Teenage girls watch porn too
Girls appreciate porn just as much as boys do, a new Swedish study indicates.
Swedish girls in secondary school like to watch porn and at least 30 percent of them appreciate porn just as much as their male classmates.
The findings are the result of a large survey carried out among secondary school students in Sweden which also revealed that more than half of the girls have watched porn at some point.
The fact that many girls actually like porn was a surprise to the researchers behind the study.
“It was a surprise. Boys were believed to be more positive towards porn than girls. This was also the pattern in this case, if all of the boys were compared to all of the girls. But when we looked at the answers from the 30 percent of the girls who actually did use porn, they were just as positive as the boys,” says study author Magdalena Mattebo, postdoc at the University of Uppsala.
One in ten girls wants to watch more porn
877 Swedish secondary school students around the age of 16 years participated in the survey which revealed that:
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54 percent of the girls had watched porn at some point, and one in three had recently watched porn.
- 96 percent of the boys had watched porn, and nine in ten had done so quite recently.
“There is a great difference between the number of boys who watch porn and the number of girls. But ten percent of the girls said that they watch less porn than they would actually like to,” says Mattebo.
The researchers don’t know why one in ten girls refrains from watching the porn she actually wants.
“It’s not a question of access to porn -- porn is very easy to find on the Internet. Perhaps their abstention is caused by the expectation that girls don’t like to watch porn. So if the girls do like to use it, they might feel guilt and shame,” says Mattebo and adds that follow-up interviews could throw light on the question.
Girls and boys have the same sex fantasies
While the survey revealed that there indeed is a difference between girls’ and boys’ porn consumption, it doesn’t indicate that boys have more porn-based sex fantasies than girls, says Mattebo. “Girls and boys have the same sexual fantasies. The most common fantasy is vaginal intercourse, then comes oral sex, anal sex, and group sex. That goes for both boys and girls.”
“The two genders were equally inspired by porn when they had sex. Thirty percent of the boys and girls have acted out porn-inspired fantasies with their partners -- typically vaginal and oral sex,” says Mattebo.
The girls often watch porn because they are curious about sex. Mattebo regards this as an indication that the Swedish sex education isn’t good enough.
Associate professor Gert Martin Hald of the Department of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen has previously commented on other results from Mattebo’s survey. He believes that when it comes to sex education and porn consumption, Swedish and Danish teenagers are very similar.
“When it comes to porn, the sexual morality in Sweden is probably a little stricter than it is in Denmark. I think a Swedish secondary school class is probably different from its Danish counterpart in some respects -- but there are more similarities than differences,” says Hald.
The survey was recently published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.
Translated by: Iben Gøtzsche Thiele
