Rural girls and porn: navigating place, gender, desire, and power

This article examines how rural South African adolescent girls navigate and interpret porn within their sexual and social worlds. Drawing on interviews and focus group discussions with 48 girls aged 15–18 years, and using the block porn/play porn framework, the study explores porn as a contradictory cultural resource shaped by rurality, gendered power, and digital inequality. Peer networks normalize the circulation of porn yet reproduce gendered hierarchies in access and control. Girls use porn as an informal source of sexual knowledge, filling gaps in sexuality education and negotiating relational expectations, while also encountering discomfort and misalignment between pornographic scripts and embodied experience. The girls’ narratives reveal interpretive agency, ambivalence, and reflexive engagement that challenge risk-based assumptions about youth and pornography. By situating porn within the structural and moral landscapes of rural KwaZulu-Natal, the study contributes to critical porn studies by highlighting how place, gender, desire, and power shape adolescents’ engagements with sexualized media.