Tuesday, Sep 25, 2007    Text size: 

Psychologists at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph in Ontario explored the reaction of 482 Canadian male and female university students to sexually explicit material on the Internet, in a study published in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality.

“In both attitudes and behavior … males were more likely than females to endorse sexually explicit materials encountered online,” the researchers wrote.

Perhaps equally unsurprising was the correlation researchers found between the amount of time individuals spent online and the likelihood that they would seek out sexually explicit material via the web.

“This result may be a function of greater opportunity,” researchers wrote. “Specifically, the more time users spend online, the greater the opportunity to encounter sexually explicit [material] either accidentally or intentionally.”

A web user’s level of computer experience and savvy also was a significant predictor of how positive their views of adult content would be, the researchers concluded. More experienced users, who tended to be better represented among the male population of participants in the study, were more receptive to sexually explicit content and more likely to actively look for such content online, according to the study.

The authors of the study speculated that those who spend a great deal of time online and/or have a lot of experience with computers are more likely to have been repeatedly exposed to sexually explicit content. Such users become more desensitized to the content over time — or so the thinking of the researchers goes — making them more likely to further explore sexually explicit websites.

One of the study’s female authors, Eileen Wood, offered a simpler explanation: women simply don’t like porn.

“We found that having access to this material online is not really changing the picture,” Wood told CTV.ca. “Women just don’t like it. It doesn’t matter what the medium is, and it’s not because it’s not there for them. They can have a look if they choose to, but they don’t want to, and that’s very interesting.”

While the study did not probe the question of why women don’t appear to like sexually explicit content, Wood had a theory of her own.

“Based on past literature on this topic, in general, women tend to find this material quite degrading and offensive,” Wood said. “So we think that might still be the issue.”