Attitudes and use of pornography in the Norwegian population 2002

Journal of Sex Research, May, 2004 by Bente Traeen, Kristin Spitznogle, Alexandra Beverfjord

Table 2 shows attitudes toward pornography in the total population by gender. The majority of respondents expressed at least some degree of positive attitude toward pornography. Men generally tended to express more positive attitudes that women did. More women than men described pornography as dull (42.1% vs. 24.0%), repulsive (24.2% vs. 9.0%), not entertaining (62.1% vs. 32.9%), and not exciting (49.4% vs. 31.7%).

The majority of participants indicated that they thought pornography leads to greater openness about sexuality, should not be forbidden, should be sold subject to some restrictions, leads to more sexualized violence in society, makes people's sex lives better, is not harmful to human sexuality, degrades women but not men, and is too easily available (Table 3). The majority of participants also indicated that censorship on TV is too strict. Looking at these results by gender, we see that a majority of men and a large minority of women express positive attitudes. In all items, women were more restrictive than were men.

We performed factor analysis of the 15 attitude items. Prior to performing the analysis, we recoded the attitude variables so that the value 1 indicated most restrictive and 4 indicted most accepting attitudes. The varimax rotated principal component analysis resulted in three factors accounting for 53.3% of the variance (see Table 4). The first factor was found to be based on eight items related to use of pornography as something to add flavor to people's sex lives. This factor was labeled "pornography as means of sexual enhancement." The second factor was based on six items dealing with moral issues related to pornography and was labeled "pornography as a moral issue." Only one item--"I can talk about pornography with my friends"--constituted the third factor. This factor was called "social climate." Scores on each of these factors were saved as new variables.

Table 5 shows the relationships between age, gender, and level of education and each of the three dimensions of attitudes toward pornography. Applying multiple regression analysis, the relative importance of the included variables in the model predicting pornography as means of sexual enhancement was gender ([beta] = -0.27), age ([beta] = -0.21), and level of education ([beta] = -0.12). Thus, men, younger persons, and persons with a low level of education tended to express more positive attitudes toward pornography as a means of sexual enhancement than did their respective counterparts. Only age was a significant predictor of the social climate attitude dimension ([beta] = -0.19). The relative importance of the included variables in the model predicting pornography as a moral issue was age ([beta] = -0.21), gender ([beta] = -0.18), and level of education ([beta] = 0.13). Thus, younger persons and persons with higher levels of education tended to express more positive attitudes toward pornography as a moral issue than did their respective counterparts.

It may be assumed that both social background factors and attitudes will influence use of pornography. Table 6 shows the relationships between these factors and use of pornographic magazines, films, and pornography on the Internet. The multiple regression analyses estimated that the included variables in the model explained 36.4% of the variance in frequency of watching pornographic films, 35.3% of the variance in frequency of reading pornographic magazines, and 21.1% of the variance in frequency of watching pornography on the Internet.