Paper Title

Teenage Kicks: Young People’s Engagements with Pornography, Some Results from Pornresearch.org Questionnaire

Keywords

teenage sexuality
youth and pornography
digital media
internet culture
pornography consumption
adolescent behavior
moral panic
media sensationalism
media effects
public health narratives
brain development
porn addiction discourse
neuroscience and media
sexual development
sex education
media literacy
sexual culture
fantasy
masturbation
sex

Article Type

Research Article

Journal

University of Sunderland

Publication Info

| Pages: 1-28

Published On

April, 2014

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Abstract

As we finished the final edit of this chapter, UK television channel C4 kicked off its autumn season with a documentary ‘Porn on the Brain’ (TX: 30.09.2013: 22.00) which purported to investigate how teenagers’ relationship with pornography was changing in the Internet age. Any hopes of a nuanced and cool investigation were dashed as presenter Martin Daubney, one time editor of lads’ magazine Loaded, exclaimed ‘But now [pornography] is turning our kids into psychopaths!’ In what followed, hyperbole and claim was laid on thick over camera-friendly scenes of family kitchens and brain scans, producing a picture of lost innocence, brain change and addiction. Establishing spurious connections, pornography was explicitly likened to heroin, claimed to be damaging kids’ brains because the ‘nature of the teenage brain ... makes it especially vulnerable to addiction’ and one expert was wheeled in to intone ‘we have a great difficulty in proving the connection between violent imagery and violent behaviour but clinically it is clear there is a connection.’