Most Austrian male youths use pornos for information on sex (Feature)

By Albert Otti Oct 9, 2008, 16:47 GMT

Vienna - Over half of Austrian male youths rely on pornography for information on sexuality, according to a study released by the Austrian Institute for Sexual Education in Vienna on Thursday.

'I don't see it as a moral problem,' said Wolfgang Kostenwein, one of the psychologists who worked on the study, which was conducted in 2007 among 13- to 21-year old male and female adolescents.

'But youths have less and less feeling for real sexual longing,' he said. 'What is increasing is an artificial idea about what sex is.'

Among the females in the study of 1,037 youths, 10 per cent said they used pornography as a source for sexual knowledge.

Kostenwein said his experience as a sexual counsellor indicated teenagers were led to believe by pornography that they had to engage in certain sexual acts.

He said he was often asked by girls, 'how should I do that, how long does it last, at what point is it finally over?'

Another problem was that pornography made youths insecure about their bodies, the psychologist said.

Besides pornography, a majority of young males gets information from conversations, personal experience and school. Females rely mostly on magazines, conversations and school, the study found.

But talks with friends were also influenced by pornography, mostly seen on the internet or on video clips shared via mobile phones, Kostenwein said.

One benefit of the prevalence of pornography is that it allows sex educators to use this topic as a gateway to talk with teenagers about contraception, Kostenwein and his colleagues have found.

With eleven births per 1,000 women between the age of 15 to 19, Austria has the highest teenage birth rate in Western Europe.