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Are Teens Making Homemade Porn?

Last Updated: March 25, 2024

Research reveals many systemic effects of Internet pornography that are undermining an already vulnerable culture of marriage and family. Even more disturbing is the fact that the first Internet generations have not reached full-maturity, so the upper-limits of this impact have yet to be realized.”
– Jill Manning, Sociologist –

When I first saw the documentary, Traffic Control: The People’s War on Internet Porn, I was shocked to hear about the large numbers of teens that have started making their own pornography, mimicking what they see on the Internet.

This month an episode of the Australian program, The Hack Half Hour, investigated how young Australians consume pornography and how rife homemade porn is among them. The show’s host, Steve Cannane, is known for his award-winning interviews on Triple J Radio  and “Hack” is the station’s daily current affairs show. (NOTE: This episode deals with mature and explicit topics.)

Cannane, with his reputation for tenacious reporting of youth affairs, walked Sydney’s streets with a camera asking young people if they had pornography on their mobile phones. Many of them did. Cannane’s team reports that there is almost a form of “one upmanship” when it comes to making and distributing porn: “Who can come up with the most extreme, most revolting, most out there piece of porn on their phone and go, ‘Hey look at this.’”

Young Pornographers

We live in an age when the phrase “porn star” is actually an accurate title for some people: men and women who make their living from pornography have a high profile celebrity status. When Jenna Jameson was on tour promoting her book, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, she was shocked to find out how many thirteen year-old girls were telling her that she was their role model. Teenage girls look up to Jameson because she fits the coveted image of a “sexy, confident and cool” woman.

In her book, Pornified, Pamela Paul talks about specific cases of young men and women recording sexual acts to be disseminated among friends and schoolmates. Boys and girls alike have been caught, suspended and prosecuted for distributing video clips of themselves engaged in sex acts with other students. She tells the story of Judith Coché, a clinical psychologist who was shocked when some parents visited her practice to get help for their eleven year old girl who had started her own porn website. When the parents confronted their daughter, she said that pornography was considered ‘cool’ among her friends (Paul, 180).

. . . .

Research: Porn’s Effects on Youth Sexuality

Concerning youth sexuality and pornography, sociologist David Finkelhor, Ph.D., says, “We need a lot more research to keep tabs on this phenomenon and to separate hype from reality.” Finkelhor is the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center. His team found that teens are actually displaying healthier sexual behaviors in recent years. Finekelhor says,

“There have been drops in crime, drops in teen pregnancy, increases in the number of kids who say they’re virgins, declines in various kinds of victimization and less running away. You have to hold that image on one hand as you’re confronting all of the things that are happening online.”

While porn may not be showing a large macro effect now, more studies do indicate that teens are looking to the world of porn as their tutor on sexual matters. Porn used to be a forbidden and taboo subject, but now teen boys and girls can go online to learn “what sex should look like.”

To be sure, when talking about pornography online it is easy to be alarmist. Still, do parents have cause to be concerned about how pornography is affecting their teens? The researchers seem to think so.

For example, a group of Swedish researchers studied 718 high school students from 47 different high school classes to find any associations between porn use and sexual practices (Häggström-Nordin, 2005). They discovered . . .

  • Engaging in sexual intercourse with a friend (i.e., someone with whom they were not having a loving relationship) was significantly associated with high consumption of pornography.
  • Boys considered “high pornography consumers” were more likely than others to engage in sexual activities such as oral sex, group sex, and anal intercourse.
  • 29% reported that pornography had influenced their own sexual behavior, and in a Swedish study a year earlier, 53% of young men reported that pornography had impacted their sexual behavior by “inspiring” them (Tydén, 2004).

One study surveying 471 Dutch teens ages 13 to 18 suggests that the more often young people sought out online porn, the more likely they were to have a “recreational” attitude toward sex, viewing sex as a purely physical function.

In a related study, researchers concluded, the more explicit the sexual media viewed, the more likely young people were to see women as sexual “play things.” Interestingly, Internet movie porn was the only media type to show a statistically significant relationship.

An increasing number of clinicians are having youth referred to them for problems associated with online sexual activity. One researcher comments that untreated and unhindered online sexual activity among youth could lead to increased sexual compulsivity and possible sexual addiction. Young porn users seek higher levels of excitement with each pornographic or cyber-sexual experience, resulting in a lack of gratification, which in turn results in an increased desire for in-person sex (Freeman-Longo, 2000).

Statistics on teen sex are difficult to compile, but as we do a general sweep of teen culture, it is not hard to conclude that more teens view pornography as “the norm” of sexual experience. It not only whets their appetite for sex at a younger age, but it tells boys how “sexy girls” ought to behave in bed. Worse yet, we read about more and more incidents in high schools (and middle schools) of teens who want to make their own porn.

Is this how we want our youth to enter adulthood—as porn consumers, or even as amateur pornographers?

The Call for a New Sexual Revolution

There is the need for a new sexual revolution among the youth of today: a revolution of modesty, respect and purity. Indeed, in some areas this is already happening.

Why a revolution? Because whenever the whole of a culture has embraced one fashion, there is a need for a counter-movement. Passively standing by (and standing for nothing) will accomplish nothing.

To be sure, there will probably always be pornography and a pornography industry. There will always be big businesses with a financial interest in porn because, as they say, sex sells. But there can also be a strong revolution of purity that provides an alternative for teens who are looking for answers. If we do nothing now, if we are silent now, what will we reap in years to come?

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr. –

References

Freeman-Longo, R. E. (2000). Children, teens, and sex on the Internet. Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, 7, 75–90.

Häggström-Nordin, E., Hanson, U., & Tydén, T. (2005). Associations between pornography consumption and sexual practices among adolescents in Sweden. International Journal of STD & AIDS, 16(2), 102–107.

Paul, P. (2005). Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families, Time Books. New York, NY.

Tydén, T., & Rogala, C. (2004). Sexual behavior among young men in Sweden and the impact of pornography. International Journal of STD & AIDS, 15(9), 590–593.

  1. Jocelyn Sophia

    Sexual relations, and they should only occur within marriage, are the most private thing that people do. Due to the way things are right now, i think that we adults should praise greatly young people who willingly refuse to look at pornography. It is also important to emphasize that when a couple is married, they are not to tell others about their sexual relations. This is very much followed in the Muslim countries and a lot of good happens when married couples do not tell their friends about what they do in private. The general rules are taught however: it is forbidden to do sodomy (even the husband to his wife), one must not injest the sexual fluids, and no harm is to be inflicted upon the other, just like at any other time.

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