Youth and Porn Resource Kit
1. Understanding
1.1 Youth and Porn – The Facts
Porn, gender roles, and stepfamily-themed sex
Rigid, stereotypical portrayals of men and women are commonly found across mainstream porn.

These include:

  • Men being portrayed as aggressive, dominant, and controlling.
  • Women being portrayed as submissive recipient of men’s demands and targets of men’s sexual gratification.
  • Men being much more likely to experience orgasm than women.
  • Men’s sexual preferences being prioritised over women’s (49, 56, 57).
These portrayals can send problematic messages to young viewers, contributing to, or reinforcing, rigid gender roles, such as men’s dominance and sexual objectification of women (59).

Family and/or stepfamily themed sex scenes are increasingly common in porn. For example:

  • In the top 200 porn videos people in Aotearoa watched in 2019, 46% of the videos contained family and/or stepfamily themed sex (45).
  • A recent UK study found the most frequent form of sexual violence in porn was sexual activity between family members (48).
This genre of porn can be confusing for young people, and provide problematic messaging around dominance, power, coercion, sex with minors, and family and/or stepfamily sex.

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“Porn normalised a lot of bad things that I thought were okay for my partner to do to me. And I was like, okay, I’ll just sit back and allow it.”
Female, 17 years