Study: Swedish Boys on a Porn Binge

LOS ANGELES—According to Sweden’s English-language The Local, a new study “based on interviews with 477 boys who were in their first year of high school in Uppsala, eastern Sweden, found that one third of the teens accessed adult content more often than they wanted.” The story’s headline delivers the study’s more provocative finding: “One in ten Swedish boys watches porn daily.” The researcher who conducted the study said she was surprised by the amount and frequency of porn accessed by the 16-year-old subjects. Uppsala University public health researcher Magdalena Mattebo told the TT news agency. "I didn't think it would be so many of them. My (doctoral) supervisor has done this type of research in the past but then the big consumers [of porn] were looking once a week.” Once a week? She obviously does not know much about 16-year-old males. Ah, but then we come to a more revealing fact culled from the study, a slight detail “that in real terms the number of boys who look at porn has not increased, but rather the frequency of visits to adult sites has increased.” Mattebo clarified, "Previous generations had to go to the news agent and buy a magazine to get access to pornography, but nowadays it is just a click away. It will be very interesting to see what happens with this group when they [grow] up, to see if their behavior stays the same.” The study also surveyed 400 16-year-old girls, most of whom had also watched porn at some point in their lives. "30 percent said they had watched more than once," reported The Local, "but Mattebo underlined that the girls' consumption was much less intense than the boys'." By intense we assume they mean more frequent, which makes sense. 16-year-old boys. It's kind of all you need to know, though interestingly, there is no mention of the sexual orientation of the study subjects, male or female.