The Impact of Online Pornography Consumption on Youth

Online pornography consumption by adolescents and young adults (i.e., youth) has been widely contested, debated, and criticized by both communication and sexual health scholars. In the current chapter, we provide an overview of the theoretical and empirical work devoted to investigating the impact of pornography use on youth. We pay attention to the conditional boundaries and underlying mechanisms explaining this impact, while highlighting inconsistencies in the field. The chapter concludes with the identification of challenges and future directions in the field of pornography research. Particularly, we point to the potential of model specification issues and the heightened value content-specific approaches would provide the field. Also, future research is recommended to more comprehensively explore the potential benefits of pornography use by youth.