Consommation de pornographie à l’adolescence : quelles représentations de la sexualité et de la pornographie, pour quelle sexualité ?

Abstract

This research was conducted on 319 adolescents (150 girls and 169 boys) aged from 15 to 19years. These participants were from different schools. The first aim of this study was to estimate impact of pornography access and visualization at representations of this media and sexuality. The second aim was to estimate influence of pornography consumption on the psychosexual development of adolescents. The participants answered a protocol, including several items about romantic and sexual relationships, about their pornography consumption and pornography perception. This protocol was administered collectively and anonymously. According to our results, young consumers emphasized the positive effects of pornography. The question was whether representations about pornography facilitated the pornography consumption or cognitive readjustment was made after viewing pornography? It was also possible that these adolescents have positive attitude towards pornography because their family or their friends watch this media. Against, young consumers and non-consumers emphasized in the same way the negative effects of pornography. This lack of difference between the two groups could refer to a mechanism for neutralizing the positive effects associated with pornography. This neutralization mechanism would reduce the pornography impact on the sexuality of young consumers. That would explain why the sexuality of young consumers is not extremely different from non-consumer. Then, young consumers recognized that pornography affects their sex life. In particularly, young consumers described an increase in their desire to have sex, an increase in the frequency of sexual activity and a change in their sexual practices. So, their sexual practices were more diversified than those of non-consumers too. Indeed, young consumers had more sexual partner in the last 6 months than non-consumers. They are more engaged in more oral sex, masturbation and anal sex than non-consumers. However, they did not differ with age of first sexual relationship and with the frequency of sexual activity in the last 6 months. Today, pornography consumption is a common behaviour among adolescents. Pornography consumption can enter in a developmental process. Attempts to keep adolescents away from pornography were useless. So, it would be more appropriate to change our current position and not analyse pornography consumption only in terms of risk to the psychosexual development of young people. Indeed, a way to bypass the pornography influence would be to develop critical thinking of adolescents. A way for this would be to give information about sex and pornography to adolescents.