London - One in three young women regularly view porn, with many watching it on their smartphone, it has emerged.
About 31 percent of those surveyed said they looked at X-rated material once a week. And 10 percent admitted that they had a daily porn habit.
The figures, which contradict the assumption that pornography is the preserve of males, also found that most of these women view images on their mobile phone.
Amanda de Cadenet, the one-time wild child and presenter of 1990s Channel 4 show The Word, who helped design the survey (carried out by Marie Claire US), said that far from ruining women’s lives, pornography is helping women find themselves.
De Cadenet, who has reinvented herself as fashion photographer and documentary maker, claimed the results contradict the idea that women feel threatened by pornography, as well as the perception that a generation’s sex lives will be “ruined by childhoods bombarded by online sexual images”.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has warned that easy access to web porn is “corroding childhood”.
And with children as young as five being reported to the police for sex offences, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has said that online pornography is warping youngsters’ ideas about sex and relationships.
The latest survey also found that 90 percent of young women who view porn do so over the web, with free sites the most popular. Many access it in more than one way, with some 40 percent said they read erotic stories, a figure likely to have been boosted by the popularity of the Fifty Shades of Grey series. Just three percent said they view adult material in magazines.
When asked which devices they use to view pornography, 62 percent said their smartphone.Laptops were the next most popular, followed by iPads and desktop computers.
The survey reflects how technology has changed how people access X-rated material. According to firm Covenant Eyes, which provides internet filtering, as many as one in five mobile searches are for porn – and 24 percent of smartphone owners admit to having pornographic material on their mobile handset.
Many of the women who responded to the survey said viewing pornography enhanced their sex life.
Writing in the magazine, De Cadenet said: “Porn is here to stay and we have to learn to negotiate it.”
About 20 percent of those surveyed said they felt embarrassed and ashamed and 41 percent said that didn’t want anyone to know about their habit, while two-thirds said they only ever watched porn alone.
Just over a third were “worried that men seem to conflate porn with real life sex”, while six percent said that their partner seemed to spend more time with porn that with them. Most of those surveyed were aged between 18 and 42, with 70 percent aged 18 to 34.
De Cadenet, who lives in Los Angeles and has twins with husband, Strokes guitarist Nick Valensi, added: “I’ve been fascinated by the impact of porn and porn culture – my term for the oversaturation of porn in our daily lives – for years.
“My friends frequently found themselves in a conundrum after discovering husbands and lovers watching it on the sly.
“Then, I began to hear from younger women that their first sexual experiences were often when boys asked them to copy sex acts from images stored on their iPhones.
“Porn is here to stay, and we have to learn to negotiate it, as sexual beings ourselves, who may or may not be viewers, and as partners.”
Daily Mail