Editor's note: This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with newsmakers of interest to pro-family Americans. The format is simple: Five questions and answers every Friday.
Jason Carroll, an associate social science professor at Brigham Young University, sensed from his work at college campuses across the nation that pornography was a growing part of the college culture, but there was no research to prove it.
So Dr. Carroll and his colleagues decided to study pornography use and attitudes among young adults. The study of more than 800 18- to 25-year-old students at six colleges found that most students — male and female — are accepting of pornography.
Generation XXX: Pornography Acceptance and Use Among Emerging Adults was published in the January issue of the Journal of Adolescent Research. Carroll spoke with CitizenLink about his research:
1. What were the results of your study?
Pornography has clearly moved into the mainstream of American culture — definitely among American college culture. Nearly 9 in 10 men report some level of use; 50 percent report at least weekly use; and 1 in 4 reports daily or every-other-day use.
At the same time, we see high acceptance rates among young women. While the young women are not participating, half of them say this is an acceptable practice.
2. How do you explain this shift in acceptance?
This has to do with the way pornography is portrayed and talked about in the popular media. You have a generation that’s growing up and, whether they use pornography or not, they get those messages that say this is very normal. This is very accepted, particularly with a little bit of a boys-will-be-boys kind of notion, and so we see the females being increasingly accepting of it.
The Internet and pay-per-view television (also) broke down a lot of barriers. People can bring this into their private spaces, and there’s no tangible record of it — there’s no magazine, there’s no videotape. Now, that same context is being augmented by wireless technology — what some scholars and myself are calling “pocket porn.” Pornography is available anywhere wireless Internet access is available. It’s not a question of if you’ll be exposed to pornography, it’s when. What will you do, and how will you respond? Will you turn toward it? Will you turn away from it?
3. Are these young men headed for porn addiction?
We do see very high use and viewing patterns that may, at least for a subset of these young people, become patterns they carry forward. Most of the research on risk factors or risk-taking among young people — like binge drinking and drug use — shows those behaviors peak at about age 22, and then they start to come back down. For pornography, this study found that’s not the case. It stays high, and it continues high.
4. What impact might these findings have on dating and marriage relationships?
While 90 percent of young men are using, only two-thirds of young men say this is an acceptable behavior. We see the exact opposite with women: Only a third of women use pornography, but half are accepting.
One of the most interesting findings of this study is the coupling effect. If 90 percent of men are using, but only 50 percent of women think this is acceptable, half of women are looking to pair with 10 percent of men. So do women become accepting and start to follow the patterns of their fiancé or eventual husband? Do men stop? Is this just a pattern of their young adult life and they stop as they move to marriage? Do men keep doing it, but they hide it? There are a lot of questions about coupling, but we know from this data there’s some incongruence. Men and women are not approaching pornography in the same way.
Pornography is an issue engaged and married couples have to deal with. They have to establish couple rules and couple expectations, and it may be an area they have some struggles coming to a consensus on.
5. What effect is the mainstreaming of pornography having on society, and what can we do about it?
It clearly socializes young people about expectations for intimacy and sexuality, very little, if any, of which is probably geared at realistic, long-term marital intimacy. There’s obvious objectification, of particularly women, in this type of media.
At the very least, these findings say there should be more of a public dialogue about pornography and more discussion about the pros and cons. People (need) to be investigating and looking at this.
Parents need to be talking with their young people. You’re not only sending them off to college where they’ll be exposed to a drinking and possibly drug culture, they’re also going off to a pornography culture.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Learn more about the harmful effects of pornography.
