As early as 2003, Gérard Bonnet, professor of psychology and psychoanalyst, posed pornography as a “challenge to modesty” . Today, it imposes itself more broadly as a “challenge for the construction of adolescent sexuality”.

Until very recently, in France, this subject was not really taken seriously. And even if the current government has expressed itself to deplore the access of young people to pornographic content, if it has expressed its intention to better regulate it , if not to prevent it, the project does not have for the hour resulted in no concrete action.

From prohibited use to sexual liberation, pornography seems, in our contemporary digital environment, to know no limits. On the Web, pornographic sites are flourishing, and are moreover the most represented (and the most consulted) with hundreds of millions of pages, which do not fail to insinuate themselves into innocuous searches through pop-up windows . . So that, without even looking for it, the eye seems irremediably compelled to see pornographic images…

The rise of new technologies has therefore offered pornography an exponential distribution medium, accessible to all… including (and even above all) children and adolescents who always know how to handle these tools better than adults.

Various surveys carried out in France estimate that around half of adolescents, girls and boys, would have been confronted with pornographic images before the age of 13 , that 63% of boys and 37% of girls, aged between 15 and 17 , regularly consult pornographic sites . Even more recently, that 30% of Internet users consulting these sites are minors, and that one minor in ten consult this type of content every day – especially from their personal mobile phone (smartphone) (for three-quarters of between them).

In short, the Internet has “democratized” (the use of) pornography, making its access easy, immediate, permanent and without any real regulation. It no longer calls for any effort to see, in what it underlies of transgression, pleasure, guilt or shame. From astonishment to disgust via the compulsion to see , adolescents have to deal with cyberpornography in their spaces of experience, of meeting… and its repercussions on their puberty upheavals.

Representations of sexuality and women

Research, mainly North American, conducted with adolescents since the 2000s, questions the influence of pornography on their representations of sexuality and of women, as well as on their sexual practices. It appears that the confrontation with pornographic codes would lead adolescents – both girls and boys – to consider women more as “a sexual object”, and to modify their relationship to their body, which is therefore invested in an anxiety-provoking mode.

Thus adolescents, using cyberpornography as their main source of information, mention the impact of this medium in their sexual activities, adopting more diversified practices, mirroring the models conveyed. But, at the same time, they may recognize some associated negative effects. This recognition would have a moderating effect, so that the consumption of pornography could be part of an “adolescent developmental process” , responding to a quest for reference points in terms of sexuality.

This quest is also advanced by some adolescents themselves: it is a question of going to see , out of curiosity, before the first sexual intercourse. This curiosity is driven by the awakening of adolescent sexuality. The instinctual invasion at this moment and the resulting need for discharge alter any critical discourse on the nature of the images and the representations thus constituted.

However, this positioning is reversed with the transition to an affective and sexual relationship with a partner “in real life”. From then on, the viewing of porn decreases, feelings of futility or shame emerge… as well as the experimentation that “pornography is not reality” .

Pornography: A Short-Circuit of Fantasy Activity

In short, psychopathological or addictive drifts appear marginal, they concern the most fragile adolescents, whose imagination remains captive to this iconography. Moreover, to date, the link between consumption of pornography and sexual assault in adolescence has not been established. Nevertheless, it is in our practice with adolescents presenting a worrying sexuality , even perpetrators of sexual violence, that this question has arisen. These young people frequently mention repeated, massive contact with pornography.

While obviously not all adolescents who view this type of image engage in this type of action, the fact that pornography is integrated into the current digital uses of young people with problematic behavior invites us to question the impact of cyberpornographic “violence of seeing” on the construction of adolescent sexuality .

We hypothesized that adolescent pornography consumption would proceed as a short-circuit of fantasy activity . While the imagination, and therefore thought, occupies a large place in the development of romantic and sexual relationships, pornography reduces them to the sexes (visible, real) and to an act-exploit(ation) freed from affective issues, annihilating any potential for daydreaming.

Besides, in its most common form (scenes, “clips”), there isn’t even a scenario anymore – or even possible scripting? – where the image crushes any projection, any fantasy movement. Under the pretext of showing everything, pornography dismantles sexuality (limited to the act, to hyper-specific practices) and the process of body unification, henceforth restricted to the organ.

Traumatic potential

These characteristics lead us to consider the traumatic potential of pornographic images (massivity of the excitation provoked, break-in, stupefaction, etc.); especially since the subject is confronted with it early on. In these cases, the encounter with sex, with the brutality of sex, precedes any understanding of (adult) sexuality, risking to initiate fixations, divisions… in short, a traumatic experience. It should also be noted that the contexts in which we observed problematic consumption are often marked by previous traumatic experiences (relating to sexuality or not).

Finally, at the same time and from a dynamic perspective, the use of pornography in adolescence could be understood as an attempt to (psychically) integrate adult sexuality. In adolescence, pornographic iconography constitutes a projection surface for the enigma of the sexual, a way, albeit fragile, of putting outside the strangeness and violence of the puberty phenomenon.

In this sense, like all images, pornography is neither good nor bad . For many teenagers, it presents itself as an inexhaustible source of information, a guide to “good practices” in terms of sexuality. According to this perspective, as shown by François Marty (2008) with regard to violent images , pornographic images would allow adolescents to contain the overflow of drives, to offer it a first form of representation, even to symbolize it.

However, by fueling both excitement and its relief, while ignoring fantasy and relationship, pornography risks subjugating the most fragile adolescents (as we encounter them in consultation). This is also one of the challenges of our therapeutic proposal: putting words to the excitement caused by sex and images of sex.

Because it is the absence of words around these “shock figures” and the sensations generated by pornography that can prove pernicious. Where the crushing of the imagination risks leading to a split between affectivity and sexuality; between the superficial ego of the adolescent apparently satisfied in its needs and its deep ego unsatisfied in its desires.

Author Bio: Barbara Smaniotto is a Lecturer-HDR in Psychopathology and Clinical Psychology, CRPPC at the University Lumière Lyon 2