Attitudes and use of pornography in the Norwegian population 2002

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

The three dimensions of attitudes toward pornography were important as intermediating variables between age and gender and use of pornographic materials. Use of pornography on the Internet, however, was more related to being young and male than to attitudes. Men and younger individuals scored higher on the attitude dimensions of pornography as a means of sexual enhancement and pornography as a moral issue than did women and older respondents. The attitude dimension of social climate mediated an effect of age in an indirect process and had a direct effect upon the frequency of film watching. Young people may have integrated pornography as a legitimate topic of conversation, and in turn this may facilitate film watching. When an effect of social climate is not found for use of the other two media, this may be explained by the fact that film as a medium has a different, and perhaps less private or even less "dirty," status than does pornography presented in magazines and on the Internet. Watching a film, possibly together with a group of friends, may be perceived as a nonsexual act in that it can be easily masked as detached and not arousing. Reading a magazine or watching sex on the Internet, on the other hand, may not be as easily shared with others. It is something you do on your own, and may therefore be perceived as a more explicit and thus more intimate or even shameful act.

All respondents who expressed positive attitudes were more likely to use pornography, particularly those who scored high on the pornography as a means of sexual enhancement dimension. It is not clear, however, that attitudes are the cause of behavior. Instead, the opposite mechanism may be operative, namely that people adopt a behavior and subsequently change their attitudes to correspond to that behavior in order to restore or maintain belief in themselves as socially competent individuals (Bem, 1970). Research has indicated that people exposed to pornography may become more liberal toward sexual acts and conventions. They express, for instance, higher acceptance of extramarital sexual relations and less emphasis on marriage and having children (Zillman & Bryant, 1982).

Controlled for gender and age, education level had relatively little impact on attitudes and behavior in this study. Still, respondents with higher levels of education scored highest on the pornography as a moral issue dimension, and persons with low education scored highest on the pornography as a means of sexual enhancement dimension. Within any society or culture, sexuality is known to vary among different social classes (Kutchinsky, 1988; Schmidt, 1989), and social class is often closely related to level of education. The results from this study are somewhat surprising, as upper-class people traditionally have cultivated the erotic while people of the working class have been too exhausted after long, hard working hours to grant sexuality the same position in their lives. The role of sexuality among the working class has been more closely related to reproduction than to the middle-class idea of sexuality as a means of mutual exchange of security, intimacy, and pleasure. In contemporary society, our results indicate that those with higher levels of education regard pornography as something morally accepted but not as something to be used to enhance sexual pleasure. This could be an indication of pornography being intellectualized and made a topic of discussion, but not accepted enough to implement in one's own sex life.