The intimacy effect: Girls’ reflections about pornography and ‘actual sex’

Abstract

Drawing on an online survey that was conducted as part of the media education awareness campaign of a Finnish online youth club, this article explores girls’ conceptions of the difference between pornographic representations and ‘actual sex’. As a result of the analysis, the greatest detachment between these two occurs concerning intimacy. Thus, this article will explore the pervasive influence of the notion of romantic intimacies, which provides the ideal for ‘normal’ relationships, sexual encounters and ‘good sex’ for the girls who participated in the survey through the concept of ‘the intimacy effect’. Like narratives of sexual storytelling in general, the survey dataset helps to trace connections between the personal and the societal. The dataset also draws attention to the ties between social relations and the cultural forms that mediate how these relations are set in motion, and to how certain cultural norms are forcefully influencing girls’ everyday life.

Traces of Pornography: Shame, Scripted Action, and Agency in Narratives of Young Swedish Women

“…In comparison to men, women generally hold more negative attitudes towards pornography. For instance, studies show that young women find viewing pornography "dirty," "disgusting," "hideous," "repugnant," "unnatural," and "vulgar" (Gurevich et al, 2017;Scarcelli, 2015;Spišák, 2020). This may in turn explain why they tend to keep quiet about their supposedly shameful private consumption (Scarcelli, 2015).…”

“…However, research also shows that pornography often gives rise to highly ambivalent feelings among young women. Feelings of disgust and repulsion may thus be experienced at the same time as feelings of sexual arousal and sexual inspiration (Attwood, 2005;Löfgren-Mårtenson & Månsson, 2010;Spišák, 2020).…”

“…In general, qualitative research that relies on phenomenological or discursive perspectives has offered more hopeful accounts of pornography consumption (e.g., Attwood et al, 2018;Gurevich et al, 2017;Spišák, 2020). In contrast to more traditional, quantitative research, which often portrays adolescents as passive victims of pornography, this research emphasizes how young people exhibit both agency and critical skills in relation to their experiences.…”

“…More specifically, we interviewed seven teenage girls, who all had experience of both heterosexual sex and pornography consumption, with the aim to shed light on how they believe pornography has affected themselves, their sexual partners, and young people in general. In line with Spišák's (2020) argument that there is a need for qualitative research that offers insights into the personal experiences of pornography use among adolescents, we performed a "thematic analysis" (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of the collected narratives.…”

‘We watch porn for the fucking, not for romantic tiptoeing’: extremity, fantasy and women’s porn use

“…Building on the respondents' descriptions of pornographic likes and fantasies as holding complex and ambivalent positions in their sexual lives, this article contributes to a growing body of empirical research on women's porn use attending to both contextual nuance and the multiplicity of identity positions through which gendered relations are structured (for example, Juffer 1998;Ciclitira 2004;Smith 2007;Ashton, McDonald, and Kirkman 2018;Attwood, Smith, and Barker 2019;Goldstein 2020;Meehan 2020;Spišák 2020). It further contributes to qualitative knowledge production on the appeal of extremity among female porn consumers outside frameworks seeking to identify the impact of pornographic scenes on women's sexual fantasies, likes or levels of tolerance (see Corne, Briere, and Esses 1992;Sun, Wright, and Steffen 2017).…”