Porn Literacy in the Digital Age

When I was a college student in the late 70s, porn was something you could get, but it wasn’t easy. Some drugstores and supermarkets had a shelf of “gentlemen’s magazines” behind the customer service desk, but you had to endure the embarrassment of asking for them. There was also the occasional showing of a porn movie at a fraternity, but you had to know someone to get in.

Today we have access to virtually unlimited pornography on the internet, catering to any and all tastes, and most of it free. Whether we in the older generation like it or not, those in the younger generation are consuming porn with a voracious appetite. And not only that, they even make their own and share it with each other.

As scientists, psychologists generally understand that they need to keep an open mind about their subject and look objectively at the data. But when it comes to the study of porn use among young adults, many psychologists approach the topic with preconceived notions of what constitutes acceptable sexual expression. In other words, they start from a position that porn is obviously harmful, and then they conduct studies to provide support for this preconceived notion.

However, if you really want to understand young adults’ attitudes and behaviors regarding pornography, you have to ask them questions and listen to their responses with an open mind. This is the point that University of Technology Sydney (Australia) psychologist Paul Byron and his colleagues argue in a review article they recently published in the journal Sexuality & Culture.

The theme of the article is “porn literacy,” which Byron and colleagues view as an extension of media literacy. The World Wide Web has placed the entirety of human knowledge and discourse at our fingertips, mostly uncensored. While it’s easy to be led astray on the Internet, those with media literacy understand where to go for information and how to evaluate the reliability of sources.

Likewise, Byron and colleagues argue, porn users need to develop porn literacy. That is, they need to understand the issues surrounding sexually explicit media so that they can make safe and ethical choices. In particular, this means evaluating the potential impact that porn viewing has on their lives.

Although hundreds of academic articles on pornography use have been published in the last twenty years, Byron and colleagues could only find seven that presented data on young people’s porn literacy. That is, the authors of these articles actually asked young people to report on their experiences with and feelings about pornography.

In these seven articles, sex education was a common theme, but in contrasting ways. Two of these articles looked at pornography use among young gay men, and the researchers concluded that porn viewing was a way for these emerging adults to learn about their sexuality. For these people, then, watching porn was a positive and educational experience in the eyes of the researchers.

Yet the attitude was quite different when it came to heterosexual young adults. Here, the focus was on “educating” young people that pornography is not “real.” In other words, there’s a double standard in evaluating porn use, viewing it as a positive educational experience for young gay men but as a negative and potentially harmful one for heterosexual emerging adults that they need to be educated about.

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When commentators claim that pornography isn’t real, the subtext is that only sex between a man and a woman in a loving relationship is “real,” and any other sexual depiction is not. Thus, these researchers also implicitly reject any alternative form a sexual expression, such as group sex or BDSM, whether in real life or on film.

In the five studies that looked at heterosexual porn use, the researchers in each maintained the attitude that porn is not “real” or that it is “harmful.” Thus, even when the researchers directly asked young people about their experiences, they interpreted the data from their preconceived points of view.

Byron and colleagues point to a study that involved interviews with young people about their porn use. One of the participants commented on the slender waists and large breasts of female porn stars, remarking that this wasn’t normal. While the authors of the article saw this as evidence that pornography is providing young people with unrealistic expectations about sex, Byron and colleagues interpreted it as evidence of the participant’s porn literacy, specifically the understanding that pornography is often a representation of fantasy.

The notion that porn isn’t “real” was a common thread in the articles under review. Yet, the authors of one study failed to see the contradiction when they reported a comment from an interviewee who said he preferred watching amateur porn because it showed real people and authentic lovemaking. Porn researchers often view pornography as all of the same kind, with little recognition of the variety of genres that are available. In this case, Byron and colleagues argue, the young respondent displayed greater porn literacy than the researchers did.

Byron and colleagues conclude that young people are likely to be far more porn literate than most researchers suspect. In fact, it’s likely the older generation of psychologists, with their more conservative sexual attitudes, who need to develop more porn literacy if they are to understand the dynamics of sexuality in today’s teens and twenty-somethings.

Pornography is deeply embedded in the daily lives of today’s youth, who are digital natives. They not only consume commercially produced porn, they also create their own sexually explicit media that they share with their current partners (sexting) or with potential partners on hook-up apps. Furthermore, they produce and post sexually explicit media on internet porn sites, where they garner comments from their peers.

We in the older generation may be uncomfortable with the widespread consumption and production of sexually explicit materials by today’s youth. No matter how much we may fret about it, today’s younger generation is finding its own way in a brave new digital world, and they’re also far more open about their sexuality than their elders. If we want to understand them, we’d best keep our mouths shut and our ears open, so that we can listen to what they have to say.