Porn literacy and young people’s digital cultures

ABSTRACT

To date, porn literacy research has mostly focused on school-based porn literacy education. This education commonly seeks to warn young people about pornography, and to inoculate them against its perceived harms. This approach fails to consider porn literacies in the context of a current media literacy framework, and rarely explores young people's digital cultures that are central to their porn engagements. This article proposes a need to centre young people's digital cultures, and in doing so, considering their porn literacy practices that fall outside school-based education. For example, social media offer much evidence of porn literacy education and practice, as found on TikTok and other platforms.

KEYWORDS:

• Literacy
• social media
• digital cultures
• education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Explicit sexual content is unsuitable for children. My focus is on young people at an age where they are likely to be using porn and/or having sex.

2 To some extent sexting education addresses young people’s sexual media production, yet uses a deficit framing that suggests young people are unaware of the risks involved, and do not have the skills/literacies for managing such risks.

3 We only reviewed literature up to and including 2017, and where porn users were engaged.

4 Tumblr removed porn in 2018 but it can still be found and shared there.