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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

ethnographic perspectives, female pornography use and disuse

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Anthropology

Abstract

In my research, I explore pornography use among a group of women in Utah, as well as attitudes about pornography held by people in the research location. For both the people in this study who use pornography and those who do not, the concept of pornography as the focus of an addiction exists via people creating meanings about what pornography is, how humans can engage with it, and what pornography will do to you if you use it. This, in turn, cycles back into existing as the context in which some of the women in this study have used pornography. Perceptions of what it means to use pornography impact the type of agentive power that pornography has and impact the realities of women who perceive themselves as having “a problem with pornography”. I find that the current discourse on pornography in the research location is damaging to the women I studied, and I present my study as a first step towards more research on this issue. It also serves as a demonstration that anthropological research methods are uniquely equipped to examine the damaging discourse and imagine an entirely new one.

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