Study challenges teen sexual experiences, porn perceptions

When you were in high school, you secretly worried about which girls were doing it and which guys were liked liked you. Contrary to the perception that boys desire more sex than women, a new study published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics proved what women knew but never said out loud—females and males equally desire and care about sex.

The scientists aimed to investigate the porn viewing patterns of pubescent youth, perceptions of porn and sexuality, experience in sexual abuse and sexual experience in general. They conducted classroom surveys with teens from two towns in central Sweden.

Even though teenage boys consume more pornography and think about it more often, a new study which conducted interviews with more than 800 Swedish teens found that 16-year-old boys and girls have similar sexual fantasies and girls consume more porn than the researchers thought.

As a reader, I would have liked to have known more about the assumptions regarding female sexuality, particularly why they believed young women had different sexual fantasies than men or consumed less pornography.

Surprisingly, the results revealed that Swedish girls were more sexually experienced than the boys, and a positive perception of porn predicted being sexually experienced, according to the study. The researchers defined sexual experienced to mean oral sex, intercourse, and anal sex.

What I found more disturbing were the predictors of being sexually experience such as being a girl, attending a vocational high school program, living with separated parents, having experience of sexual abuse.