Pornography vs. sexual science: The role of pornography use and dependency in U.S. teenagers’ sexual illiteracy
AUTHOR(S)
PUBLISHED
2021 in Communication Monographs
KEY FINDINGS
- The findings of this study show that pornography consumption is associated with believing sexual misinformation, suggesting that pornography is actively contributing to making young people more sexually illiterate.
ABSTRACT
This study examined U.S. adolescents’ pornography consumption, pornography dependency, and belief in a variety of notions contradicted by basic sexological science. Data were from 595 youth aged 14–18 who participated in a population-based probability survey. Consistent with the sexual script acquisition, activation, application model (3AM) of sexual media socialization, adolescents who had viewed pornography were more likely to hold erroneous sexual beliefs than adolescents who had not viewed pornography. Also consistent... READ FULL ABSTRACT
EXCERPTS
- "Pragmatically, these results suggest that pornography consumption frequency and dependency independently increase adolescents’ sexual illiteracy."
- "Taken together, these correlations are inconsistent with the notion that youth discard the erroneous sexual beliefs they have learned from pornography as they gain experience with sex. Rather, they suggest that adolescents who are dependent on pornography for sexual learning are more likely to precociously enact sexual scripts they have observed in pornography, which reinforces the erroneous sexual beliefs they acquired from pornography in the first place and lessons the measurable impact of subsequent pornography consumption."
