Beyond porn literacy: drawing on young people’s pornography narratives to expand sex education pedagogies

Abstract

ABSTRACTAs online pornography has become more readily available and accessible, educators have begun to grapple with how to address young people’s engagement with it. Much of this discussion centres the view that pornography is an inherently problematic genre that young people should be inoculated against through comprehensive media literacy education – an approach that often ignores the nuance of young people’s engagements with porn and which often isolates pornography as outside of and infringing upon young people’s everyday lives. Using thematic narrative analysis, this paper examines excerpts from focus groups with undergraduate students at a Canadian university examining their experiences with and thinking on pornography and sex education. Findings suggest that participants’ pornography-related narratives are connected both to their own personal, lived experiences with pornography and to the broader structural and relational aspects of their sexual and social worlds in ways that complicate traditional media literacy interventions. Small-group discussions on pornography therefore emerge through this study as potentially productive pedagogical sites for educators seeking to develop a more expansive and ethically oriented approach to sex and sexuality education.