More than one in four young women in Britain has considered getting cosmetic surgery after seeing the beauty standards displayed in pornography.
Around 40% of young women say porn has made them more concerned about how their breasts look, and 37% say it’s made them concerned about how their vagina looks, according to new BBC Three figures.
In the revealing survey of attitudes, 60% of women say porn sets an unrealistically high bar for what bodies should naturally look like, and one in five men agreed they’d also thought about changing their body because of porn.
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Not only do people aged 18-25 think porn imagery is changing expectations of what someone should look like, but also how they should behave.
The study of 1,000 people, which was commissioned alongside BBC Three’s new show Porn Laid Bare, found 24% of young men and women have felt pressured to do things a partner has seen in porn, and 36% say they’ve had riskier sex due to porn.
Half of women believe porn routinely “dehumanises” women, and 62% said the sex in porn is not depicted as loving or consensual. Just over a third of women also believe porn is harmful to society and, at its worst, can promote violence and risk taking.
This has meant that 19% have ended up doing something they’ve regretted.
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Despite these negative perceptions, the survey found wide viewing figures – with 77% of young men and 47% of young women admitting to having watched porn in the last month. Worryingly, 31% of men and 14% of women surveyed said they considered themselves to have a porn addiction.
There were some positive takeaways from the study, as nearly half of young women say porn has played a role in helping them understand their sexuality.
The findings aren’t surprising in light of a recent survey by relationship charity Relate, which found 47% of therapists reported an increase in the number of clients of all genders (and none) who say pornography is causing problems in their sex lives.
Counsellor Peter Saddington previously told HuffPost UK he’s seen this increase first hand. “A couple of years ago very few people came to us to talk about porn,” says Saddington, who estimates that 40% of clients arriving at his door now raise pornography as an issue in their relationship or sex life. “It is coming up again and again and causing real distress.”
BBC’s Porn Laid Bare is a three-part series following six young Brits with very different attitudes to pornography as they explore the ethics of porn in Spain’s sex industry. The group includes three women in their early 20s: one who never watches porn for ethical reasons, one who is considering a career as an actress in the porn industry, and one woman who previously experienced physical symptoms of addiction from over consumption of porn.
Porn Laid Bare is available on BBC Three from Thursday 14 March.