Learner, laugher, lover, critic: young women’s normative and emerging orientations towards pornography

ABSTRACT

This article examines young women’s common ‘orientations’ towards pornography as they appear across a range of qualitative research. These orientations, which I define as ‘learner’, ‘laugher’, ‘lover’ and ‘critic’, reflect both common understandings of pornography as a problematic object as well as normative constructions of ‘good’ female sexuality. I outline the features of these orientations and draw on them to make sense of a set of pornography-related narratives shared by young female participants within a focus group study. I argue that while these young women generally oriented themselves in normative ways towards porn as reflected in other qualitative studies, they also at times broke from those orientations to situate themselves as unashamed viewers of pornography, suggesting a potential shift in the terrain of contemporary femininity that allows some young women to express a more banal relationship to porn, sex and sexuality.

KEYWORDS:

• Pornography
• qualitative research
• young women
• femininity
• focus groups
• narrative analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Broad City. 2015. Season 2, episode 8. ‘Kirk Steele’, directed by Lucia Aniello, USA.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 752-2015-2021].