Nearly one in three young Australians rely on “violent and degrading” pornography to teach them about sexuality, a new report reveals.
An online survey of 832 Australians aged 16 to 20, commissioned by Our Watch, asked them about gender roles, sex, dating and relationships, including their attitudes towards pornography .
The study found that young people first viewed pornography, on average, at the age of 13.6 – often before they were given the tools to understand what they were seeing.
What’s more concerning is that 31% of participants watch this content as a form of sex education – even though many know it’s not a good way to learn about sex.
Although pornography is not problematic in itself, much of it “is violent and degrading towards women”, Watch CEO Patty Kinnersly told news.com.au.
“Many young people say they learn about sex and relationships through pornography, and then retain those values and views when they enter into intimate relationships.”
As Chanel Contos, founder of Teach Us Consent, said in her speech at the National Press Club last November, learning to have sex by watching pornography is like learning to drive by watching Formula 1.
Kinnersly “absolutely” agrees with this comparison.
“It’s the normalization of aggression, misogyny and things like strangulation that have grown over recent decades that is particularly concerning,” she added, noting that one in three Australians aged 18 and 19 reported being a victim of domestic violence in the past year.
“If you think that people as young as 13 are starting to see violent pornography that actually perpetuates violence against women in particular, and there are a high percentage of young men who regularly view this pornography and normalize it, it is not necessarily surprising that it is being distributed. in intimate marital relationships during their early years.
A survey conducted earlier this year by the University of Melbourne Law School and the University of Queensland of 4,702 people aged 18 to 35 found 57 per cent of participants had been strangled during sex at least once. More than half (51%) said they had done it to a partner.
Kinnersly called the statistics — which have been widely attributed to the depiction of sexual strangulation in mainstream pornography and other contemporary media — “staggering.”
In pornography, choking is often presented as an act of pleasure rather than one that can cause harm. Still, “there is no safe way to perform strangulation or to provide consent during strangulation,” Kinnersly emphasized.
And the more common it becomes, the more pressure young people will feel to engage in it.
“If young women consider it normal to be submissive and choking – and overwhelmingly, it is women who experience choking – if they consider it normal and this is how they should behave in a normal relationship, so clearly this will have a big impact on young women, on their self-esteem and on what they expect from a healthy relationship,” Kinnersly said .
The increasing prevalence of choking during sex, including among young men “who don’t have a violent bone in their body,” is a topic Contos explores in more detail in his book: Consent laid bare.
“The fact that we simply call it ‘sex’ and not ‘rough sex’ means that as a society we have now made rough sex the default norm,” she writes.
“Not leaving with bruises, after being slapped, choked, spat on, ejaculated on, fucked so hard it hurts to walk is an anomaly worthy of an adjective – ‘vanilla sex’.
“If these acts occurred in any other context, they would qualify as domestic violence, but if you slide a mattress under the altercation and add sexual intercourse, it’s apparently good sex.”
Nearly three-quarters (72%) of young people surveyed by Our Watch said the pornography they watched often showed aggression and violence against women. Eight-four percent believe pornography reinforces stereotypes about what is expected of men and women during sex.
The implications of this cannot be overstated, Kinnersly said.
“In a country where violence against women and gender-based violence is a national emergency, it does not matter whether it is sexual harassment and assault in workplaces and universities, or street harassment or domestic violence,” Kinnersly said. .
“This is driven and underpinned by lack of respect, gender stereotypes of women as submissive and men as dominant, and sexism in all aspects of our community.”
That’s why “it’s so important that we, as a community, include consent and be able to critique pornography as a normal part of consent and relationship education,” Kinnersly said.
“So the moment they have access to pornography, they themselves have something to challenge and say, ‘Actually, that’s not how my world is, that’s not what I see ‘”, she added.
Adults also need to meet young people “where they are,” Kinnersly said, through Our Watch’s The Line campaign, a primary prevention resource that runs on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook and helps young people have healthy and respectful relationships. .
“I think because many of us didn’t grow up in an online environment normal part of our daily experience…(we forget) that it’s absolutely part of people’s world,” Kinnersly said.
“We need to understand that this is the truth for young people. It’s not something added, we can’t remove or disable it. We need to meet them where they are.
“We need to bring this matter out of the dark – because most people I talk to still think of pornography as something they saw when they were 18, back then, on a VCR.
“It’s not like that anymore. It’s a very different thing.
