The multiplication and intensification of these debates within academia is manifest in the new discipline of porn studies ( Smith and Attwood, 2014), with an academic journal of the same name. Dworkin, 1979).Įven so, the increased consumption of pornography has occurred alongside persistent mainstream discourses of its ‘cultural harm’ ( McGlynn and Rackley, 2007).
She argues that this user-created content provides a new type of pornography that transcends some of the feminist debates around coercion, objectification and the morality of pornography (e.g. Paasonen (2010) also highlights how the internet has facilitated a rise in amateur pornography, where people upload self-recorded videos of themselves having sex to websites such as. (2012: 100) contend that it has allowed people of all ages to consume sexually explicit content, and that this is increasingly common for adolescents.
older people have lower rates of pornography consumption), alongside a continued unwillingness among many adults to admit to consuming pornography ( Wright, 2013).Ī key driver of this increased consumption is the role of the internet ( Edelman, 2009). While General Social Survey data find lower rates of pornography consumption (at 34% in 2010), this can be explained through a combination of a broad sample that does not account for age and thus generational differences (i.e. Studies estimate that pornography is consumed by between 86 per cent and 96 per cent of men, with only slightly lower rates for women ( Rosser et al., 2012). Furthermore, there is increased discussion of non-normative sexual behaviours, such as kink activities ( Wignall and McCormack, 2015).Īs part of these trends, pornography has become more accessible online and has been normalized in many aspects of popular culture – a process McNair (2013: 3) calls ‘the pornographication of mainstream culture’. This focus on sexual pleasure is particularly visible in many youth cultures, where casual sex in the form of ‘hooking up’ is a normalized behaviour ( Bogle, 2008).
Attitudes towards non-marital sex have liberalized ( Twenge et al., 2015), with a fundamental shift in society regarding the rationale for sexual intercourse away from procreation towards pleasure ( Treas et al., 2014). Significant social change related to sexuality has occurred over the past 30 years. As such, we contribute to sociological understanding of the nature of pornography in society by examining the experiences of pornography consumption by young adult men whose sexual identities do not fit into the monosexist norms of US culture. Participants also used pornography to explore their sexual desires, emerging sexual identities and for developing new sexual techniques.
Pornography was understood as a form of pleasure to be consumed during free time, and we apply the conceptualization of sex as a leisure activity to understand this engagement with pornography. Adopting an inductive analytic approach to understand their uses of pornography, we find that internet pornography consumption was a feature in all participants’ adolescence, and that it was framed as an ordinary and unproblematic component of their lives. This study addresses this absence by analysing in-depth interviews with 35 young adult men with non-exclusive sexual orientations from an elite university in the north-eastern United States. Even so, there remains a dearth of qualitative accounts regarding the consumers of pornography. However, Attwood (2011) contends that a paradigm shift has begun in how pornography is studied: an increasing amount of research eschews a behaviourist approach that looks for causal links to negative outcomes in favour of one that recognizes the complexity of pornography and the importance of context in terms of its actors, social hierarchies and consumer groups (e.g. Flood, 2009 Klaassen and Peter, 2015 Mitchell et al., 2003), at the expense of other outcomes that could occur ( McKee, 2012) we call this focus on potential harms the negative effects paradigm, and it is pervasive in the study of pornography. A substantial body of research has explored the negative effects of consuming pornography (e.g. Feminist writing in the 1970s and 1980s developed a critique of pornography that claimed social problems, such as rape and gender inequality, were perpetuated through forms of pornography that were equivalent to violence against women (e.g. Pornography is a central site for debates about the regulation of sexual expression in society.