Australian heterosexual teenagers have reported the porn they're watching is frequently violent and shows more violence than affection, Victorian researchers have found in a study published in the Journal of Sex Research.
More than a third (36.5%) of the teenagers interviewed for the study, by a team from Australian medical research organisation the Burnet Institute, said the porn they were watching showed violence, while 11.1% of them said it contained nonconsensual violence directed towards women.
The behaviour watched by most (85%) the participants was "men's pleasure".
More than 500 Australians aged 15 to 29 who had watched pornography over the previous 12 months told researchers they had seen a range of behaviours in the content, but the female participants were more likely than the males to report seeing violence towards women.
"It wasn't surprising to me that male dominance and male pleasure was seen a lot more than women's pleasure and women's dominance but what did surprise us was when we looked at associations by gender," the study's lead author Angela David told BuzzFeed News.
"We weren't expecting women to report seeing violence more frequently and does that mean young men are seeing the same behaviour and not identifying it as violence and what does that mean?"
Men were more likely to report seeing heterosexual anal sex and ejaculation onto a woman's face as well as "female dominance" in the porn they chose to watch.
“So there’s something interesting happening there around what it means to be dominant and what it means to see pleasure.”
More than 80% of the males in the sample (all of whom had watched porn in the year prior) had watched it in the past month and more than 50% of women.
Davis said the study was unique because it didn't aim to quantify the types of pornographic content available or viewed but to ask young people what they were actually perceiving in the porn they watched.
"We weren't telling young people 'this is what violence is' but asking them how frequently they perceive it."