Not all porn is created equal - is there such a thing as a healthy pornography?
“Many of the discussions around … the putrid effects of porn on real-world sex … come back to teaching about sex and consent and starting that teaching young”.
- “Many of the discussions around … the putrid effects of porn on real-world sex … come back to teaching about sex and consent and starting that teaching young”.
- Read more:
Big W has withdrawn Welcome to Sex from its stores to protect staff – but teen sex education can keep young people safe
Modern pornography
- That’s resulted in an explosion in the variety of pornography you can consume.
- There still exists – although less – expensive glossy mainstream pornography.
- To answer this question I worked with a team, including Welcome to Sex author Melissa Kang, to establish an expert panel of sexual health experts, adolescent health experts, sex educators, pornography researchers and pornography producers.
A different kind of pornography
- The experts identified four explicit websites that potentially supported healthy sexual development, all of which feature a slightly different kind of pornography.
- PinkLabel.TV favours queer indie materials which are often slightly punk in their orientation, with a range of different sexualities, genders and body types, presenting their sex in unashamed ways.
- Both of these points match well with non-expert critiques of pornography.
Diversity and realism
- This is an interesting finding because unlike the first two it doesn’t match up so well with non-expert critiques.
- A lot of discussions about “porn literacy” at the moment critique pornography for being “unrealistic” – and when you dig down into the details often they mean pornography shows too much variety in sex – group sex, anal sex, kinky sex – rather than vanilla, monogamous loving sex.
Negotiation of consent
- A fourth criterion on which the experts agreed was the value of showing the negotiation of consent on screen.
- This is also an interesting one because most pornography doesn’t show the negotiation of consent.
- However it doesn’t often show negotiation of consent – pornography is set in a world of fantasy where everybody enjoys everything they do sexually, all the time.
Navigating pornography
- In this world where so many different kinds of people are producing different kinds of pornography, don’t assume it’s all the same.
- If you want to find healthy pornography - or you want to advise young adults in your life about how to find healthy pornography - then here are some of the questions you should be asking.