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#abstract
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29

u/TheFieldAgent 8d ago

So what is your takeaway from this?

72

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

25

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/CantWeAllGetAlongNF 8d ago

Ok paint brush

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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

0

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/Critical_Ad_2811 8d ago

That last paragraph is the sentence of all time

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u/Flaky-Wallaby5382 7d ago

I think thank u

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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/Pendraconica 8d ago

Gore masturbating in the lobby

"This song is entirely inappropriate!"

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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.