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Porn Studies
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To cite this article: Kath Albury (2014) Porn and sex education, porn as sex education, Porn
Studies, 1:1-2, 172-181, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2013.863654
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Porn Studies, 2014
Vol. 1, Nos. 1–2, 172–181, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2013.863654
Journalism and Media Research Centre, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
(Received 11 September 2013; accepted 17 October 2013)
universal consensus as to what porn teaches its consumers and how it works as an
educator. Pornography is increasingly itself the subject of educational texts, with
‘porn literacy’ being debated as a potential addition to the secondary state school
curriculum in the United Kingdom and Australia. This article presents an
overview of the field of ‘porn as pedagogy’ and pedagogy about porn. It is
modest in scope, relying primarily on recent research and media reportage from
Australasia, North America and the United Kingdom. These Anglophone
countries have significant similarities in respect to the ways pornography is
framed as a moral and/or political issue within public debate (although there are
also notable differences). For this reason, the overview that follows does not seek
to be globally representative, but represents a preliminary foray into a complex
and diverse field.
Keywords: pornography; sex education; health promotion; young people; sexual
health
Introduction
Pornography is a burning issue – the elephant in the room – a more significant issue
with some groups than with others but students seem to have such easy access to this
material and need to be taught to view it critically if they are going to access it and with
a healthy lens that values their own well-being and the well-being of others. (South
Australian teacher, cited in Johnson 2012)
Both popular and academic discussions of pornography have explored the question
of sexually explicit texts as pedagogy. While many commentators and scholars
have acknowledged the educational qualities of pornography, there is no universal
consensus as to what porn teaches its consumers and how it works as an educator.
This question of ‘what porn teaches’ is further complicated when ‘porn consumers’
are considered not as a homogeneous group, but as a diverse set of sub-groups,
which includes same-sex-attracted and heterosexual people of diverse ages,
genders, and cultural, political and religious affiliations (see McKee, Albury, and
Lumby 2008).
*Email: k.albury@unsw.edu.au
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
Porn Studies 173
(although there are also notable differences). For this reason, the overview that
follows does not seek to be globally representative, but represents a preliminary
foray into a complex and diverse field.
One need not personally ‘like’ commercial pornography or even artistic, avant-garde
representations of sexuality to understand that analyzing it without condemning it plays
an important role in developing feminist [and other kinds of] knowledge. (1996, 5)
Despite this, the study of sexually explicit texts in university classrooms remains
controversial (Reading 2005; Smith 2009).
174 K. Albury
images and texts with sexual health information is relatively rare in health promotion
and health education materials targeting young people, heterosexual adults, or same-
sex-attracted women, one Australian sexual health promotion project targeting
sexually adventurous women has adopted similar strategies (Albury, Constable, and
May 2012). Although the project has been active for less than 12 months and is still
being evaluated, it illustrates some of the ways that a ‘community-driven’ approach
to sexual pedagogy and learning can engage with the tastes and practices of porn
consumers. The media campaign was developed in consultation with a reference
group of women drawn from Sydney alternative sex sub-cultures. The project
website, iloveclaude, is modelled on the social media platform Tumblr, and combines
‘found’ images from soft-core pornography and erotica with commissioned photo-
sets, interviews, expert advice and short videos focused on safer-sex and blood-play
practices (AIDS Council 2012).
Some North American producers of commercial pornography have produced
‘couples’ videos that specifically offer sexually explicit instruction in particular
sexual practices within the genre of ‘educational porn’ (for example, Nina Hartley’s
Guide to Better Cunnilingus; Hartley 1995). Others have also sought to incorporate
safer-sex strategies, including the use of gloves, condoms, and ‘dirty talk as sexual
negotiation’, into their videos, although this appears to be more common in
explicitly queer/lesbian porn production (see Butler 2004; McKee, Albury, and
Lumby 2008). In the United Kingdom, producer Anna Span has collaborated with
health-promotion organization The Pleasure Project to produce heterosexual porn
featuring condoms (Philpott 2004; Naish 2006; Knerr 2008). However, the use of
condoms in both gay and straight pornography is generally not intended as safer-sex
instruction, but as a sexual health precaution for performers (Albury 2013a).
Just as porn that features condoms is seen to model safer-sex within the gay
men’s community, bareback (or condom-less) porn is viewed as pedagogical in a
negative sense – that is, it is suspected of eroticizing and thus promoting practices of
unprotected anal intercourse. Consequently, sexual health organizations in Australia
and the United Kingdom have sought to intervene in public conversations about
barebacking in pornography, with the AIDS Council of NSW (Australia) requesting
that sex-on-premises that seek to conform with safer-sex ‘best-practice’ codes do not
broadcast bareback porn in their screening rooms (AIDS Council of NSW 2008, 5).
176 K. Albury
The authors of the Porn Laid Bare website, a collaboration between the Terrence
Higgins Trust and the University of Sussex, observe that the interplay between
men’s consumption of bareback pornography and their sexual practices is
complex, and:
A simple ‘ban bareback pornography’ campaign risks alienating [men] who might enjoy
consuming it (but equally be very clear about differentiating the act of barebacking in
from their own sex lives) or could even further endorse or sensationalise bareback
pornography as taboo, forbidden or exciting. (Mowlabocus 2012)
Albury, and Lumby 2008). As with other forms of media, there are multiple
pedagogies deploying the term ‘critical literacy’, and these multiple approaches may
have very different methods and aims. Within some educational frameworks, media
literacy education may aim to ‘inoculate’ young people against particular kinds of
media content, and in some cases involves ‘denigrating all forms of media and
computer culture’ (Kellner and Share 2005, 372). This approach can lead to
frustration for teachers when young people demonstrate an ability to correctly
identify myths, stereotypes and ‘bad role models’ in commercial media imagery in
the classroom, while simultaneously taking pleasure in what might be termed
subaltern readings of these texts and images, particularly in relation to the ‘coolness’
or ‘sexiness’ of media content (Turnbull 1993; Albury 2013b).
Other forms of media education may encourage students to ‘read’ media texts in
the ways they might read books, to develop ethical and aesthetic criteria for
interpreting media, and/or to develop technical skills in media production (Kellner
and Share 2005, 372). As Buckingham notes, media education programmes focused
on non-pornographic texts often adopt ‘a more student-centred perspective, which
begins from young people’s existing knowledge and experience of media, rather than
the instructional imperatives of the teacher’ (2008, 13). The difficulty for educators
in the field of ‘porn literacy’, however, is that they may not legally distribute the
object of study to their (minor) students, nor may they legally encourage students to
develop alternative pornographic media as a means of developing literacy – a
common strategy within mainstream media education. This means that porn
education (for under-18s at least), neither permits close readings of actual explicit
texts nor allows for direct discussions of specific texts.
As Allen (2011) suggests, young people publicly express interest in pornography
for multiple reasons, which include (but are not limited to): seeking to satisfy
curiosity regarding specific sexual practices, displaying sexual knowledge to peers, or
conforming to normative gender expectations. In an ideal educational setting, porn
literacy education might permit a dialogue that offers the opportunity for educators
to learn more about young people’s sexual cultures, and for both teachers and
learners to extend their knowledge and understanding of the intersections between
mediated representation and lived experiences of sex, sexuality, and gender.
However, most settings are less than ideal, and navigating the topic of
pornography can be difficult or uncomfortable for teachers (Ayala et al. 2008;
Porn Studies 177
It has not been possible to fully do justice to the range of dissent and debate around
porn as education, and education about pornography. Men and women, boys and
girls are framed quite differently as ‘students’ of porn, as are heterosexual and same-
sex-attracted people. While this review has primarily focused on examples of
research and practice from North America, Australia and the United Kingdom, it
is clear that different cultures (both national and global) have their own relationship
to pornography as pedagogy (for example, see Ramalgun 2012). It is likely that there
may be quite different conversations about what porn teaches, and what could be
taught about porn, within different cultural and sub-cultural contexts.
In their study of the popular reporting of young people’s changing sexual
repertoires (specifically the ‘fellatio epidemic’) in North America, Curtis and Hunt
note the radical changes in broader cultural views with respect to young women’s
sexuality since the 1970s. They also draw attention to the changes in hierarchies of
sexual intimacy and sexual repertoires that have occurred in the past half century,
noting that:
oral sex has been relocated in the regime of sexual practice to the realm of pre- or non-
marital sex – ‘outercourse’ – and its quality as an expression of commitment and
mutuality for the marital relation has been largely eliminated. (Curtis and Hunt
2007,16)
Curtis and Hunt suggest that some of anxiety adults experience in relation to young
people’s interest in ‘alternative’ sexual practices such as oral sex may stem from a
broader anxiety in response to young people’s increased capacity to publicly express
sexual curiosity (and sexual adventurism) without fear of being incarcerated by adult
authorities for being ‘wayward’ or ‘incorrigable’ (2007, 24).
As Kellner and Share argue in their review of prevalent methods and approaches
in critical media literacy education:
Conversations about porn literacy and porn as sex education (particularly with
respect to the question of what young people learn from porn) should also be
understood as conversations about changing cultural rules and conventions regard-
ing sexual self-representation and sexual practice. Academic research to date does
not present a unified picture of what porn teaches, or what porn audiences might
learn from it. While debates are sparked around the inclusion of porn literacy
programmes within school-based sex and relationships education, there is no clear
model of what ‘best-practice’ might look like in this field, or who might be best
suited to deliver it. Further, where other areas of school curriculum do not challenge
sex/gender inequality, or seek to actively promote what Allen (2011) has termed
sexual/social justice, it is unlikely that education programmes which focus exclusively
on pornography will effect significant change.
As Buckingham notes, contemporary ‘mainstream’ media literacy education
‘seeks to begin with … students … existing tastes and pleasures, rather than
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assuming that these are merely invalid or “ideological”’ (2008, 14). While sexuality
education targeting adults (particularly same-sex-attracted men) currently takes this
approach to pornography, education targeting heterosexual young people does not. I
suggest this difference does not solely stem from adult concerns regarding
representations of gendered inequality within pornography, but from the anxieties
alluded to by Curtis and Hunt (2007), regarding young people’s changing
engagements with new sexual practices and sexual cultures.
Future research (and practical inquiry) into pornography and/as sex education
might therefore interrogate the ways that debates about porn education intersect
with other debates around young people’s sexual practices, sexual self-representation
and sexual knowledge. Rather than seeking to set universal definitions regarding
what porn really teaches (or what young people and adults should know about porn),
this line of questioning might seek to take account of the ways that differences in
sexual tastes and cultures might impact on audiences’ reception of pornographic
texts. It might also seek to understand how young people’s readings of pornography
(and their reception of porn education) can reshape the broader curriculum of formal
sex and relationships education. This interrogation would not rule out explicit
critiques of misogynistic, homophobic or racist tropes within pornography, but
might also offer the capacity to open up critically productive conversations about the
boundaries between adult sexual knowledge and young people’s sexual learning; and
the ways popular and institutional discourses define particular forms of sexuality,
sexual identity, and sex/gender expression as ‘legitimate’ (or ‘illegitimate’) know-
ledge for young people.
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