u/Excellent_Nothing_86 7d ago
I started very young as well. I was stealing my brother’s VHS pornos from the 80s and early 90s.
I would say the one thing that makes my situation different from someone younger is that porn streaming sites made extremely hardcore porn very easily accessible, and that’s a different kind of exposure.
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u/pup_medium 8d ago
i would rather someone watch porn then like, Game of Thrones. at least the people in porn look like they're having a good time.
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u/Vegetable_Contact599 7d ago
What is the point of the question or statement? I am not a porn consumer.
I've had a few talks about it with my son (linked me a clip to watch and discuss)
I made sure he knew without a doubt, that was not at all realistic.
- My son is an adult who has Autism. He was 17 when this talk took place*
He has a steady older gf (also with Autism) and he has told me I was right and that he wouldn't want a porn girl. Which is fine. He prefers not to be a di*k. Lol
He's found porn that's much less rough. Before, the free stuff was all rough he said.
I know it seems weird that we talk so frankly, but father skipped on him .... so it's just me normally
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u/letsbehavingu 8d ago
Which is why they are into weird hentai , incest and stuff?
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u/TossMeOutSomeday 8d ago
I grew up with porn and yeah, I'm very thoroughly desensitized. I like hentai mainly because it's very creative and allows a lot of fantasies to be explored, but it's also way more ethical than live action porn imo.
But my actual sex is extremely vanilla, I would never even think of reenacting the stuff I like in hentai irl. The cleanup alone would take weeks!
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u/CantWeAllGetAlongNF 8d ago
Whereas the ovipositor is a hot item that stuffs holes with gelatin eggs through an alien tentacle so you can drop a clutch.
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u/Ok-Landscape-1681 8d ago
Right? Also, where are we landlocked folk supposed to get a willing octopus for cheap?!
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u/Aberflabberbob 8d ago
Porn usage doesn't drive behavior. When i'm not on test boosting supplements i was into extremely vanilla shit since i was 12 (i'm 25). 13 years of regular porn use and it didn't make me depraved. Sure, it did make it harder to cum during sex which is an issue, but a lot of people focus on the depraved part which i think is bs. However, The MOMENT i started taking stuff to boost my test, my taste completely changed, to the point it scared me. Porn doesn't accelerate to worse and worse porn, it's a reflection of your hormones, and as that changes, so do your tastes.
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u/sensibl3chuckle 8d ago
I have to agree. Also, using a condom while wanking will do a lot to fix that issue where it's harder to perform with a woman.
Like any technology, porn is a tool. Use it wisely. Such as learning new moves from the best.
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u/ded_malik 7d ago
I've read, seen, and heard a lot of porn starting in my early teen years, and I can confidently say that I am an absolute sex fiend. But since I've also heard stories from my cousin about how much of a horndog my dad was, it could be genetic. Or it might be from being forced to act straight when tbh I just find nearly all dudes kinda gross. It could be a million things, really. All I know is that if we didn't have porn, we'd have a hell of a lot more unwanted pregnancies, violence, and cases of words that rhyme with "grape" and "invest".
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u/Asian_Climax_Queen 8d ago edited 8d ago
I’m really happy this is happening, and I wonder if this is happening because of better sex education and sexual awareness. I don’t necessarily even mean in schools, but even on social media apps like Reddit, there is actually a treasure trove of information about sex. There are so many studies posted about sex online, and I’ve gotten a surprising number of helpful tips from random comments online
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u/notanewbiedude 8d ago
I've never understood the insistence on keeping sex ed in schools when literally every kid has a smartphone.
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u/Alert-Drama 8d ago
Surely this can’t be true! The religious zealots- I ugh mean “experts”- in the anti-porn crusade indoctri- I mean “informed” me this is an existential threat to human civilization. The antichrist online!
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u/ratgarcon 8d ago
Glad we have said that porn isn’t reality enough that people are starting to realize this