Third of young women look at porn every week

ONE in three young women regularly view porn, with many watching it on their smartphone, it has emerged.

Some 31 per cent of those surveyed said they looked at X-rated material once a week. And 10 per cent admitted that they had a daily porn habit.

The figures, which contradict the assumption that pornography is the preserve of males, also found that most of these women view images on their mobile phone.

Amanda de Cadenet, the one-time wild child and presenter of 1990s Channel 4 show The Word, who helped design the survey, said that far from ruining women’s lives, pornography is helping women find themselves.

Miss de Cadenet, now a fashion photographer and documentary maker, claimed the results contradict the idea that women feel threatened by pornography, as well as the perception that a generation’s sex lives will be ‘ruined by childhoods bombarded by online sexual images’. The Daily Mail has campaigned for an automatic block on online porn to protect children amid fears they are getting hooked on explicit material.

David Cameron has warned that easy access to web porn is ‘corroding childhood’.

The latest survey also found that 90 per cent of young women who view porn do so over the web, mostly on free sites.

Many access it in more than one way, with 40 per cent saying they read erotic stories, a figure likely to have been boosted by the popularity of the Fifty Shades of Grey series. Only 3 per cent said they view adult material in magazines. When asked which devices they use to view pornography, 62 per cent said their smartphone. Laptops were the next most popular, followed by iPads. Most of those surveyed were aged between 18 and 42, with 70 per cent aged 18 to 34.

According to firm Covenant Eyes, which provides internet filtering, as many as one in five mobile searches are for porn – and 24 per cent of smartphone owners admit to having pornographic material on their handset.

Writing in the magazine Marie Claire US, which carried out the survey, Miss de Cadenet, 43, said: ‘Porn is here to stay and we have to learn to negotiate it.’