By Siobhán Healy-Cullen
When I embarked on my doctoral research in 2018 I was interested in how young people made sense of gendered images in online pornography. I was also interested in what caregivers and teachers thought about young people’s pornography use. A new, in vogue, term called “porn literacy” caught my eye. In those early stages of the project, I thought “Sounds good… Why not talk to young people about pornography!? It’s clearly something many young people engage with, and to ignore or censor it would be like other prohibitive interventions, which haven‘t worked!” However, as I explored the notion of “porn literacy”, it became plain to me that the ways pornography, young people and their pornography viewing are thought about invariably shapes porn literacy as an educational response.
My research focus on a range of people—including 16-18-year-olds, caregivers, and teachers—showed how adult views of youth sexuality are different from young people’s views of themselves as sexual beings, and users of pornography. This is an important insight for developing pornography education that fits with young people’s lives, rather than adult perceptions of their realities. A key finding is that the young participants resist adult positioning of youth as gullible, at-risk, and ineligible consumers of pornography. This was apparent in the way young people viewed pornographic representations in contrast to their own sexual practices, as well as how they saw pornography as a (flawed but valuable) resource.
It became clear that porn literacy—as it is usually envisaged in the literature—could potentially be considered patronising by youth. Porn literacy education is largely understood to (i) protect youth from inevitable harm, (ii) help them decipher ‘porn sex’ from ‘real sex’, and (iii) ultimately create ‘good’ sexual citizens (i.e., self-controlled and aware of the ‘logical’ corruptive nature of pornography). This understanding of the intervention was echoed by my research participants. Such literacy programmes may be presented as youth-centred and claim to promote youth agency, but they promote a particular kind of agency that encourages youth to view pornography as negative and reject it outright. I came to think of porn literacy education as a ‘civilising mission’ with an agenda of teaching youth to ‘critically analyse’ pornography correctly, keeping within the charmed circle of ‘good’, ‘healthy’ heteronormativity.
My research with youth, their caregivers and teachers highlighted the limitations of didactic, adult-led initiatives implied by porn literacy education. I noted instances where participants expressed reservations about the basic assumptions of porn literacy education. Participants, particularly youth, resisted and challenged constructions of youth innocence and naivety in a way that suggests a desire to move past a deficit construction of youth upon which porn literacy education is based. Seeing these instances as moments of resistance to the well-worn narrative of hapless young people led me to suggest an alternative pedagogical approach: a critical framework for ethical sexual citizenship.
This framework was suggested as I noticed a divergence in approaches in the porn literacy education field: on one hand, the dominant harms focused and effects-based essentialist position based on cognitive models and, on the other, an emerging poststructuralist-inspired, critical pedagogical approach. The first school of thought aligns with the media effects thesis that views youth as uncritical media consumers. This approach focuses on the risks of pornography and reducing the (inevitable) harms of viewing it, such as ‘unhealthy’ choices or ‘unrealistic’ body image/standards. The other approaches look ‘beyond porn literacies’ towards ‘ethical erotics’ and ‘thick desires’, presenting youth of all genders and social identities as holding capacity to be desiring sexual subjects who seek pleasure, and:
“are entitled to a broad range of desires for meaningful intellectual, political, and social engagement, the possibility of financial independence, sexual and reproductive freedom, protection from racialized and sexualized violence, and a way to imagine living in the future tense”
(Fine & McClelland, 2006, p. 300).
From this perspective, youth are understood as critical consumers with agency, and recognised as sexual beings, and thus sexual citizens; Experts of their own sexualised, gendered, racialised and classed lives who hold the agentic potential to negotiate the porn-tech nexus in ways that contributes to everyday constructions of sexual embodiment, relationality, diversity and other sexual matters. This view goes beyond the concern (read: moral panic) about the effects of media on young people’s development, based in traditional monkey-see-monkey-do social learning understandings. A justice-orientated pedagogy, grounded in ethical sexual citizenship, tackles gender, sexism and other inequalities, rather than solely focusing on individualised social change, and therefore supports youth in feeling equipped to question essentialised norms that support inequitable power relations. Youth are able to engage with adults as active media consumers and adults are supported to recognise young people’s agency and to work with them to discuss mutuality, pleasure and desire—empowering youth to challenge sexual and social injustices.
About the Author
Dr Siobhán Healy-Cullen completed her PhD in Psychology at Massey University, New Zealand and is currently working as a Research Associate at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Images were sourced from Unsplash and Shutterstock
References
Fine, M., & McClelland, S. (2006). Sexuality education and desire: Still missing after all these years. Harvard Educational Review, 76(3), 297–338. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.76.3.w5042g23122n6703