I'd be interested to know what their definitions of pornography were, especially when talking to girls.  There's plenty of alt-porn that doesn't really gel with mainstream conceptions (fanfic, anybody?) that girls consume and produce.  I wonder if changing the definitions would change the numbers?

Anyway, interesting graphs.  I wonder if the unwanted exposure number rises for girls at 14-15 because boys of that age are starting to seek it out?

as a 14-15 year old boy I desperately wanted to watch porn but the internet was in it's fledgling sages (and I didn't really understand why it existed, NOW I know :D ) so I had to get my "fap material" from friends who were connected to bbs or could copy VHS.
And if there wasn't any porn, I watched MTV ;)

I guess the survey was made in the US. Would be interesting to see the results of other countries (netherlands, germany, saudi arabia....)

Wait, you're saying that they called up people's houses, asked to speak to their children, and then asked the children if they had ever seen porn, and if they had sought it out?

Yeah, I'm not buying the legitimacy of these results.

Wow. 58% of teenage boys are either lying or aren't trying hard enough...

This does seem like it would be a difficult survey to get people to tell the truth on.

HA. This just reminds me of when my boyfriend had to pull my 14 year old brother aside and discretely show him how to erase the history on my parent's computer. I figured it would be better appreciated from a guy than from his older sister. Things have changed in the past 10 years or so though - I think many kids have their own computers instead of one household computer.

I'm a middle school librarian and have serious discussions with my students about "unwanted exposure", especially my 5th graders who do an internet safety unit.  Overall they seem to be able to handle it pretty well.  They universally tell me that when they see something that makes them uncomfortable they just close the window.  They get a little squirmy and say "you know, that... stuff" but they certainly don't seem traumatized by it.  Now with the older ones (7th, 8th grade and high schoolers) you know that they are looking at porn (on purpose and not).  I don't have a problem with them masturbating and exploring their sexuality but we really need to have more comprehensive sex education for teenagers.  This education also needs to include discussions on the difference between porn and real life sex as well as pleasure.  Especially for girls. 

um ya, the design of this study is kind of weird. Telephone? The land line in a house is usually in public space. Seems unlikely they get un-biased answers. Clever researchers couldn't figure out a way to do this online anonymously?

My opinion is:  it is perfectly natural for teens to be interested in sex and pornography might be a useful tool for sating sexual impulses in light of the changing circumstances of humanity whereby our natural impulses lead to undesirable outcomes.  

Just like many argue the correct response to teen sex is to teach safe sex and consequences of sex, as opposed to abstinence only, perhaps there's a better response to porn than "abstinence only."  The major problems with porn, in my mind, are it usually does not treat men and women as equal participants in sex, and it fosters unrealistic or unhealthy fantasies, which in turn might translate into unrealistic or unhealthy expectations.  It would be nice to try to pressure the porn industry to address these, but given the status quo you could educate people to their existence, why they are problematic, possible consequences etc.  

Man, self-reporting? That doesn't seem very solid.

I honestly find this study a difficult one to believe.  I've done a decent amount of secondary research on pornography and all the studies I've read indicate that most boys are exposed to pornographic material by age 11, and they are typicaly exposed to it by friends who are slightly older than them.

One thing that I like is that they actually included girls in the study.  Because we live in a society where the sexuality of girls and women is so complex nobody wants to touch it.

I disagree with these results.  In my non-scientific discussions with people I work with, the vast majority of girls do look at porn, or have, on purpose, in the past.  Boys more.

The result is a multitude of physical changes in the younger persons world, from everyone, or nearly everyone, shaving their pubic hair (time to write a new Vagina Monologue??), to boys thinking that sex in porn is the real way of doing it.  Quite a few younger girls complain about their boyfriends wanting to choke them or do other insane sex acts to them, just because they've seen it online and think that that's how you do it.

I would bet all my money that a much larger percentage of teens do look at porn.

These results are way too low, based on my personal experience.  I was 13 when the internet was just starting to be a thing, and I definitely was exposed to and sought out things that could be considered pornographic.  (One big example is cyber sex, which is not mentioned here at all, but used to be a thing before web cams were also a thing. ) 

Well, I have a problem with a majority of (film, 'scripted') porn in general. However, with teenage boys I have an extra issue: They will see porn before actually having sex. Given that you have posted about the "Make love, not porn" TED talk, you've posted on how many men have no clue what the clitoris is and you've posted on how much bad sex young people are having (meaning: sex which they do not find satisfying and which they do not enjoy), I am frankly very disappointed that you don't make that connection. 

I was probably 14 (and a girl at the time) before I started looking for porn - but then, boy howdy! I even had some of my friends with faster internet connections download and burn porn onto CDs for me. Of course, this kind of study rings up my bias alarm on many fronts, including that they opted not to consider written porn - which was my typical go-to for masturbation, mostly because you could get the whole story (and not just 'clips') for free, and you didn't have to have any sound on/wear headphones and maybe thus miss the sound of mom coming to check up on me. Oh, and that I was a huge anime nerd and so my porn choices when it came to images or videos were typically hentai rather than live action. One of my reasons for that at the time was that I couldn't be sure that the women in live action porn were there willingly and happily and as a feminist I didn't want to risk getting off on their suffering - I didn't know yet where to get good porn with happy performers. Kids are smarter than most people give them credit for, and honestly, teaching how to find non-exploitative porn would be time much better spent than trying to keep them away from everything sexually explicit.

I dislike surveys like this because people will lie under any circumstances about porn usage. And how did they manage to use a telephone survey to ask children if they had watched porn? I call shenanigans.

Also, both sexes read things like Fanfics and mangas and watch certain genres of animes that can be considered porn (yaoi, yuri, hentai), and I doubt this survey is accounting for that.

Can someone give reference to some a metastudy or other extensive empirical study on porn consumption in contemporary US or Europe. Who consumes what how often for how long? Is there notable subgroups of users apart from men/women. Are there any detailed qualitative studies that track users for extended periods (people writing porn diaries or whatever?).

As a young person of the first internet generation, I can GUARANTEE that kids (and I say "kids" because it's not just teens, it's those much younger too) are actively seeking out porn on the internet. If you don't have any sort of internet-nanny software on your computer, it is EXTREMELY likely your kid has purposefully looked at porn. Even if you do have that software, some kids are smart enough to get around it or just access the porn at a friends house.

It's perfectly natural for kids to be curious about sex, whether or not they should be having sex themselves at such a young age. The fact that it's so taboo just makes it more appealing to them.

There wouldn't be anything wrong with porn if it weren't more often than not presented in a totally unrealistic and sexist way. I've seen some pretty brutal, sick and downright anti-woman internet porn. Sometimes it's passed around for shock value, but then other times you get people actively requesting it.

I think that the best course of action, for unsupervised children/teens (because you're NEVER going to keep them from looking for it, no matter how hard you try) AND adults, is to start producing more realistic, less misogynistic depictions of what grownups get up to in the bedroom. Also, start educating young people that most porn they might stumble upon is NOT a very good representation of how most people get it on.

Free internet porn is totally easy to come by...I looked at a ton of it throughout my childhood and teenage years. I'm twenty two now and I've been porn-free for about three years. And I'm a girl.

When will otherwise smart sociologists stop publishing papers on surveys about topics on which people will, by all means, lie, no matter what... asking a child /teenager on the phone whether they have looked at porn on the Internet??? I'd fail a methods' class student for writing a project using this method.