What Do We Know About the Effects

of Pornography After Fifty Years of

Academic Research?

This book presents an innovative cross-disciplinary report on research across the humanities
and social sciences about the relationship between pornography and its consumers.
For policy makers and the wider public it can be difficult to obtain a clear understanding of
the current state of knowledge on pornography and its relationships with audiences, due to the
often-contradictory nature of research spanning the various and politically diverse academic
disciplines. The cross-disciplinary expertise of the author team has engaged in an extensive
examination of the findings of academic research in the area in order to explain, in a clear
and accessible style, the most important conclusions about the relationship of pornography to
Healthy Sexual Development.
This short and accessible overview is suitable for students and scholars in Psychology,
Sexual Health, Film Studies, Sex Education, Queer Theory, Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies,
Sociology, Media Studies and Cultural Studies.
Alan McKee is a Professor in Digital and Social Media at the University of Technology
Sydney, Australia, and an expert on entertainment and healthy sexual development. He recently
completed an Australian Research Council Discovery grant entitled ‘Pornography’s effects on
audiences: explaining contradictory research data’. He also worked on an ARC Linkage grant
with True (previously Family Planning Queensland) to investigate the use of vulgar comedy
to reach young men with information about healthy sexual development. He has published
on entertainment education for healthy sexuality in journals including the Archives of Sexual
Behavior, the International Journal of Sexual Health, the Journal of Sex Research and Sex
Education.
Katerina Litsou is a PhD researcher of psychology at the University of Southampton, UK.
She has conducted research on pornography use and she is specifically interested in women’s
pornography use. She has a BSc in Psychology and an MA in Master of Sexology.
Paul Byron is a postdoctoral researcher of digital and social media at the University of
Technology Sydney, Australia. He has undertaken qualitative research on young people’s
digital intimacies, including studies of dating/hook-up app use, pornography, sexual health
and LGBTQ+ communities online. His current research focuses on LGBTQ+ young people’s
digital peer support for mental health. He is author of the book Digital Media, Friendship and
Cultures of Care (Routledge 2021).
Roger Ingham is a Professor of Health and Community Psychology at the University
of Southampton, UK, and Director of the Centre for Sexual Health Research. He has been
conducting research into many aspects of sexual and reproductive health and related issues
for over 30 years, he has published widely and has worked with governments and other local
and international agencies in many countries. His undergraduate degree in Psychology was
obtained from University College London, UK, and his DPhil was awarded by the University
of Oxford, UK.
Focus on Global Gender and Sexuality

https://www​.routledge​.com​/Focus​-on​-Global​-Gender​-and​-Sexuality​/book​
-series​/FGGS

Reading Iraqi Women’s Novels in English Translation

Iraqi Women’s Stories
Ruth Abou Rached

Gender Hierarchy of Masculinity and Femininity during the Chinese

Cultural Revolution
Revolutionary Opera Films
Zhuying Li

Representations of Lethal Gender-Based Violence in Italy Between

Journalism and Literature
Femminicidio Narratives
Nicoletta Mandolini

LGBTQI Digital Media Activism and Counter-Hate Speech in Italy

Sara Gabai

Transmasculinity on Television
Patrice A. Oppliger

What Do We Know About the Effects of Pornography After Fifty

Years of Academic Research?
Alan McKee, Katerina Litsou, Paul Byron and Roger Ingham
What Do We Know About
the Effects of Pornography
After Fifty Years of Academic
Research?

Alan McKee, Katerina Litsou,

Paul Byron and Roger Ingham
First published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Alan McKee, Katerina Litsou, Paul Byron and Roger Ingham
The right of Alan McKee, Katerina Litsou, Paul Byron and Roger Ingham to be
identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-032-14031-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-14033-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-23203-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003232032
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents

Acknowledgements vi

1 Fifty years of academic research on pornography 1

ALAN MCKEE, ROGER INGHAM, PAUL BYRON AND KATERINA LITSOU

2 Method and approach 18

ALAN MCKEE, PAUL BYRON, KATERINA LITSOU AND ROGER INGHAM

3 Defining pornography 29
ALAN MCKEE, PAUL BYRON, KATERINA LITSOU AND ROGER INGHAM

4 Pornography and consent 42

ALAN MCKEE, KATERINA LITSOU, PAUL BYRON AND ROGER INGHAM

5 Learning from pornography 53

KATERINA LITSOU, PAUL BYRON, ALAN MCKEE AND ROGER INGHAM

6 Pornography and porn literacy 65

PAUL BYRON, ALAN MCKEE, ASH WATSON, KATERINA LITSOU AND
ROGER INGHAM

7 Pornography and pleasure 80

ALAN MCKEE, KATERINA LITSOU, PAUL BYRON AND ROGER INGHAM

8 Recent academic research on pornography and healthy

sexual development 93
ALAN MCKEE, KATERINA LITSOU, PAUL BYRON AND ROGER INGHAM

Index 111
Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ash Watson for her brilliant, efficient and
friendly research assistance work on porn literacies research, reported in
Chapter 6.
The research reported in this book was supported by the Australian
Research Council Discovery grant DP170100808 ‘Pornography’s effects
on audiences: explaining contradictory research data’.
Alan McKee: I would like first to thank my husband, Anthony Spinaze
because every time I publish a book he asks ‘Is it about me?’. I would like
to thank Professor John Hartley, who introduced me to the world of aca-
demic research with generosity and humour and got me excited about the
possibilities of researching culture. I am deeply indebted to my co-authors
on this book – for five years our meetings and emails have sparked curios-
ity, excitement, joy and hilarity, and have reminded me that good academic
research relationships are necessarily good relationships between human
beings. I remain profoundly grateful to my colleagues who have helped
me over the years develop my thinking about sex and entertainment – in
particular Kath Albury, Feona Attwood, Larissa Behrendt, Jerry Coleby-
Williams, Catharine Lumby, John Mercer, Susanna Paasonen, Clarissa
Smith, Rebecca Sullivan and Ann Watson. I would not be able to do this
work without the support of the University of Technology Sydney, a great
place to be a Communications researcher, where I work with outstanding
colleagues. I’m particularly delighted to find myself this year appointed as a
Professor of Digital and Social Media: the enthusiasm, creativity and intel-
ligence of my new colleagues in that team inspires me. All mistakes and
eccentricities that I have contributed to this book remain my own.
Paul Byron: I firstly wish to thank Alan McKee for inviting me to work
on this project, all those years ago, and for mentorship beyond this project.
Big thanks to Roger Ingham and Katerina Litsou for being fine collabora-
tors and expanding my ‘undisciplined’ thinking on pornography research.
I've learned far more than I expected from this project, and I look forward to
 Acknowledgements  vii
seeing where our work travels. Thanks to the many mentors, peer research-
ers, academics and friends whose writings and conversations have assisted
my understanding of pornography research and where it intersects with
studies of digital media and health and wellbeing. There are too many to
mention, but particular thanks to Kath Albury, Susanna Paasonen, Feona
Attwood and Clarissa Smith. I'd also like to thank the Digital and Social
Media team at UTS, and my partner Nicholas, for ongoing support when
writing (or at least trying to).
Roger Ingham: I was not quite sure what to say when Alan first invited me
to join him in the grant bid to the ARC – but being a great fan of his healthy
sexual development work I was flattered and excited. I have never regret-
ted the decision. He has been inspirational, hard-working, clear-headed
and open-minded throughout, as have the staff on the project – Paul and
Katerina. It has been a real pleasure to have been part of the team exploring
this most enigmatic of topics. Many thanks to the Delphi panel members,
the initial advisory group, and all the journal reviewers and editors who
have read bits along the way and offered (mainly) constructive feedback.
Katerina Litsou: I would like to thank Roger Ingham, Alan McKee and
Paul Byron who actually introduced me into the world of pornography
research. I would like to give my special thanks to Roger Ingham for giv-
ing the opportunity to work on this project and supporting me all the way
through.
The authors acknowledge that some of the material in this book has pre-
viously been published in different forms in the following sources:

Chapter 2: Litsou, K., McKee, A., Byron, P., & Ingham, R. (2020).
Productive disagreement during research in interdisciplinary teams:
Notes from a case study investigating pornography and healthy sexual
development. Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies, 38(1–2), 101–125.
Chapter 3: McKee, A., Byron, P., Litsou, K., & Ingham, R. (2020). An inter-
disciplinary definition of pornography: Results from a global Delphi
panel. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 49(3), 1085–1091. https://doi​.org​
/10​.1007​/s10508​-019​-01554-4
Chapter 4: McKee, A., Litsou, K., Byron, P., & Ingham, R. (2021a). The
relationship between consumption of pornography and consensual sex-
ual practice: Results of a mixed method systematic review. Canadian
Journal of Human Sexuality, 30(3), 387–396. https://doi​.org​/10​.3138​/
cjhs​.2021​-0010
Chapter 5: Litsou, K., Byron, P., McKee, A., & Ingham, R. (2021). Learning
from pornography: Results of a mixed methods systematic review. Sex
Education, 21(2), 236–252. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/14681811​.2020​
.1786362
viii Acknowledgements
Chapter 6: Byron, P., McKee, A., Watson, A., Litsou, K., & Ingham, R.
(2021). Reading for realness: Porn literacies, digital media, and young
people. Sexuality & Culture, 25(3), 786–805. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/
s12119​-020​-09794-6
Chapter 7: McKee, A., Litsou, K., Byron, P., & Ingham, R. (2021b). The
relationship between consumption of pornography and sexual pleas-
ure: Results of a mixed-method systematic review. Porn Studies, 8(3),
331–344. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/23268743​.2021​.1891564
1 Fifty years of academic
research on pornography
Alan McKee, Roger Ingham, Paul Byron
and Katerina Litsou

Introduction
Why do we need to understand the relationships between pornography and
people who use it?
‘If you ask some people’, notes the journalist Olga Khazan, ‘America is
in the middle of a public-health crisis’:

Legislators in 16 states have passed resolutions declaring that pornog-

raphy, in its ubiquity, constitutes a public-health crisis. The wave of
bills started five years ago, with Utah, which went a step further this
spring by passing a law mandating that all cellphones and tablets sold
in the state block access to pornography by default.
(Khazan, 2021, np)

Lobbyists argue that pornography has negative effects, including that it:

increases problematic sexual activity among teens, normalizes violence

against women, contributes to sex trafficking, causes problems in inti-
mate relationships, and is ‘potentially biologically addictive.’
(Khazan, 2021)

However, despite this vigorous and visible campaigning against pornog-

raphy, Khazan notes that the evidence on the issue is not clear: ‘Whether
porn is actually harming the health of adults who watch it is frustratingly
hard to determine’ (Khazan, 2021, np). Despite the assertions of campaign-
ers that pornography has straightforward effects, it is difficult to get a clear
overview of what academic research tells us about the relationship between
the consumption of sexually explicit materials and healthy sexual devel-
opment. Where would interested researchers, politicians, journalists – and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003232032-1
2 Fifty years of academic research
even parents who might be worried about the effects of pornography on
young people – go for such an account?
In 2017, the four authors of this book set out to review the academic
research that has been published about this topic across academic disci-
plines; and then to synthesise that information and present it in a way that
would be meaningful and accessible for researchers, parents, policymakers
and interested others. It was a major project. It took us years to work out
how we could identify relevant research, and how we could bring together
the findings of researchers in different academic disciplines that might have
different assumptions about how pornography research should be con-
ducted, what questions are worth asking and what counts as evidence. It
took a long time to read hundreds of articles and agree within our own team
about what they were saying (and/or not saying). But, in the end, we did it.
This book is the result.

Healthy sexual development

In order to start exploring the relationship between the consumption of
pornography and healthy sexual development we need to answer the
question:
What is healthy sexual development?
It is an important question, one that we discuss in all kinds of tangen-
tial ways every day, through news stories about sexting and casual sex,
about objectification and sexual harassment and, of course, through dis-
cussions about pornography (the focus of this book). We talk about all of
these kinds of culture, and the effects they have on our sex lives, positive or
negative. But, strangely, we rarely talk directly about the fundamental ques-
tion – what exactly is a happy, healthy sex life? We have discussions about
whether sexting leads people to have more sexual partners, for example,
without ever asking – is it a good thing or a bad thing if people have more
sexual partners? We worry that pornography might be putting people off
having physical sexual relationships – but don’t ask whether that is neces-
sarily problematic.
Sexual health is defined by the World Health Organisation as:

a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being in relation

to sexuality; it is not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction or
infirmity. Sexual health requires a positive and respectful approach to
sexuality and sexual relationships, as well as the possibility of having
pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion, discrimina-
tion and violence. For sexual health to be attained and maintained, the
sexual rights of all persons must be respected, protected and fulfilled.
(World Health Organisation, 2006, p. 5)
 Fifty years of academic research 3
But what does that mean in day-to-day practice for those of us who might
be having sex?
The first important point we want to make is that healthy sexual develop-
ment isn’t the same for everybody. There are many different ways in which
you can have a happy, healthy sex life. You can be married in the suburbs
with two kids having sex once a week with the lights off. Or you can be
single, going out dancing, picking up strangers and having enthusiastic,
sweaty fun in the toilets of a nightclub. You can be in a committed three-
some; or an extended network of polyamorous fuckbuddies and friends-
with-benefits. You can enjoy spanking or roleplaying or being wrapped in
cellophane and suspended from the ceiling. A healthy sex life can involve
oral sex or anal sex or vaginal sex or many other body parts. Or maybe
you’ve decided that sex isn’t really your thing and what you really want is
a life of cuddling and boardgames. All of these can be examples of sexually
healthy lives.
But the variation isn’t infinite. Underlying all of these many differ-
ent ways to be a healthy sexual being are 15 ‘domains’ of healthy sexual
development, identified in 2010 by a group of researchers across a range
of academic disciplines – child psychology, early childhood, a legal expert
in children’s rights, a specialist in sexuality education, experts on sexual
socialisation, and experts on the media’s impact on children’s development
(McKee et al., 2010). According to these experts, healthy sexual develop-
ment should meet 15 criteria:

1. Freedom from unwanted activity. Healthy sexual development takes

place in a context in which we are protected from unwanted sexual
activity. This is a fundamental starting point.
2. Sexual development should not be aggressive, coercive or joyless. The
best sexual development is ‘fun’, playful and light-hearted (Okami
et al., 1998, p. 364).
3. Education about sexual practice. We all need to have accurate
knowledge about how our bodies work.
4. Awareness of public/private boundaries. One of the earliest things
we learn about a healthy sex life that while sex itself is nothing to be
ashamed about, we must make distinctions about what we perform in
private and what we perform in public.
5. An understanding of consent. We must learn what consent is, the com-
plexity of the consent, and its fundamental place in healthy sexual
practice.
6. An understanding of safety. What are the risks involved in becoming a
sexual being? These include not only physical risks such as unplanned
pregnancy or Sexually Transmitted Infections, but a range of other risks
4 Fifty years of academic research
– the emotional risks of becoming involved in an abusive relationship;
or the more mundane risk of being trapped in a boring relationship.
7. Self-acceptance. We need to develop a positive attitude, rather than a
shameful one, towards our own sexual beings – whether that’s our body
shape, our sexual identities, or the sexual pleasures that we prefer.
8. Acceptance that sex can be pleasurable. We all need to accept that sex
can be pleasurable, and that’s fine. Again, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
We do not need to feel guilty because we enjoy physical pleasure.
9. Sexual agency. If we want to communicate assertively what we want
from sex and relationships, we need to know what it is that we want. To
grow up as healthy, happy sexual beings we need to know that each of
us has the right to the final say about what we do with our bodies, and
to explore what we enjoy.
10. Relationship skills. We need to learn the skills that underlie all healthy
human relationships; for example, how to be assertive without being
aggressive in communicating what we want.
11. Open communication. It’s difficult to have a healthy sex life if you’re
ashamed to talk about what you want and what you enjoy. Growing up
in a supportive environment can help us communicate openly about
sex; if we don’t have that environment when we’re younger we can
work on developing these skills later in our lives.
12. Lifelong learning. Healthy sex lives don’t stop evolving the first time
we have sex. We can continue learning and developing throughout our
lives.
13. Resilience. In sexual practice, as in many other areas of our lives, we
will make mistakes. Do we have the skills to learn from these, and to
grow from them?
14. Understanding of parental and societal values. All of these aspects
of healthy sexual development occur within a cultural context and we
need to be aware of that and know how to navigate it. That doesn’t
mean that we just accept negative values around us – such as homopho-
bia or whorephobia. But we can’t be naïve about them either.
15. Competence in mediated sexuality. We are surrounded by mediated
messages about sex – from entertainment, education, religious groups
… we need to learn how to use different kinds of media appropriately.
Pornography is often designed for entertainment rather than as an
instruction manual. Religious teachings about sex are often designed to
maintain patriarchal control of women’s and queers’ bodies and are not
fit-for-purpose as sex education.

In this book we explore what we know, after 50 years of academic research,

about the relationship between consuming pornography and some of the
 Fifty years of academic research 5
key domains of healthy sexual development. We conducted a series of lit-
erature reviews that looked at the research that has been produced from a
range of academic disciplines, synthesised the results, and we present them
here for your interest and application.

The big bang of modern pornography research

Why does this project refer to ‘fifty years of academic research’?
There’s a simple reason – modern academic research about pornography
was born on the 1 October 1970 when the US President’s Commission
on Obscenity and Pornography released its Report (Commission on
Obscenity and Pornography, 1970). Just as in cosmology’s Big Bang,
where all of the matter and energy currently existing in the universe was
released from a singularity, so the attitudes, approaches, methods, ques-
tions and modes of public debate that still surround academic research
about pornography emerged – remarkably fully formed – with the publi-
cation of this Report.
The Commission was formed by the US Congress in 1967 as part of the
progressive ‘Great Society’ social program of president Lyndon Johnson
(Lewis, 2008, p. 8), tasked to ‘study the effect of obscenity and pornogra-
phy upon the public, and particularly minors, and its relationship to crime
and other antisocial behavior’ (Commission on Obscenity and Pornography,
1970, p. 1), to analyse the laws controlling obscenity and pornography, to
report on the volume of such material being distributed in America and to
make recommendations for ‘legislative, administrative, or other appropriate
action’ (p. 1). The President appointed the 18 members of the Commission
in January 1968 and it was given two million US dollars (Hill et al., 1970,
p. 458) (equivalent to almost US14 million in 2021 money) and two years to
complete ‘its studies’ (Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970,
p. 1).
And the Commission did indeed take ‘its studies’ seriously. Starting
with an ‘initial survey of available information’, it noted ‘the insufficiency
of existing factual evidence as the basis for recommendations’ – and so
the Commission ‘initiated a program of research, designed to provide
empirical information relevant to its tasks’ (p. 2). We can see how seri-
ously the Commission took its work by reviewing the material it released
two years later. In addition to the Report of the Commission on Obscenity
and Pornography – which itself runs to 700 pages – the Commission also
released a separate Technical Report reproducing the results of all the aca-
demic research it commissioned for the process. This mammoth publication
runs to a total of nine volumes, numbered in Roman numerals I–IX; a total
of 2,760 pages, and 81 academic articles.
6 Fifty years of academic research
The pre-big bang world of research on the effects of pornography is
summarised in the articles in Volume I of the Technical Report. As well
as reports of pilot studies and methodological work, Volume I provides
reviews of the existing academic literature at the time. In their ‘evaluative
review’ of recent psychological research about ‘sex censorship’, Cairns,
Paul and Wishner look for research about any ‘long-term behavioral effects
of exposure to “obscene” materials’ (Cairns et al., 1971, p. 6). Two points
are of interest here. The first is the use of the term ‘exposure’ to describe the
relationship between audiences and pornography. This word has different
implications to terms such as ‘consumption’ or ‘use’ of pornography – we
discuss this, and our position on terminology, in the next chapter. Secondly,
they note particular public interest in whether exposure to pornography led
to the commission of sex crimes, or other kinds of crimes:

Unfortunately there were no empirical studies of even the immediate

or short-term behavioral effects of obscene or pornographic stimuli on
the individual, much less the effects upon the standards of a society.
Investigations of long-term effects were non-existent.
(Cairns et al., 1971, p. 6)

Also in Volume I, Lenore Kupperstein offers ‘A review of the research lit-

erature’ on the ‘role of pornography in the etiology of juvenile delinquency’
(Kupperstein, 1971) – another common concern at the time. But, reviewing
the academic literature on the causes of juvenile delinquency she finds noth-
ing of relevance:

exposure to and consumption of pornography are nowhere mentioned

in the professional literature on the etiology of delinquency nor is there
any suggestion as to their probable significance.
(Kupperstein, 1971, p. 109)

Volume II of the Technical Report is dedicated to legal analysis by authors

including the Commission’s general counsel, Paul Bender. These review
US legislation and case history and present comparisons with other coun-
tries. Volumes III and IV present data about ‘The Marketplace’ for por-
nography in America, including a national industry analysis authored
by lawyer John Sampson; and a series of empirical case studies of par-
ticular cities and types of consumption by an economist, a lawyer, an
anthropologist, a sociologist and a criminologist. Volume V – address-
ing ‘Societal control mechanisms’ – is organised around possible ways of
managing sexual materials, and provides analysis of the workings of law
 Fifty years of academic research 7
enforcement, citizen action groups, industry self-regulation and sex edu-
cation. These chapters are authored by social and clinical psychologists,
legal scholars and a sociologist. Volume VI reports on the findings of a
‘National Survey’ designed, administered and reported on by a market
research group.
Volumes VII and VIII of the Technical Report are most directly relevant
to this project, presenting 30 articles on the effects of pornography under the
headings ‘Erotica and Antisocial Behavior’ (VII) and ‘Erotica and Social
Behavior’ (VIII). Many of these take a social psychological approach to
ask whether ‘exposure’ to pornography leads people to become sexually
violent or aggressive (Cook & Fosen, 1971; Goldstein et al., 1971; Johnson
et al., 1971; Walker, 1971). Others take legal (Ben-Veniste, 1971; Mosher
& Katz, 1971) or criminological (Kupperstein & Wilson, 1971; Kutchinsky,
1971) approaches to look at national-level correlations between the avail-
ability of pornographic material and ‘registered sex crimes’ (Kutchinsky,
1971). Another group of studies take a social psychological approach to
explore more generally the ‘effects’ of pornography – including the extent
to which pornography consumers became sexually stimulated by different
kinds of pornography and whether it then changes the amount or kind of
sex that they have (Amoroso et al., 1971; Byrne & Lamberth, 1971; Davis
& Braucht, 1971b). One study explores whether exposure to pornography
leads to ‘deviant sexual behaviour’ such as homosexuality, promiscuity or
premarital sex (Davis & Braucht, 1971a).
The final Volume of the Technical Report, entitled ‘Consumer and the
Community’, presents a wide-ranging series of articles from a variety of
disciplinary perspectives: a group of articles explores what people consider
to be obscene, drawing on survey (Wallace et al., 1971) or experimental
(Katzman, 1971a, 1971b) data. Another group of articles returns to the
concerns of Volumes VII and VIII, presenting data about various groups
of young people’s exposure to pornographic materials (Elias, 1971), and
the relationships in these groups between pornography exposure and vari-
ables including amounts of masturbation, dating and academic performance
(Berger et al., 1971a), friendships with members of the opposite sex and per-
missiveness of sexual attitudes (Berger et al., 1971b) and antisocial behav-
iour (Propper, 1971). In addition, in this volume a sociologist provides a
‘content analysis’ of ‘Sex-related themes in the underground press’ (Levin,
1971); while a group of anthropologists presents data about the content
and audiences of romantic confession magazines (Sonenschein, 1972). The
Technical Report concludes with an anthropological ‘cross-cultural study of
modesty and obscenity’ (Stephens, 1971) and a sociological account of ‘the
consumers of pornography where it is easily available: the Swedish experi-
ence’ (Zetterberg, 1971).
8 Fifty years of academic research
On the basis of this sprawling collection of academic studies, the
Commission came to the conclusion that:

there is a correlation between experience with erotic materials and gen-

eral attitudes about sex: Those who have more tolerant or liberal sexual
attitudes tend also to have greater experience with sexual material.
(Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970, p. 30)

It also found, in relation to its task to determine the relationship between the
consumption of pornography and criminality, that:

Delinquent and nondelinquent youth generally report similar experi-

ences with explicit sexual materials … Available research indicates
that sex offenders have had less adolescent experiences with erotica
than other adults … empirical research designed to clarify the question
has found no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materi-
als plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal
behavior.
(Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970,
pp. 30, 31, 32)

On this basis, the Commission’s recommendations included ‘that a mas-

sive sex education effort be launched’ (Commission on Obscenity and
Pornography, 1970, p. 54), ‘that federal, state and local legislation prohibit-
ing the sale, exhibition or distribution of sexual materials to consenting adults
should be repealed’ (Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970, p.
57), with the caveats the legislation should prohibit the sale of explicit mate-
rial to ‘young persons’ (Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970,
p. 62), and ‘public display’ of such material (Commission on Obscenity and
Pornography, 1970, p. 67).

The last 50 years of academic research on pornography

consumption
Reviewing the Report and the Technical Report of the Commission at a
distance of 50 years we can see the ways in which this work changed the
study of pornography in Western countries and set the stage for what was to
come – as well as some ways in which the innovations of the Commission
have fizzled out in succeeding research.
Perhaps the most important contribution of the work of the panel
was to ‘place the dimension of human sexual behaviour on the agenda
for continuing inquiry’ (Johnson et al., 1970, p. 171). The Commission
 Fifty years of academic research 9
clearly promoted the idea that we needed academic research about the
role of pornography in society. There exist few academic articles before
1970 that study the relationship between pornography and its audiences;
in the years that followed thousands have been published. Partly this
change is to do with the general increase in academic research; the acad-
emy has grown massively since the late 1960s and there are simply a lot
more academics doing a lot more research. But it also represents a clear
pivot away from a previous approach to pornography in which research
was unimportant, Christian values were to be upheld regardless of data,
and it was the voices of powerful public men (sic) that provided the
context for setting policy about sexually explicit materials. We can see
how revolutionary this move was at the time by looking at responses to
the Commission’s Report.
The Report, after its initial publication by the US Government Printing
Office, was commercially published in the same year by Bantam Books,
‘set in type from the materials released by the Commission to the Press
on September 30 1970’, with the cover blaring ‘The complete text of the
report now exploding into a bitter, nation-wide controversy’ (Commission
on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970). The Commission consisted of 18
members, as well as support and professional staff. The Commission
Report, as well as the main ‘Report’, also includes two adversarial
‘Reports’ authored by three Commission members which radically disa-
gree with the main Report (one of whom is Charles H Keating, founder
of Citizens for Decent Literature and producer of the film Perversion for
Profit (Keating, 1965)). Both of these minority Reports make clear that
their disagreement with the main Report is the lack of attention to ‘the
Judeo-Christian values from which our culture and heritage is derived’
(Hill et al., 1970, p. 464), and that the Report ‘advocates sex educa-
tion without reference to morality, God, or religion’ (Keating Jr, 1970,
p. 619):
For those who believe in God, in his absolute supremacy as the Creator
and Lawgiver or life, in the dignity and destiny which He has conferred
upon the human person, in the moral code that governs sexual activity
– for those who believe in such ‘things’, no argument against pornog-
raphy should be necessary.
(Keating Jr, 1970, p. 582)
From this religious viewpoint the minority Reports then go on to attack ‘the
scanty and manipulated evidence contained within this report’, the research
methods used (Hill et al., 1970, p. 463), the ‘persons of mediocre talent,
hangers-on in government, or individuals not yet settled on a course in life
who accept interim work’ who staffed the Commission (Keating Jr, 1970,
10 Fifty years of academic research
p. 582), the ‘tyranny of the Commission Chairman, and the runaway Staff’
(Keating Jr, 1970, p. 595).
The dissenting reports are also vexed that the Commission chose not to
hold public hearings. Public hearings had previously been an accepted way
of generating data to guide policy – for example, Kupperstein notes in her
review of the literature on pornography and juvenile delinquency that:

After a series of hearings in 1955, the chairman of the United States

Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency concluded
that ‘undoubtedly, pornography is one of the contributing factors to the
increase in juvenile delinquency and sex crimes in the United States’ …
This conclusion was based on extensive testimony by attorneys, police
officers, customs and postal service officials, psychiatrists, school
authorities, youth workers and clergymen.
(Kupperstein, 1971, p. 103)

The Commission on Obscenity and Pornography had explicitly rejected

the suggestion that it should hold such hearings because ‘in the first stage
of its work public hearings would not be a likely source of accurate data’
(Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970, p. 3). The dissenting
Commission members were so appalled that the ‘Commission under its
leadership had consistently refused to go to the public and hear other views’
(Hill et al., 1970, p. 462, emphasis in original) that they set up their own
public hearings. Keating’s minority Report shows the kinds of data that can
be gathered in such a way: it includes in its ‘Exhibit C’ a range of testimo-
nies from public luminaries:

J Edgar Hoover: ‘The circulation of periodicals containing salacious

material … play an important part in the development of crime among
your youth.’
(Keating Jr, 1970, p. 636)

Herbert W Case, former Detroit Police Inspector: ‘There has not been a
sex murder in the history of our department in which the killer was not
an avid reader of lewd magazines.’
(Keating Jr, 1970, p. 637)

Police Chief Paul E Blubaum, Phoenix, Arizona: ‘Our city has expe-
rienced many crimes of sexual deviation, such as child molestation
and indecent exposure. We find that most of the deviates read obscene
material.’
(Keating Jr, 1970, p. 637)
 Fifty years of academic research 11
Keating’s minority Report also provides details of pages of crimes which
police attribute to the consumption of pornography. It submits a newspaper
article by psychoanalyst Dr Natalie Shainess which warns that:

pornography washes over us all like a great wave of sewage. It corrupts

the body and numbs the mind … From my own professional practice
I know that the more we are exposed to things that are degrading, the
more we are degraded.
(Keating Jr, 1970, p. 660)
Keating further presents a speech by Robert Clegg, Headmaster of Barden
Primary School in Burnley England, warning that ‘sex education programmes
… amount to a deliberate attempt to interfere with … the beliefs, standards
and practices of what I would call normal people’ (Keating Jr, 1970, p. 667).
This is the kind of data that had previously informed public debate about
pornography – strongly held, religiously informed moral positions from people
holding powerful positions in society. Against this background it is significant
that the Commission refused to hold public hearings and instead insisted that
‘Discussions of obscenity and pornography in the past have often been devoid
of fact’ and that ‘Within the limits of its time and resources, the Commission
has sought … through research to broaden the factual basis for future continued
discussion’ (Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970, p. 4).
The move towards academic research as an important source of informa-
tion about the relationships between pornography and its audiences was
one way in which the Commission’s Report represented a turning point
in this area. Another is that the Commission’s work established that the
most important questions for research in this area concern the relation-
ship between pornography consumption and aspects of sexual behaviour
– including what the Commission calls ‘Social behavior’ (how much, and
what kinds of sex people have and their attitudes towards sex) and what
they call ‘Antisocial behavior’ (including ‘sex crimes’). Again, from our
present-day vantage point this might not seem revolutionary – but at the
time it was. In 1973, W Cody Wilson, the Executive Director and Director
of Research for the Commission, wrote in an article on ‘Pornography: the
emergence of a social issue and the beginning of psychological study’ for
the Journal of Social Issues that before the Commission’s work ‘[n]early
everything imaginable has been attributed to the effects of pornography’ –
including not only ‘sexually aggressive acts of a criminal nature’ but also:
moral breakdown, homicide, suicide, delinquency, criminal acts, inde-
cent personal habits, unhealthy habits, unhealthy thoughts, rejection of
reality, ennui [and] submission to authoritarianism.
(Wilson, 1973, p. 12)
12 Fifty years of academic research
Over the intervening years, while we have seen the emergence of a
well-populated literature exploring relationships between consumption of
pornography and various ‘social’ and ‘antisocial’ sexual behaviours, there
has been little subsequent research on whether consuming pornography
turns people into (non-sex-related) murderers or criminals or leads them
to submit to authoritarianism. As noted above, Kupperstein’s review of the
literature on the relationship between the consumption of pornography and
juvenile delinquency led her to write that, as well as finding that there is no
academic literature on this topic:

nor is there any suggestion as to their probable significance, nor is there

any recommendation in this literature that the relationship between
pornography and delinquency merits special investigation in the future.
(Kupperstein, 1971, p. 109)

The general sense that pornography can be blamed for all non-sexual ills in
society does not survive as a focus of academic research after the Report
of the Commission. The focus has been more squarely on the sexual arena.
It is also worth noting that there are some ways in which the Commission’s
Report is atypical of the research that would follow. For example, as noted
above, the Commission is quite open-minded about both positive (‘social’)
and negative (‘antisocial’) aspects of pornography consumption. As we
will show in this book, much of the research that followed started from
the assumption that the ‘antisocial’ effects were of greater significance and
needed to be addressed.

Assessing pornography research across disciplines

In 1970, the Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography
was the big bang of modern pornography research. Fifty years later, we set
out to review how our academic understanding of pornography’s relation-
ship with its audiences has changed since that founding moment. Tens of
thousands of studies have been published, so what do we now know about
this topic? Importantly, we wanted to gather data that have been published
across the social sciences and humanities disciplines – in history, cultural
studies, sociology, anthropology, social psychology and elsewhere. In one
way the Commission’s work was both typical and atypical of what would
follow. As well as including a strong focus on social psychological research
seeking to measure ‘effects’ of pornography consumption, the Commission
also included an impressive array of different academic perspectives. As
noted above, these included criminologists looking at national patterns of
crime data, sociological accounts of ‘Sex-related themes in the underground
 Fifty years of academic research 13
press’ and an anthropological ‘cross-cultural study of modesty and obscen-
ity’ (Stephens, 1971). As we will show in this book, our research suggests
that social psychology has become perhaps the most dominant academic
discipline for studying the relationships between pornography and its audi-
ences; nevertheless, research has continued in other disciplines. Perhaps
it is true that other disciplines have focused on questions other than the
effects of pornography – such as research in film studies on the aesthetics
of pornography; for example (Williams, 1989). It is difficult for researchers
in different disciplines to understand each other’s work, as we explain in
the next chapter. But it is important to pay attention to, and attempt to syn-
thesise, the data that have been gathered across academic disciplines – just
as the Commission did. This has not often been done in the past 50 years.
This is one of the reasons that we hope that this book will offer a unique
resource for interested researchers, policymakers and public figures who
want to understand what we have learned about the relationships between
pornography and its audiences over the last 50 years of academic research.

Pornography research in the real world

Before we begin, it is worth noting one final way in which the Commission’s
Report set the paradigm for the pornography research that followed: it
showed that pornography research would be controversial, that public
debates about it would be vicious, that the participants would talk across
each other, with those interested in academic research failing to communi-
cate to those driven by religious faith and vice versa – and that some/many
politicians would often favour the latter over the former. As noted above, the
dissenting Reports of the Commission, speaking from the ‘Judeo-Christian’
point of view, violently rejected the Commission’s findings. They made
vicious personal attacks on the Commission members and academics with
whom they disagreed. They went further: academic research and facts were,
they argued, irrelevant in God’s view:

One can consult all the experts he chooses, can write reports, make
studies, etc, but the fact that obscenity corrupts lies within the common
sense, the reason, and the logic of every man. St Paul, looking upon
a society in his time such as ours is becoming today wrote: They had
exchanged God’s truth for lie [sic].
(Keating Jr, 1970, p. 616)

As Rainwater notes ‘it is perhaps not surprising to learn that from the White
House to Congress the reaction of traditional politicians to the Commission
findings was hardly positive’ (Rainwater, 1974, p. 143). On 2 October 1970
14 Fifty years of academic research
‘Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate expressed strong opposi-
tion … to the findings of the Commission’ (Anon, 1970). The Report had
been commissioned by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. By the time
the Report was delivered, Republican Richard Nixon had taken over. His
public statement about the Commission’s recommendations is stark:

Several weeks ago, the National Commission on Obscenity and

Pornography –appointed in a previous administration – presented its
findings. I have evaluated that report and categorically reject its mor-
ally bankrupt conclusions and major recommendations. So long as I am
in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to
control and eliminate smut from our national life.
(Nixon, 1970)

Nixon makes no attempt to engage with the academic research presented

by the Commission. It is irrelevant for him – what is important is morality:

American morality is not to be trifled with. The Commission on

Pornography and Obscenity has performed a disservice, and I totally
reject its report.
(Nixon, 1970)

Again, this has set the template for future research on pornography: aca-
demic research does not, on the whole, guide public policy or political
debate in this area. Nevertheless, we must not lose heart. We must continue
to gather the evidence and make it available to stakeholders. That is the pur-
pose of this book. In the next chapter we explain how we started the process
by finding ways to examine and report on research across a range of quite
different academic disciplines.

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2 Method and approach1
Alan McKee, Paul Byron, Katerina
Litsou and Roger Ingham

Designing the project

In this chapter we provide details about the research methods we used for
gathering, analysing and reporting our data. This chapter is more likely to
be of interest to academic readers than to other interested stakeholders – so
please feel free to skip it if a discussion of the difference between corre-
lation and causality doesn’t catch your eye. If however you’re concerned
about epistemology, and how we justify the findings in this project, it will
be of interest.
The most important thing to emphasise about the design of this project
is that the authors come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. Indeed,
one of the starting points for our research was our awareness that differ-
ent academic disciplines have produced very different – and sometimes
even contradictory – bodies of knowledge about pornography and healthy
sexual development. We wanted to understand why this is the case (McKee
& Ingham, 2018). We quickly discovered that because of our variety of
disciplinary backgrounds our team disagreed about many aspects of aca-
demic research. The project was designed by professors Alan McKee and
Roger Ingham, two senior researchers who have practised interdisciplinary
research over the course of their careers. McKee was originally trained in
literary studies and media studies, the latter of which is a portmanteau area
of study, including psychoanalysis, economics, social psychology and art
history. He has identified as belonging to media studies and cultural stud-
ies, but over the course of his career he has led multiple interdisciplinary
research projects, often seeking to establish definitional clarity across dis-
ciplines. He has co-authored research outputs with researchers from law,
education, early childhood development, psychology, marketing, public
health, gender studies, sociology and queer studies among other disciplines.
Ingham has been researching many aspects of sexual activity amongst
young people for many years, starting in the early days of HIV. He led (with

DOI: 10.4324/9781003232032-2
 Method and approach 19
Peter Aggleton and John Cleland) a large DFID-funded programme on HIV
in poorer countries, has worked as a consultant for the WHO and other
international agencies, was research adviser for the UK government’s teen-
age pregnancy strategy, and has worked with other governments on various
aspects of sexual health. He trained initially as a social psychologist but
dips in and out of other disciplines if necessary.
McKee and Ingham then recruited two emerging researchers to work
on the project. Paul Byron majored in sociology and gender studies for his
undergraduate degree, worked as a health promotion officer while under-
taking Honours in gender studies, and started his PhD in a social health
research centre, but eventually moved to a media research centre, which
later merged with an Arts and Media school. Throughout his education and
research his work has mostly orbited around media and cultural studies,
with a strong focus on health, gender and sexuality. He describes himself
as cynical about research more committed to disciplinary principles than
to social and health improvements. Katerina Litsou’s work on this project
is her first experience practising interdisciplinary research. She is trained
as a psychologist and as a sexologist, and she identifies as a sexual health
researcher, having a social science perspective on conducting research.
Despite the sometimes fractious relationship between the disciplines
involved in this project, the relationship between the members of our team
has been friendly and entertaining. Over the four years that we worked
together we encountered and discussed a variety of disciplinary differ-
ences in our approaches to pornography and healthy sexual development.
Previous researchers on interdisciplinarity have made the point that, when
working together in such teams, ‘it’s all about relationships’ (Nair et al.,
2008, p. 4). A project’s success will depend as much on the attitudes of the
team members involved as on their expertise (McNeill et al., 2001, p. 31).
Although we worked very hard over the four years, and had a lot of difficult
discussions, we also had fun. We laughed a lot at the differences between
us, and our bemusement at those differences (you can find a lot more detail
about the things we laughed about in Litsou et al., 2020). In the following
chapters we provide details of what we discovered from this four-year pro-
ject of reading, arguing and laughing.

The research undertaken for this book

Our starting point for this project was to put together a team of leading
pornography researchers from a range of academic disciplines – what’s
known as a ‘Delphi panel’. We began by recruiting a small Advisory
Group comprising six leading professors from a range of disciplines
across the Social Sciences and Humanities, selected for their expertise
20 Method and approach
in healthy sexual development and/or representations of sexuality. These
included researchers in Paediatrics, Epidemiology, Adolescent Medicine,
Psychology, Cultural Studies and Feminist Media Studies.2 Members of the
group were asked to provide names of ‘key pornography researchers around
the world’ to form a Delphi panel. Fifty-seven researchers were suggested
by at least one of the Group members. We then contacted each of these
57 and invited them to take part. Forty-nine responded, with 40 ultimately
contributing to the panel (although not every member contributed to every
stage of the project). The panel included researchers from a wide range
of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, including psy-
chology, communication studies, cultural studies, media studies, human
geography, history, literary studies, film studies, gender studies, cultural
anthropology, sociology and public health.3 We asked this panel to help
us define pornography, to decide what were the most important aspects
of healthy sexual development in relation to pornography consumption,
where we should look for relevant academic research about these relation-
ships and what search terms we should use.
We surveyed the experts and asked the following question for each of
the 15 domains of healthy sexual development (see Chapter 1) ‘How impor-
tant do you think this domain is in understanding the relationship between
pornography and its audiences/users/consumers, etc?’ Members responded
on a five-point (Likert) scale from ‘Very Important’ to ‘Completely
Unimportant’. They were also asked to suggest which academic literature
databases we should search, and which search terms we should use.
The members of the Delphi panel agreed that all 15 domains of HSD
were ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ important for researchers interested in under-
standing uses of pornography. In terms of importance, they ranked them in
the following order:4

1. Competence in mediated sexuality

2. Awareness and acceptance that sex can be pleasurable
3. Open communication
4. Self-acceptance
5. An understanding of consent
6. Sexual agency
7. An understanding of safety
8. Lifelong learning
9. Education about sexual practice
10. Public/private boundaries
11. Understanding of parental and social values
12. Relationship skills
13. Sexual development should not be coercive or joyless
 Method and approach 21
14. Freedom from unwanted activity
15. Resilience

Based on their advice we then conducted a series of systematic literature

reviews of academic research on the relationship between the consumption
of pornography and some of the domains of healthy sexual development.
A ‘systematic’ literature review is one that follows an explicit and standard
process that can be reproduced by future researchers, ensuring that the find-
ings can be checked by other people to make sure that they are reasonable
and do not misrepresent the data (Ressing et al., 2009, p. 457). There is also
another possible approach to analysing large amounts of academic data – a
‘meta-analysis’, which we chose not to use. A meta-analysis only really
works when there are a lot of articles taking a quantitative approach to
measuring similar variables – these numbers can then be brought together
and have statistical processes run on them. We chose to undertake a sys-
tematic literature review rather than a formal meta-analysis as there does
not yet exist a stable and consistent set of questions, definitions and pro-
cesses for data-gathering about the relationships between the consumption
of pornography and healthy sexual development domains that would allow
direct comparison across studies. In short, it is hard to do a meta-analysis
on data that could include historical analysis of archive documents, focus
group discussions with feminist researchers and varied forms of social psy-
chological survey data. As Richters argues, it is only possible to conduct
a formal meta-analysis in an area where researchers ‘more or less agree
about the meaning of the terms they use’ (1997, p. 214) and, as Attwood
and Smith have warned, we must be wary of the unproven idea that:

research instigated and undertaken for varying purposes and within dis-
parate academic disciplines can be aggregated to produce similar and
substantiating conclusions.
(Attwood & Smith, 2010, p. 175)

Rather, a process such as a systematic review that is sensitive to the ways

in which different academic disciplines produce and report on data is vital
when working across a range of disciplines that are not typically brought
into conversation with each other. We followed the Preferred Reporting
Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines
(PRISMA, 2015). We started the project in 2017, and we decided to focus on
research published from the period January 2000 to December 2017 rather
than trying to review everything that had been published in the 50 years
since the Commission’s big bang. Because academic research should be
cumulative, and researchers are necessarily aware of the work that has gone
22 Method and approach
before them, we note that previous academic findings continue to be part of
contemporary pornography research.
On the advice of the Delphi panel members, we searched four academic
databases: ProQuest, EBSCO, Scopus and JSTOR. Each of these databases
was nominated more than once, along with Google Scholar, but we did
not use this because it does not permit searching for keywords in article
abstracts.
We developed a rigorous, replicable process for conducting the reviews –
this ‘Search and Analysis Protocol’ is available to anybody who would like
to replicate our searches (http://bit​.ly​/3l6JvTi). The protocol is 19 pages,
and almost 3,500 words long. It provides instructions about which data-
bases to search, what search terms to use and how to review the articles
once they have been downloaded. It provides details about exclusion cri-
teria and intercoder reliability.5 It provides enough information that, if a
future group of researchers followed the same process, they should end
up with a group of academic articles very similar to the group that we
analysed.
We searched for all relevant peer-reviewed journal articles published
between January 2000 and December 2017 using – for each domain – a set
of search terms developed in consultation with the Delphi panel. We pro-
vide details of the search terms for each domain in the appropriate chapter.
A search log template was created for inputting the search terms to ensure
consistency in approach. Two members of the research team independently
searched the four databases. The two members of the research team who
performed the database searches each created a list containing all the arti-
cles that emerged from their searches. After removing all duplicates, lists
were compared to ensure consistency. The abstract of each article was then
independently reviewed in order to identify which ones were relevant to the
study, using the following exclusion criteria:

● was not a peer-reviewed article;

● did not offer original qualitative or quantitative data about the con-
sumption of pornography and the relevant domain of HSD;
● did offer original qualitative or quantitative data but in relation to
another domain of healthy sexual development and not the one in focus;
● the full article was not in English;
● the article was not centrally about pornography consumption and the
relevant domain of healthy sexual development.

The two coding researchers liaised closely during this process. For cases
in which agreement could not be reached they brought the discussion to
the whole group for a decision. This produced a final list of articles that
 Method and approach 23
addressed the relationship between the consumption of pornography and
the relevant domain.
Two forms of analysis were then used; a light touch quantitative con-
tent analysis and a qualitative thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006).
In order to facilitate the former, a spreadsheet was created to allow cod-
ing of information about research design, methods and the content of the
articles. Articles were coded into this spreadsheet independently by two
members of the research team using the Search and Analysis Protocol. In
order to check for interrater reliability, coding was conducted in batches of
ten to 15 articles and then Cohen’s kappa statistic6 was calculated for each
researcher’s results for each batch. If kappa was below 0.61, and as recom-
mended by McHugh (2012), the researchers then reviewed and discussed
differences, reached agreement on the coding, and then continued with the
next batch of articles. This process continued until a kappa of at least 0.61
was reached for all criteria that would be coded in the analysis. For catego-
ries where it was not possible to reach a kappa of 0.61, these codes were
excluded on the basis that they appeared to be too subjective (again, the full
details of this process are available in the Search and Analysis Protocol).
Upon deciding which categories should be eliminated and having reached
over 0.61 agreement for each remaining category, the researchers indepen-
dently proceeded to code all of the remaining articles for this domain. Two
members of the research team then independently carried out a thematic
analysis using NVivo to identify the patterns within the research related
to pornography and this particular domain of healthy sexual development.
Researchers independently read the articles, using an inductive approach
to identify the key ‘themes’ in each domain (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 83),
with the coding sheet allowing researchers to easily identify relevant arti-
cles for analysis. The full team of researchers then discussed the possible
themes identified and, over the course of several discussions, agreement was
reached about the most important themes. Because the team was interdis-
ciplinary, particular attention was paid to the differences between the ways
in which articles from social sciences and humanities disciplines engaged
with the themes. This generated some of the discussion of interdisciplinary
research throughout the project (Litsou et al., 2020).
Another important aspect of our protocol is that because we only
searched for articles that provided information about the effects of por-
nography consumption on healthy sexual development, we excluded a
lot of academic research from this study. There have been thousands of
articles published about the effects of pornography; however, we quickly
found that the vast majority of these are not about aspects of healthy sexual
development. For example, there exists a significant tradition of research
about whether pornography consumption is correlated with the stability
24 Method and approach
of monogamous committed relationships. Although this topic may be of
interest to the researchers conducting the work, relationship stability isn’t
related to healthy sexual development. People can be in long-term, com-
mitted stable relationships and have terrible sex lives – and indeed, terrible
relationships (staying together for 40 years doesn’t mean that relationship is
actually good …). Or equally, people can have wonderful sex lives without
being in a relationship. So, we were surprised to find out that, for some
domains of healthy sexual development, there were fewer than a dozen pub-
lished articles that were relevant to the effects of pornography, out of the
thousands that have been published. We will keep returning to this issue
throughout the book. What have we learned from 50 years of research into
the effects of pornography? Well, one thing we have learned for certain – in
many cases, we’ve been researching the wrong things.
Another point that quickly became apparent is that, even with a team
of four people working for a number of years, we would not be able to
conduct systematic reviews of all 15 domains of healthy sexual develop-
ment. The interdisciplinary discussions of our data became part of the pro-
ject itself and meant that we didn’t reach a point where the project ran like
a machine. Every stage in the process for every domain involved extensive
discussions between the four team members as we reviewed the data that
we had produced, the interpretations we should make of it and whether
we agreed on what we should count as ‘data’ or an ‘interpretation’ (for
an extended discussion of these challenges, see Litsou et al., 2020). We
therefore had to choose which domains of healthy sexual development we
would focus on. The fact that our Delphi panel had ranked all 15 domains
as being important gave us latitude in choosing the ones to focus on, but
was not terribly helpful in actually making those decisions. We were able
to conduct systematic reviews of four domains in the time available. In
choosing the domains, we took into account both the rankings given by the
expert panel, and our awareness of which issues are currently of particular
interest in public discussions about pornography (as research impact and
engaging with real world concerns is increasingly important for academic
researchers). On this basis, we chose to review ‘Competence in mediated
sexuality’ – that is, media/porn literacy – which was ranked number one
by our Delphi panel, and has become an increasingly important focus of
public debate in an age of digitally accessible pornography. As the question
of pornography’s relationship to knowledge about sex remains of key inter-
est in public and academic debate – given the recognition that, for many
young people, pornography is a key part of their sex education (Litsou et al.,
2021) – we also included the domain ‘Education about sexual practice’. ‘An
understanding of consent’ was also ranked as being highly important by
Delphi panel members – and consent has likewise become an increasingly
 Method and approach 25
important part of public debate not only about pornography but also about
healthy sexuality more generally, so we included that domain. ‘Awareness
and acceptance that sex can be pleasurable’ was ranked second by members
of the Delphi panel. Based on our knowledge of research about sex educa-
tion we knew that this is an area where formal sex education often falls
down (Allen et al., 2013) and pornography is used by young people to fill
the gap, so we also included that domain. We report on our findings about
these four domains of healthy sexual development in this book.

Causality and correlation

As touched upon above, we noted in our analysis whether the articles we
reviewed claimed that the relationship between the consumption of pornog-
raphy and domains of healthy sexual development was one of correlation
or of causation. Correlation means that two variables are related in some
way – that if one increases, so does the other. We do not know which one
causes the other, or indeed if there is some other variable related to both of
them that drives the change. On the other hand, causality means that one
variable has a direct effect on the other. This distinction is vitally important.
Correlation does not equal causality. If we show, that people who consume
pornography are also more likely to have more gender egalitarian attitudes,
for example (Kohut et al., 2016), that doesn’t prove that consuming more
pornography leads to more gender egalitarian attitudes; it could equally
mean that having more gender egalitarian attitudes makes people more
likely to consume pornography or that an independent factor explains both.
In our systematic review, we counted which articles made explicit claims
about causality and also which ones implied causality. Implied causality was
measured through article references to terms including the ‘effect’, ‘impact’
or ‘influence’ of pornography. To clarify the logic of this analysis: whereas
‘the correlation of gender egalitarian attitudes with pornography consump-
tion’ means the same as ‘the correlation of pornography consumption with
gender egalitarian attitudes’, it is not true that ‘the impact of pornography
consumption on gender egalitarian attitudes’ means the same thing as ‘the
impact of gender egalitarian attitudes on pornography consumption’. The
language of ‘impact’ implies a unidirectional causal relationship. Having
noted whether the articles claimed causality, we then also checked whether
the data presented in the article supported claims of causality. In order to
do this we recorded the forms of data-gathering that were used. Qualitative
forms of data-gathering, like interviews and focus groups, gather data using
words, which are then analysed using methods such as thematic analysis.
Quantitative approaches use numbers – surveys are usually quantitative, for
example – which can then be analysed using statistical methods. Interviews,
26 Method and approach
focus groups and (to a much greater extent) surveys generally produce evi-
dence of correlation rather than causality. When using an experimental
design, by contrast, the research process is conducted in a controlled way
so that it can be determined that changes to one variable (dependent) are
caused by changes in the other (independent). Mixed-methods approaches
use a combination of data-gathering methods. We also noted whether data
were a snapshot gathered at a single point in time, or whether data was
gathered at several points – called a ‘longitudinal’ study. Snapshots can only
ever offer data about correlations.

A note on terminology
In the first chapter we noted that the research undertaken for the President’s
Commission – and much subsequent research – used the term ‘exposure’ to
describe the relationship between pornography and its audiences. This term has
particularly connotations – as per the Oxford English Dictionary, it describes:

the action of uncovering or leaving without shelter or defence; unshel-

tered or undefended condition. Also, the action of subjecting, the state
or fact or being subjected to any external influence.
(OED online)

The implications of this language are that pornography is something that

people should be defended against and sheltered from. There is no agency
in being ‘exposed’ to something. Similarly, talking about the ‘effects’ of
pornography on audiences suggests that the consumers are passive, and
things are being done to them, and minimises differences between consum-
ers (Gauntlett, 1998). By contrast, other words – like ‘using’ pornography,
do allow for agency – they imply an active engagement with the text, that
people are choosing to do something with it. Other words have yet other
connotations – ‘consuming’ pornography, for example, has both an etymol-
ogy of eating that implies taking something into your body, as well as a
capitalistic implication of being a ‘consumer’.
The authors of this book debated for some time which is the most value-
free of these terms; and we finally decided that none of them is neutral
in any substantive sense. All of them imply particular ways of thinking
about the relationships between pornography and its audiences. For this
reason, we decided in this book to use all of the terms at different times, thus
allowing the different perspectives on the relationship – user, consumer,
exposure, effects – to appear throughout our writing. We should emphasise
that, even when the term ‘exposure’ or ‘effects’ appears in the book, we are
not looking at people ‘stumbling across’ pornography by accident. We are
 Method and approach 27
interested in the intentional use/consumption/viewing/reading and so on of
sexually explicit materials.

Notes
1 Some elements of this chapter were originally published in Litsou, K., McKee,
A., Byron, P., & Ingham, R. (2020). Productive disagreement during research
in interdisciplinary teams: Notes from a case study investigating pornography
and healthy sexual development. Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies, 38(1–2),
101–125.
2 Advisory Group members were Professors Feona Attwood, Dennis Fortenberry,
Cynthia Graham, Clarissa Smith, Rebecca Sullivan and Ine Vanwesenbeeck.
3 Delphi panel members were Peter Alilunas, Brandon Arroyo, Martin Barker,
Heather Berg, Amy Bleakley, David Church, Lynn Comella, Ed Donnerstein,
William Fisher, Rosalind Gill, Gert Martin Hald, Helen Hester, Katrien Jacobs,
Steve Jones, Jane Juffer, Taylor Kohut, Charlotta Löfgren-Mårtenson, Giovanna
Maina, Neil Malamuth, Shaka McGlotten, Mark McLelland, Brian McNair,
John Mercer, Kimberly Nelson, Lucy Neville, Susanna Paasonen, Constance
Penley. Julian Petley, Jim Pfaus, Eric Schaefer, Sarah Schaschek, Lisa Z. Sigel,
Aleksandar Štulhofer, Shira Tarrant, Evangelos Tziallas, Thomas Waugh,
Ronald Weitzer, Eleanor Wilkinson, Paul Wright and Federico Zecca.
4 See the Introduction chapter for more explanation of each of these domains in
relation to healthy sexual development.
5 Intercoder or interrater reliability is the extent to which independent coders
evaluate a text or a message and reach the same results.
6 Cohen’s kappa coefficient is a statistic used to measure intercoder reliability for
qualitative items.

References
Allen, L., Rasmussen, M. L., & Quinlivan, K. (Eds.). (2013). The politics of pleasure
in sex education: Pleasure bound. Routledge.
Attwood, F., & Smith, C. (2010). Extreme concern: Regulating “dangerous
pictures” in the United Kingdom. Journal of Law and in Society, 37(1),
171–188.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology.
Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi​.org​/10​.1191​
/1478088706qp063oa
Gauntlett, D. (1998). Ten things wrong with the media effects model. In R.
Dickinson, R. Harindranath, & O. Linné (Eds.), Approaches to audiences: A
reader (pp. 120–130). Arnold.
Kohut, T., Baer, J. L., & Watts, B. (2016). Is pornography really about “making
hate to women”? Pornography users hold more gender egalitarian attitudes than
nonusers in a representative American sample. Journal of Sex Research, 53(1),
1–11. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/00224499​.2015​.1023427
Litsou, K., Byron, P., McKee, A., & Ingham, R. (2021). Learning from pornography:
Results of a mixed methods systematic review. Sex Education, 21(2), 236–252.
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during research in interdisciplinary teams: Notes from a case study investigating
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22(3), 276–282.
McKee, A., & Ingham, R. (2018). Are there disciplinary differences in writing about
pornography? A trialogue for two voices. Porn Studies, 5(1), 34–43. https://doi​
.org​/10​.1080​/23268743​.2017​.1390397
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3 Defining pornography1
Alan McKee, Paul Byron, Katerina
Litsou and Roger Ingham

Pornography experts
There already exist some overviews of the existing academic research about
pornography and its audiences (see, for example, Wright et al., 2016; Grubbs
et al., 2019), but these tend to report on research within one discipline or
a group of closely cognate disciplines (for example, social psychology and
public health). This project represents the first time that an interdisciplinary
group of researchers has reviewed relevant research published across the
social sciences and humanities academic disciplines. It is a surprisingly dif-
ficult project. Although all academic research is committed to gathering,
analysing and reporting on data, the ways in which different disciplines
do this can be so fundamentally different that translating results between
those disciplines can require learning whole new languages (Klein, 1996,
p. 46). Indeed, as mentioned in Chapter 2, the original impetus for this pro-
ject was a recognition that different academic disciplines were producing
quite different findings about the relationships between pornography use
and its audiences. We noted that some refereed overviews of research in,
say, social psychology could write that ‘[t]here is … a strong body of evi-
dence … establishing a link between exposure to sexually explicit material
and engagement in aggressive or violent sexual practices’ (Guy et al., 2012,
p. 546), and that ‘pornography has been linked to unrealistic attitudes about
sex, maladaptive attitudes about relationships … belief that women are sex
objects … and less progressive gender role attitudes’ (Horvath et al., 2013,
p. 7). By contrast, a researcher in literary studies could write that pornogra-
phy in the 1980s had an important role in ‘teaching women that masturba-
tion was an accepted activity’ (Juffer, 1998, p. 73), a vital part of feminist
politics; and a media studies professor’s analysis noted that pornography
can similarly support feminist ideals by offering ‘to women the possibility
of joining other women in discussing sex and imagining sex’ (Smith, 2007).
Researchers in different disciplines were coming to conclusions about the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003232032-3
30 Defining pornography
relationship between pornography consumption and healthy sexual devel-
opment but were producing results that appeared to be very different. This
inspired us to put together this project, and to explore the published research
about the effects of pornography across all disciplines and explore whether
the surface differences were in fact real, and how any actual differences in
findings could be explained.
Before we go on to report on our systematic reviews about the relation-
ships between pornography consumptions and various domains of healthy
sexual development, it is worth spending some time looking at one of the
problematic issues that emerged in trying to talk between disciplines, as
a case study for the challenges the project faced: how do you even define
pornography?2

I know it when I see it

In everyday usage, the term ‘pornography’ is slippery (Willoughby & Busby,
2016, p. 683). Videos on Pornhub are pornography, obviously. And maga-
zines that show people having sex, are clearly pornography. What about
Playboy magazine? That’s got naked women in it – but they’re not actually
having sex, and they don’t spread their legs to show you their genitals in
detail. Still, many people describe Playboy as pornography. What about lin-
gerie adverts showing women wearing lacy underwear in sexy poses – could
that be pornography (Bailey, 2011)? National Geographic magazines with
photographs of women from across the world with their breasts exposed
(Rose, 2012)? What about a sex education book that includes ‘anatomically
correct drawings of reproductive organs’ (Culp-Ressler, 2014)? In all these
cases, at least some people have at some point included them in their defini-
tion of pornography.
And that is a problem. In everyday practice we can perhaps get away
with the now-infamous approach to defining pornography articulated by
Justice Potter Stewart in his opinion in the 1964 case Jacobellis vs Ohio:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I under-
stand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I
could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.
(Stewart, 1964, p. 197)

This approach, commonly shortened to the definition of pornography as ‘I

know it when I see it’, works perfectly well in most everyday contexts. But
it does not work for academic research on the relationship between consum-
ers and their pornography – because what different people know as pornog-
raphy when they see it is not the same (Willoughby & Busby, 2016). And in
 Defining pornography 31
academic research about the possible effects of pornography, it matters a lot
if one academic is talking about Pornhub (and its varied genres) and another
is talking about sex education books. Although researchers have sought to
understand the relationships between the consumption/use of/exposure to
pornography for decades, it is only recently that researchers have sought
to operationalise a definition of pornography for use in academic research
(p. 678).
Psychologists believe that reaching an agreed definition of a variable
is vital for the development of formal theories (Sell, 2018) and psychol-
ogy researchers have begun to approach a consensus about how to define
pornography [sometimes the term Sexually Explicit Material (SEM) is used
as a synonym (Downing et al., 2014)], employing definitions that focus on
two necessary elements. The first is that pornography is ‘explicit’ (Wright
& Randall, 2012, p. 1410) and includes ‘images of exposed genitals and/
or depictions of sexual behaviors’ (Morgan, 2011, p. 520) that are ‘uncon-
cealed’ (Peter & Valkenburg, 2011, p. 751). The second is that pornography
is ‘intended to increase sexual arousal’ (Morgan, 2011, p. 520).
However, even within the discipline of psychology there is little agree-
ment about elements of this definition. Some researchers will include in
their definition of pornography texts3 that show only ‘nudity’ with no sexual
contact (Wright & Randall, 2012, p. 1410). By contrast, other researchers
in psychology insist that in order to be explicit, pornographic texts must
show sexual acts or ‘(aroused) genitals’ (Peter & Valkenburg, 2011, p. 751)
– researchers in the latter group exclude Playboy from their definition of
pornography, for example (Træen & Daneback, 2013, p. e42). In relation to
the second part of the definition, some psychology researchers exclude the
intention to arouse and include all sexually explicit materials in their defini-
tion of pornography (Wright & Randall, 2012, p. 1410; Træen & Daneback,
2013, p. e42). And it is notable that, even in recent work, many researchers
do not provide a definition of pornography at all (Hald et al., 2013; Downing
et al., 2014; Doornwaard et al., 2015). Given the lack of consensus within a
single discipline, it is not surprising that, when we begin to consider other
disciplines that are interested in the consumption of pornography, there are
even more pronounced disagreements. Researchers in humanities disci-
plines insist on the heterogeneity of the category and the variety of texts
that can function as pornography, including the complicated relationship the
category has with other kinds of culture like art or sex education. They point
out that texts that are produced for other purposes are used by consumers
for pornographic purposes – such as shoe catalogues used as masturbatory
aids by foot fetishists (Rose, 2012, p. 549). Indeed, an influential account
of pornography by literary historian Kendrick insists that pornography is
‘not a thing but a concept, a thought structure’ (Kendrick, 1996, p. xiii)
32 Defining pornography
– different cultures at different times categorise different texts as porno-
graphic as a way to control forms of knowledge and thus power relations
between groups. For Kendrick, pornography does not have ‘any common
qualities’ (Williams, 1989, p. 11, italics in original).
The first survey we sent to our Delphi panelists (see Chapter 2) included
a question asking everyone to provide an open-ended definition of por-
nography. A later question in the survey also asked: ‘In your professional
opinion, what is the relationship of pornography with its audiences/users/
consumers, etc?’ – drawing out further complexities to the definitions given,
as will be discussed. Panel members were also asked to indicate both the
discipline in which they conducted their doctoral research, and their current
research discipline. Thirty-six of our panel members, working from a range
of disciplines, offered a definition of pornography. No two researchers gave
exactly the same definition. Over three-quarters of the 36 respondents who
attempted this task included the term ‘explicit’ within their definition for
example:

● sexually explicit media;

● the explicit representation of sexual activity, broadly defined, in images
and words;
● sexually explicit materials within different media and art formats.

Just over half included ‘intention to arouse’ or a similar phrase; examples

include:

● material designed to provide arousal and entertainment of a sexual

nature;
● material that is designed to provoke urges to masturbate;
● an aesthetic work with the primary artistic intention to encourage sex-
ual arousal or other forms of autoerotica;
● explicit sexual representation for the purpose of arousal.

Over half of the sample mentioned only one term or the other, and less than
half included both these terms (or cognates) in their definitions. Some of the
participants who offered a definition including both elements (or cognates)
also added caveats to their definition; these included the use of qualifiers
such as ‘porn often contains’, or the use of ‘and/or’ to link explicitness
and arousal, or providing alternative definitions alongside this one – for
example:

pornography can be understood in two ways: 1) … sexual explicitness

and/or a purposive attempt to arouse … 2) … a frequently disparaging
 Defining pornography 33
label applied to media texts possessive of a particular set of character-
istics such as affectivity, transgressiveness and prurience.

Researchers disagreed on the place of ‘intent’ in the definition. Some did

state that pornographic material must be ‘designed’, ‘produced’, ‘for the
purpose of’ or ‘aiming at’ or ‘intended’ to or ‘meant’ to provide arousal.
However, other researchers suggested that material is pornographic if it is
‘consumed’ for sexual arousal, or ‘stimulates’ or ‘sexually arouses’.
So far in our analysis the answers look quite coherent. There might be
slight differences in emphasis or language, but they are gesturing at least in
the same basic direction. But of course, things are not that simple.
Another group of respondents did not use the language of explicitness,
or intent to arouse, at all. Instead, they presented a completely different kind
of definition of pornography. They insisted that pornography is not a ‘thing’
but an ‘argument’ or a ‘process’. The six respondents in the latter camp
comprised five who nominated either their doctoral degree or current area
of study as film studies or media studies, and one historian. Two mentioned
the genre theories of Altman, whereby the content of a genre is the result
of a ‘contract’ between producers and ‘a community of users – audiences,
fans, critics, etc’; for example:

I tend to consider pornography as an audio-visual genre; therefore I’d

extend to pornography the semantic-syntactic-pragmatic approach
developed by Rick Altman. In this sense, I consider pornography as
a complex set of semantic elements (for instance, but not exclusively,
explicit sex), syntactic elements (specific plot structures, or visual
styles, etc.) and pragmatic elements (in this case, the existence of a
community of users – audiences, fans, critics, etc. – that considers a
specific object as pornographic).

Two mentioned Kendrick’s history of pornography, which argues that pornog-

raphy is an ‘argument’ or a ‘process, not a thing’ as illustrated in the following

I would hesitate to define it, suggesting as Walter Kendrick does that

‘pornography’ names an argument, not a thing.
I tend to go with (and expand) Walter Kendrick’s definition:
Pornography is a process, not a thing. That process involves cultural
shifts, norms, regulations, social relations, taboos, and sanctioned/
unsanctioned pleasures and desires.

As Kendrick points out, for example, it was unproblematic in the 19th cen-
tury for educated rich white men to view ‘erotica’, because they were thought
34 Defining pornography
to be able to control their reactions and appreciate this material in appropri-
ate ways; but when it became widely available through cheap printing to the
uneducated masses it was renamed as ‘pornography’ and had to be controlled.
So, we found two distinct approaches to the definitions of pornogra-
phy from our expert panel; the first is a group of answers in the form of
‘Sexually explicit materials intended to arouse’, or similar formulations
which imply an essence to pornography – all pornographic texts will have
similar characteristics under this definition (although even here we note that
there will be disagreements – is a topless photo of a woman in Playboy
‘sexually explicit’? If not, is it not pornography?). The second approach is
quite different – it’s a culturally mediated one which states that at a given
time, in a given culture, there will be rules about what is and what is not por-
nographic, but that these rules can change. At some points in time the cat-
egory ‘pornography’ will include only sexually explicit materials intended
to arouse but, at other times, other kinds of texts will be included in the
category of pornography and ‘sexually explicit texts intended to arouse’
may not be captured in the category. Arguments about which texts should
be included in the category of pornography become power struggles – as
we can see in fights about, for example, whether sex education textbooks
(McKee, 2017) or artworks (Simpson, 2011) are pornographic.
On the basis of these responses, we identified two (what we thought
would be) incompatible themes in the definitions of pornography offered by
researchers; these were:

● Sexually explicit materials intended to arouse;

● Pornography is not a thing but a concept, a category of texts managed
by institutions led by powerful groups in society in order to control
the circulation of knowledge and culture, changing according to geo-
graphical location and period.

We then did a second survey of the panel members, offering these two
alternative definitions of pornography and asking them to rate their level of
agreement with each of them on a five-point scale from ‘Strongly disagree’
to ‘Strongly agree’. All 44 Delphi panel members who enrolled in the study
(including those who did not complete the first survey) were invited to par-
ticipate. Twenty-seven of our experts completed this second survey. Asking
our panel members to rate these definitions on a five-point scale, rather than
simply asking if they agree or disagree, allowed them to indicate partial
agreement; for example, if they agreed with some aspect(s) of the definition
but not all of them.
Of the 27 participants who replied to this survey, 21 agreed or strongly
agreed with the first definition – Sexually explicit materials intended to
 Defining pornography 35
arouse – while just two disagreed or strongly disagreed. For the second
definition, 15 respondents agreed or strongly agreed, while nine disagreed
or strongly disagreed. Using a value of 1 for Strongly Disagree through to
5 being Strongly Agree, the mean scores for the two definitions were 4.19
for definition 1, and 3.50 for definition 2.
This finding surprised us at first. We thought that the definitions – one
being a strict definition of media content and its intended use, the other rec-
ognising culturally contingent aspects that make a single definition unten-
able – were mutually exclusive. That is clearly not the case. And as we think
about it more we see that it makes perfectly good sense to say that the nature
of pornography changes between cultures and times – but, at this point in
time in Western cultures, pornography means ‘sexually explicit materials
intended to arouse’.
We also dug down a bit deeper into the responses to see if there were dif-
ferences between social scientists and humanities researchers. As we men-
tioned in the Introduction, one of the reasons we started this project in the
first place was our sense that there are different silos of academic knowledge
about pornography that are developing quite independently from each other.
Researchers in one discipline are asking different questions, relying on dif-
ferent assumptions – and yes, using different definitions – from researchers
in other disciplines, and there are few points where these distinct bodies of
knowledge regularly meet up. So, we were interested to see whether experts
from different disciplines responded in different ways to these two defini-
tions. The mean levels of agreement for definition 1 (material intended to
arouse) were 4.30 for social scientists and 2.70 for humanities researchers.
Corresponding figures for definition 2 (not a thing but a concept) were 4.13
and 4.00 respectively. In other words, social scientists were more likely to
agree with both definitions (4.30 and 4.13 respectively), whereas humani-
ties researchers were more inclined to agree with definition 2 (4.00) than
with definition 1 (2.70). Further exploration of the ratings revealed that just
over half of the 27 participants were in agreement with both definitions.
The fact that researchers across disciplines did not agree on a single defi-
nition of pornography is both unsurprising and surprising. It is unsurprising
in that several recent researchers have made the same point (Rose, 2012;
Andrews, 2012). But it remains a surprising finding that researchers have
been gathering data about the relationships between pornography and its
consumers for five decades now, yet they have done so without an agreed
definition of the object of study. The results of the first round of the survey
show that more than half of surveyed researchers used each of the terms
‘explicit’ and ‘arouse’, which might offer some hope that ‘Sexually explicit
content intended to arouse’ could offer a starting point for a definitional
consensus. But, as we note, only a minority of panellists used both of these
36 Defining pornography
terms without caveats. We also note the disagreement among researchers as
to whether pornographic material must be created with the intent to arouse
or whether it is defined by the fact it is consumed to create arousal. The
complexity of the different definitions that can be created through different
applications of explicitness and/or arousal (with the latter term having two
possible meanings – intent to arouse or use for arousal) leads to a complex
matrix of definitions, each of which produces a different object of study.
One respondent mentioned both explicitness and intent to arouse – and then
noted that under their definition this would exclude Playboy, as it is does
not contain ‘clear and explicit acts’. Another mentioned only that material
must be explicit, and not that it be designed for sexual arousal – which could
include artworks. Another respondent included material designed for sex-
ual arousal, even if not explicit – which could include romance novels, for
example. One excluded both explicitness and intent, defining pornography
as ‘Any material … that sexually arouses people’ – which, they note, would
include some of the pictures in National Geographic among other materials
that are not produced for masturbatory purposes.

Talking across disciplines

So – where do we go from here? We’ve included this case study to suggest
the kinds of challenges that we face as we try to summarise the research
about pornography and its audiences that has been produced across a range
of academic research. If we cannot even start by deciding on a single defini-
tion of pornography, where do we go?
There exists a significant tradition of academic research exploring the
challenges of working across disciplines and the ways in which we might
address these. Repko and Szostak (2020) suggest that epistemic disagree-
ments between disciplines can be organised under three headings: concepts,
theories and assumptions and that assumptions can include:

what constitutes truth, what counts as evidence or proof, how problems

should be formulated and what the general ideals of the discipline are.
(np)

In addition, researchers from different disciplines can face differences in

language, including the way key concepts are understood (Szostak, 2013,
p. 50). There also may be differences in beliefs and assumptions, differ-
ences in identifying the problem (p. 20), and differing epistemologies – for
example, critical/contextual or positivist/general (p. 23). Pohl et al. (2008)
propose three modes of collaboration among experts from different disci-
plines that can lead to integration of knowledge – ‘common group learning’
 Defining pornography 37
where team members learn from each other through the process, ‘delib-
eration among experts’, where ‘team members with relevant expertise …
amalgamate their views … during one or more rounds of exchange’, and
‘integration by a subgroup or individual’ where one team member, or a sub-
group, takes responsibility for the integrative aspects of the project (p. 415).
Three particular aspects of interdisciplinary work have become important
for this project.
The first insight is that we must make peace with the fact that the data
from different disciplines cannot simply be synthesised into a single coher-
ent whole because some of it might be inconsistent – because of different
definitions, different aims and different methods. This does not mean that
we have to give up on the process of drawing research together, but it does
mean that the process can involve a degree of messiness as well as creativity
(Keestra, 2017, p. 121).
A second important insight is that researchers can address differences
in language by ‘deliberately using everyday language and avoiding scien-
tific terms’ (Pohl et al., 2008, p. 415), or by using ‘new and redeployed
terminology’ as the basis for a ‘working interlanguage or metalanguage’
as with ‘pidgin’ or ‘creole’ (Klein, 2012, np). Related to the first point, in
order to bring together the insights of different disciplines, which may have
conceptualised their objects of study in quite different ways, it is necessary
to accept a level of imprecision that is unusual and perhaps unsettling for
some academic researchers. This helps explain the tone of this book: we
have deliberately used everyday language wherever possible. This decision
has a number of advantages. The topic of pornography’s effects on its audi-
ences is of interest to a lot of people who may not have formal research
training – politicians, journalists and parents for example – and using eve-
ryday language wherever possible allows this book to be accessible to these
stakeholders. But research discussions of interdisciplinarity also point to the
important theoretical rationale behind this decision, allowing the synthesis
of results across disciplines.
The third important insight from interdisciplinary researchers is the
‘principle of iteration’: that is, ‘moving back and forth … triangulation …
reflective balance and weaving together perspectives’ (Klein, 2012, np).
This means accepting that our findings are always provisional; that we have
reached an uneasy truce about what the data across disciplines show but
that as we keep talking to our colleagues in different disciplines, translat-
ing across our different languages, our insights will change even if the data
remain the same (we go into more detail about this process in Litsou et al.,
2021).
In relation to our project, we decided in the end that the complex pattern
of responses about defining pornography suggests that rather than a single
38 Defining pornography
definition of pornography, if we employ both definitions we are more likely
to meet the needs of an interdisciplinary cohort of pornography research-
ers. For researchers in disciplines that typically insist on having a single
agreed-upon definition before research projects can start, this might be a
challenging idea. But in practice, it works. For researchers who are inter-
ested in what gets defined as pornography by different people, in different
cultures, at different times, for different reasons, it is enabling to define
pornography as:

Pornography is not a thing but a concept, a category of texts managed

by institutions led by powerful groups in society in order to control
the circulation of knowledge and culture, changing according to geo-
graphical location and period.

Such an approach remains true to lived complexity, but fails to produce

final, agreed operational terms that allow for replicable research on the
audiences of pornography.
However, if we want to produce replicable data – such as through sur-
veys and content analysis – then we need to agree on a definition of the
object being studied, even if that definition is understood to be imperfect
or incomplete. Allowing for researchers to choose the definition that suits
their project represents a pragmatic – and messy, and creative – approach
to the problem of defining pornography. Indeed, we think we can see some
evidence in our Delphi panel responses that many researchers are already, in
practice, balancing a tension between complexity and operational necessity.
Twenty-eight panelists provided a definition of pornography that included
the terms ‘explicit’ and/or ‘intended to arouse’ (or cognates). In a later ques-
tion, panelists were asked ‘In your professional opinion, what is the relation-
ship of pornography with its audiences/users/consumers etc?’. In response
to this question 20 respondents – despite presenting a workable operational
definition of pornography – included terms that insisted on complexity and
variability, such as ‘It’s many things’, ‘That really does depend entirely on
the circumstances’, or ‘Complex, and contingent upon many factors’. One
researcher who defined pornography as ‘sexually explicit visual or printed
material that is consumed for sexual arousal’, also stated that the relation-
ship between pornography and its consumers is ‘Too diverse to sum up
neatly, there are so many different kinds of pornography and so many dif-
ferent consumers!’ In each of these cases a researcher is aware of the fact
that a simple definition of pornography cannot do justice to the complexity
of its reality, but is willing to make a contingent decision to lay out a sim-
ple definition in order to allow empirical data-gathering to take place and
resultant data to be published and hopefully cited. And, by settling on a
 Defining pornography 39
definition, researchers also increase the possibility of communication with
other researchers who may work within other disciplines; even if that com-
munication takes the form of disagreement, at least there is something to
talk about.
Having established our definition(s) of pornography, we then looked at
the existing academic knowledge about the relationships between consum-
ing pornography and various aspects of healthy sexual development. The
next chapter explains what we found about pornography and one of the
most important of these: the understanding and practice of sexual consent.

Notes
1 Some elements of this chapter were originally published in McKee, A., Byron,
P., Litsou, K., & Ingham, R. (2020). An interdisciplinary definition of pornog-
raphy: Results from a global Delphi panel. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 49(3),
1085–1091. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s10508​-019​-01554​-4.
2 For the formal refereed version of these data see McKee, A., Byron, P., Litsou,
K., & Ingham, R. (2020). An interdisciplinary definition of pornography:
Results from a global Delphi panel. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 49(3), 1085–
1091. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s10508​-019​-01554​-4.
3 In this book we use the word ‘texts’ in the sense in which it is used by cultural
studies researchers – that is, any element of culture that carries meaning for a
consumer. This can include books, films and photographs as well as T-shirts,
coffee mugs or even hairstyles, to name only a few possibilities: McKee, A.
(2003). Textual analysis: A beginner’s guide. Sage.

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4 Pornography and consent1
Alan McKee, Katerina Litsou,
Paul Byron and Roger Ingham

Pornography and consent

Consent has been increasingly recognised as a central component of healthy
sexual development and sexual practice in public debates (Bashan &
Berkovic, 2021) and in sex education (Whittington, 2021).2 There is ongo-
ing public concern about pornography’s impact on sexual health, respectful
relationships and issues of consent (Waterson, 2019). Consent has become
increasingly integrated in public discussions about healthy sex and relation-
ship practice, particularly in relation to identifying and preventing sexual
harassment and sexual assault (Fischel, 2019). Many commentators are
concerned that the consumption of pornography is related to consumers’
understandings and practices of sexual consent (see, for example, Tankard
Reist, 2021).
So – after 50 years of academic research, do we know whether people
who consume more pornography have better or worse understandings of,
and practices of, sexual consent? Surprisingly, after analysing the academic
research on this topic, we found that the answer is: we don’t really know,
because that isn’t what the research has focused on. This might relate to the
issue of sexual consent only gaining recent traction in sexualities education,
yet sexual consent has been part of this discussion for more than two dec-
ades now (Gilbert, 2018).
We might be surprised by this – we would think that this would be a cen-
tral topic of interest for researchers, given the vital importance of consent.
But what we found in relation to this domain is that researchers have not
paid as much attention as we should to consent as a key aspect of healthy
sexual development. In our focus on pornography research, discussion of
consent often falls within research about pornography’s relationship with
sexual violence. And much of this research does not distinguish between
non-consensual violence, and consensual practices of BDSM, kink, spank-
ing, role playing and rough sex. This complicates things.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003232032-4
 Pornography and consent 43
In reviewing pornography research about consent, we started off by find-
ing the relevant academic articles, as detailed in the ‘Search and Analysis
Protocol’ and searched all relevant peer-reviewed journal articles. In this,
and all subsequent searches, we used search terms suggested by two or
more of the panel members:

porn* OR “sexually AND consent* OR rape OR coercion OR

explicit material” OR unwanted OR violen* OR aggress* OR
“visual sexual stimuli” assault OR objectif* OR force* OR
submiss*

We used this extensive list of terms so that we would pick up research

about non-consensual behaviours like rape, or sexual assault, as well as
those that explicitly talked about consent. The initial search, after remov-
ing duplicates, returned 678 articles. Of these, 576 were excluded after
screening of title and abstract and a further 68 were excluded after full
texts were reviewed. In total, 34 articles were identified as providing rel-
evant, original data about the relationship between the consumption of
pornography and sexual consent and were thus included for analysis. A
table providing details of all included articles is available at http://bit​.ly​
/3l5XCIp. We then analysed the articles, as laid out in the Search and
Analysis Protocol. We also reviewed the instruments (e.g. surveys) used
in each article. For some of the included papers the authors used vali-
dated measurement scales, for other papers the authors produced their own
questions and some papers reported on qualitative methods, using either
focus groups or interviews. Some of these measures were about intentional
violence such as rape while others were about the possibility of commit-
ting sexual violence. Our analysis of the instruments used found that
authors took no consistent approach towards consent, including whether
or not they measured consent at all. Indeed, many articles did not measure
aspects of consent, but discussed it or made claims about it anyway. In all
of our analyses, given the interdisciplinary nature of this project, we were
particularly interested in the ways in which articles from social sciences
and humanities disciplines approached the topic differently. In relation to
this domain of healthy sexual development, though, all of the articles we
found originated from social science disciplines. Nevertheless, it became
clear in our thematic analysis that our interdisciplinary approach remained
important; humanities researchers have written extensively about norma-
tive approaches to sexuality, and this became an important theoretical
perspective for making sense of the academic research that has been con-
ducted in this area.
44 Pornography and consent
Incorrect claims of causality
The journals in which most of the articles were published are Violence
Against Women (four articles) and Violence and Victims (three articles).
Following these, two articles were included from each of the following
journals: Aggressive Behavior; Archives of Sexual Behavior; Psychology of
Men and Masculinity; Sex Roles; and Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity.
This gives some insight into the types of research discussions offered in
relation to pornography and matters of consent. Initial coding revealed
that, of the 34 articles, 29 report on data collected from a single point in
time. Three articles use data collected at more than one time point, and one
was based on an experimental design. Data were mostly collected through
surveys only (25 articles) with five articles using interviews and/or focus
groups. Three articles used mixed methods. Twenty-six of the articles report
correlations (as explained in Chapter 2).
However, despite the fact that the data reported actually showed corre-
lations, we found that 19 of the articles explicitly claim that pornography
causes changes in other variables despite the fact that data were not available
to support this claim. Twenty articles imply causality – implied causality was
measured through article references to terms including the ‘effect’, ‘impact’
or ‘influence’ of pornography (some articles both claimed causality explic-
itly and also implied it, which is why the numbers add up to more than 34).
Based on our analysis, only 14 of the 34 articles avoid incorrectly claim-
ing or implying causality. This is a breathtaking finding. Despite the fact
that academics are trained from the beginning of their careers to avoid
incorrect claims about causality, the majority of these research papers about
pornography consumption and consent gets it wrong.
We found no agreement in the sample articles about the definition of
pornography, what constitutes a suitable taxonomy of kinds of pornogra-
phy or measures of pornography consumption (see Kohut et al., 2020). The
articles refer to at least 13 different kinds of pornography, some overlap-
ping, some referring to medium (e.g. ‘internet’ pornography), and others to
content: ‘violent’, ‘hardcore’, ‘sadomasochistic’, ‘rape’, ‘erotica’, ‘gonzo’,
‘violent/degrading’, ‘softcore’, ‘mainstream’, ‘degrading’, ‘adult-child sex’
and ‘child’.
We also note that none of the articles attempted to define consent.
Despite this being a key aspect of healthy sexual development, we found no
work that employed indicators to measure the sophistication of consumers’
understanding of how sexual consent should operate.

Themes about pornography consumption and consent

In our qualitative thematic analysis of the articles, our first finding is that
 Pornography and consent 45
There is no agreement in the literature as to whether consumption of
pornography is correlated with better or worse understandings of sexual
consent including having attitudes accepting of sexual violence, or likeli-
hood of bystander interventions in cases of sexual violence or coercion.
We made a distinction between people’s understanding of sexual con-
sent and their practice of it. Consent is a complex concept and gaining
consent can be a complex process. It is not the case that if someone says
‘yes’, then all sexual negotiation is completed. Someone can say yes to
one particular sexual act – a blow job, perhaps – without agreeing to oth-
ers – toe-sucking, maybe. Consent can be withdrawn or negotiated at any
time during a sexual act. Consent need not be verbal – but consent via
body-language can be ambivalent or uncertain. Consent should be free
from coercion – so if someone says yes to sex because they are frightened
their partner will hit them, that clearly isn’t consent. What if they say yes
because they’re afraid their partner will leave them, even if the partner
hasn’t said that? What if they say yes because they think it will put their
partner in a good mood, and thus more likely to load (or unload) the dish-
washer – is that consent?
So, we were interested to find out what we know about whether people
who consume pornography have more or less sophisticated understand-
ings of, and attitudes towards, sexual consent. However, we struggled to
identify a consistent set of findings in this group of articles. Some arti-
cles found correlations between pornography use and attitudes towards
sexual consent. One found a correlation between women viewing por-
nography and being less likely to intervene as a bystander during a sex-
ual assault, and more likely to believe rape myths (Brosi et al., 2011);
another found that men who viewed pornography – when compared with
those men who did not watch pornography – were less likely to say they
would intervene as a bystander, more likely to rape a woman if they were
assured they would not get caught or punished and more likely to believe
rape myths (Foubert et al., 2011). Another article found a correlation
between pornography use and attitudes supporting violence against
women, but only for men who are at high risk for sexual aggression and
are self-reported frequent consumers of pornography (Malamuth et al.,
2012).
However, other articles found that exposure to non-violent pornography
had no effect on bystander willingness to intervene, nor to bystander effi-
cacy; while exposure to violent pornography for men but not for women was
correlated with bystander willingness to intervene but not to ‘bystander effi-
cacy’ (Foubert & Bridges, 2017) – that is, the perceived ability to intervene
as a bystander. Others found no effect on rape myth acceptance or attraction
to sexual aggression after exposure to violent and degrading pornography
46 Pornography and consent
(Isaacs & Fisher, 2008), no link between pornography use and attitudes
towards sexual coercion (Tomaszewska & Krahé, 2016) and no relationship
amongst men (not women) between reading pornographic magazines and
aggressive sexual attitudes (Taylor, 2006).
Our second finding from the thematic analysis was:
There is no agreement in the literature as to whether consumption of
pornography is correlated with better or worse practices of sexual consent
including practising sexual violence or taking bystander actions in cases of
sexual violence.
Similar to our findings in relation to the consumption of pornography
and sexual consent attitudes, there were no consistent findings in relation
to pornography use and sexual consent practices. Some articles suggest
that there is an association between men being sexually aggressive (this
did not always specify non-consensual practices, so may involve consen-
sual kink practices) and using pornography (pornography generally, not
just violent pornography) (Gwee et al., 2002; Bonino et al., 2006; Vega &
Malamuth, 2007; Simons et al., 2012; D’Abreu & Krahé, 2014; Mikoriski
& Szymanski, 2017). For example:

adolescents who use pornography seem more likely to establish rela-

tionships with their peers characterized by greater tolerance towards
unwanted sexual behaviour.
(Bonino et al., 2006, p. 281)

frequent corporal punishment in the family of origin combined with

consumption of pornographic materials increased the probability that
males reported engaging in coercive sexual practice.
(Simons et al., 2012, p. 381)

Our finding supports assertions about links between rape and

pornography.
(Gwee et al., 2002, p. 54)

Another article found a correlation between women’s pornography use and

all forms of sexual aggression except physical violence and intimidation,
though the authors do admit that not enough information was collected
about the types of pornography used and the context of its use (e.g. alone
or with a partner) (Kernsmith & Kernsmith, 2009). Other articles found a
relationship between the use of violent pornography and sexual aggression,
but not between the use of non-violent pornography and sexual aggression
(Baer et al., 2015). These distinctions between types of pornography are
 Pornography and consent 47
useful context; however, it is not always clear what ‘violent pornography’
refers to, and there is ongoing disagreement about this among research-
ers, as discussed below. Furthermore, other articles found no relationship
between viewing ‘violent and degrading’ pornography and self-reporting of
sexual coercion or aggression (Gonsalves et al., 2015), or between pornog-
raphy exposure and sexually aggressive behaviours (Burton et al., 2010).

Why is the data so confusing?

The research on this topic is confused by the fact that, although the everyday
use of terms like ‘sexual violence’ assumes that this means non-consensual
behaviour, this isn’t always true in the academic research. Some academic
research counts consensual practices as being violent; some doesn’t. Baron
and Richardson, for example, define violence as: ‘Any form of behaviour
directed toward the goal of harming or injuring another living being who is
motivated to avoid such treatment’ (1994, p. 37) – emphasising that, in order
to be violent, an act must not be consensual. But other definitions exclude
consent from consideration, counting any acts that might cause harm as
violence, regardless of consent. For example, Stanko’s (2001) ‘often-cited
definition of violence’ (Ray, 2011, p. 7) describes it as:

any form of behaviour by an individual that intentionally threatens

to or does cause physical, sexual or psychological harm to others or
themselves.
(Stanko, 2001, p. 316)

In this definition, consent is not relevant – ‘violence’ can be consensual

but is still called ‘violence’ if it can cause physical harm. Under this defini-
tion, consensual BDSM could count as violence. Therefore, the history of
academic research on pornography and violence/aggression does not map
neatly onto research on pornography and sexual consent. It is no wonder,
in this context, that the research on pornography consumption and consent
is confusing. Indeed, we even found evidence of academic research where
consent was framed as negative; for example, Walker et al. write that por-
nography shows ‘violence’ where ‘female actors displayed eagerness or
willingness to comply’ (Walker et al., 2015, p. 201) which is framed as a
negative behaviour. This seems worrying to us. Consent is at the heart of
healthy sexual practice: to exclude it from research is problematic. Take,
for example, the work of Bridges et al. analysing ‘aggression’ in pornogra-
phy videos (Bridges et al., 2010). They quite explicitly ignore consent from
their definition of aggression because paying attention to consent ‘results in
48 Pornography and consent
the rendering of aggressive acts as invisible’ when they are consensual (p.
1067). Instead, they take an approach where some sexual acts are always
counted as negative ‘aggression’ whether they are consensual or not – for
example spanking. And, conversely, some sexual acts, like kissing, are
always counted as ‘positive’ – again, whether they are consensual or not (p.
1077). From their perspective, then, it can be said that a forced kiss is more
‘positive’ and less ‘aggressive’ than a consensual spanking. We do not agree
with such a perspective.
Consent is a vital part of sexual health. Our review shows that it has
not traditionally been a major focus of pornography research, often being
replaced by a focus on ‘violence’ that does not pay attention to consent.
An alternative tradition of research looks at coercion rather than violence
(Gonsalves et al., 2015; Tomaszewska & Krahé, 2016). Coercion may not
involve physical aggression, but could involve actions such as:

‘telling them what they want to hear’; saying nice things about the
victim or saying that s/he is special; telling them ‘it will be good’;
proposing marriage; and promising that it will not be ‘just one time’
… saying mean things; criticizing the victims or calling them ‘mean’;
questioning their heterosexuality; comparing them to past partners;
accusing them of cheating; crying or pouting; making them feel guilty;
threatening to stop loving the victim; saying that the victim has stopped
loving them.
(Kernsmith & Kernsmith, 2009, p. 596)

This latter approach is directly related to consent, whereas work on aggres-

sion or violence sometimes includes consent and sometimes excludes
it. This makes coercion a better focus for research into the relationship
between the consumption of pornography and sexual health, as opposed to
research focusing on violence, which we found to give inconsistent atten-
tion to sexual consent.

Normative pornography research

Why does some previous pornography research assume that consensual
kinky sex is negative? We suggest that this is part of a larger trend that we
noticed in our studies: over the past 50 years, research into the relation-
ships between pornography and its audiences has been profoundly norma-
tive. Rather than focusing on healthy sexual development, it has focused on
conservative definitions of how people should live their sex lives.
In the 1990s, anthropologist Rubin (1992) wrote about the ‘charmed cir-
cle’ (p. 281) of sexual practices that Western cultures approve of:
 Pornography and consent 49
Sexuality that is ‘good’, ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ should ideally be het-
erosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive and non-commercial. It
should be coupled, relational, within the same generation, and occur
at home. It should not involve pornography, fetish objects, sex toys of
any sort.
(pp. 280–281)

A lot of pornography research has been anti-kink; it has called consensual

BDSM ‘aggression’ and argued that it should be stamped out, and that por-
nography is bad for showing consensual kink. This approach to pornogra-
phy devalues sex that is unmarried, casual, non-procreative, commercial, in
groups, cross-generational, in public, uses pornography, involves manufac-
tured objects or is sadomasochistic, for example.3 Rubin argues strongly that
favouring dominant forms of sexuality over their marginalised counterparts
is not scientific or natural, but rather that these ‘hierarchies of sexual value’:

function in much the same ways as do ideological systems of racism,

ethnocentrism and religious chauvinism. They rationalize the well-
being of the sexually privileged and the adversity of the sexual rabble.
(p. 280)

Rubin also draws attention to the fact that the production of such hierarchies
is imbricated in ‘sex negativity’ – the tendency to treat sex with suspicion
and regard it as requiring excuses such as love or marriage. We argue that
the articles in this sample – which privilege ‘vanilla’ sex over kink – are tak-
ing a ‘charmed circle’ approach. They are not interested in whether the con-
sumption of pornography leads to consensual, happy sex that happens to be
kinky; they seem more concerned about whether pornography is correlated
with the ‘charmed circle’ of married, vanilla, monogamous sex. By doing
so, these researchers (whether or not they realise it) exclude consent from
discussions of healthy sex. Conversely, we believe that consent is central to
healthy sexual development, and that attention to consent warrants further
discussion within pornography research.
Another issue that has been the focus of much public debate is the fact
that young people are using pornography as a form of sex education. What
are they learning about sex? And how does it compare with what they are
taught in traditional sex education by schools and parents? This is the focus
of our next review, reported on in the next chapter.

Notes
1 Some elements of this chapter were originally published in McKee, A., Litsou,
K., Byron, P., & Ingham, R. (2021).
50 Pornography and consent
2 For the formally refereed version of this data see McKee, A., Litsou, K., Byron,
P., & Ingham, R. (2021). The relationship between consumption of pornography
and consensual sexual practice: Results of a mixed method systematic review.
Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 30(3), 387–396. https://doi​.org​/https:/​/
doi​.org​/10​.3138​/cjhs​.2021​-0010.
3 This is also indicative of heteronormativity – a concept devised by Warner
(1991) that builds on the work of Rubin and other queer theorists. A key fea-
ture of heteronormativity is the way it erases or devalues sexual cultures and
representations that do not fit into expected norms, as per the norms identified
in Rubin’s charmed circle (perhaps confusingly, heteronormativity has nothing
to do with heterosexuality per se – gay sex can be heteronormative; and sex
between a man and woman can challenge heterosexual ideals). Pornography
research that excludes a discussion of consent while classing consensual acts/
representations of BDSM as violent is heteronormative. As many queer theo-
rists have argued, the social penalties ensured by heteronormativity, and the
systems that uphold and enshrine sexual norms (for example, legal, medical and
educational systems), are themselves enacting violence.

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5 Learning from pornography1
Katerina Litsou, Paul Byron,
Alan McKee and Roger Ingham

Pornographic sex education

Despite improvements in recent years, many young people still find that
the formal sex education offered by schools doesn’t give them what they
want, including information about how to ‘form and maintain healthy
relationships; the right to decide whether, when, and with whom to engage
in sexual behavior; and the fact that sex should be pleasurable, to name
just a few’ (Kantor & Lindberg, 2020, p. 145). School-based sex and rela-
tionships education is often criticised for being overly biological, often
too late and concerned with risk-avoidance rather than admitting that
sex is potentially pleasurable (Ingham, 2005; Philpott et al., 2006; Allen,
2012). As one young woman put it in a recent survey, school-based sex
education ‘doesn’t tell us the real stuff about sex’ (quoted in Fisher et al.,
2019, p. 81).
Where else might young people get information about sex? Ideally
parents should be a major part of learning about sex. But young people
commonly report that their parents’ attempts at sex education are limited,
uncomfortable and/or consisted of ‘warnings or threats about consequences’
(Holman & Koenig Kellas, 2018, p. 365).
But, on the other hand, access to pornography through digital media,
along with the ability to use anonymous search and browse, makes it easy
for people to regularly engage with sexual media (Paasonen, 2011; Attwood
et al., 2015; Spišák, 2016). In such a context it is not surprising that many
young people use pornography as a significant source of sex education
(Albury, 2014). This has fuelled public concern: just what are young people
learning from pornography (Dawson et al., 2019)?
In this chapter we report on our review of the academic literature relating
to the third healthy sexual development domain: Education about sexual

DOI: 10.4324/9781003232032-5
54 Learning from pornography
practice (McKee et al., 2010). In doing so, we focus on the question: do
people who consume more pornography know more about how to have sex?
As with the previous chapter, we found that despite this being a topic of
profound public concern – and despite the plethora of academic research
on the relationships between pornography and its audiences – there isn’t
actually much research on this important topic. Once again, academics have
tended to focus on other topics that are not necessarily related to healthy
sexual development.
For this domain of healthy sexual development, we followed our Search
and Analysis Protocol, using the search terms provided by our Delphi panel
for this domain:

porn* OR “sexually explicit AND education OR information OR learn*

material” OR “visual OR knowledge OR “sexual health”
sexual stimuli”

After duplicates were removed we had a list of 692 articles; we screened

using the same eligibility criteria that we used for all domains. This process
left us with ten articles that gave us original data about what consumers
of pornography learn about how to have sex (the full list of articles can be
found at http://bit​.ly​/3DUrm2w).

Learning about how to have sex

In reviewing these articles we identified five main themes about how
pornography functions as a source of education about sexual practice – or
what we’ll refer to as ‘sex education’ from now on.
The first, and most common theme, is that young people are using por-
nography as a source of information to learn ‘how to have sex’. This is
perhaps not surprising: sex education in schools often focuses on STIs
and pregnancy, or even abstinence-only education. It is rare that formal
sex education – or information from parents – focuses on how to actually
have sex, or, how to have better sex (given that many young people are
already sexually active when accessing either pornography or sex educa-
tion). In formal sex education, young people are more likely to learn about
the protein coating of the HIV virus than how to give good cunnilingus,
for example (McKee et al., 2014). In this context, it is not surprising that
research on pornography’s role as sex education frequently mentions that
inadequate sexual education, and lack of sexual information about the
mechanics of sex, means that pornography is an educator of many young
people.
 Learning from pornography 55
Across the ten articles, pornography was mentioned by participants of
the studies as being used for learning about sexual performance, positions
and roles; for example, Arrington-Sanders et al. (2015) mentioned that:

Sexual performance was a key theme that emerged among participants

as a reason why they watched [sexually explicit media]. Sexual per-
formance included learning about position and sexual roles in certain
positions; how adolescents should act during sexual activity with sex-
ual partners; and how sex should feel.
(p. 602)

Pornography told young people ‘what goes where’ (Arrington-Sanders et

al., 2015, p. 602), ‘what to do’ (Rosengard, Tannis, Dove, Den Berg, et al.,
2012, p. 90) and ‘how it works’ (Kubicek et al., 2010, p. 251). This includes
information about the function of sexual organs, ‘how to masturbate and
ejaculate’ (Arrington-Sanders et al., 2015, p. 601), and sexual roles. In their
study of US teenagers from alternative high schools and correctional facili-
ties, Rosengard et al. (2012) cite a 17-year-old woman:

[Before watching porn] I didn’t know that sex was like a penis going
into a vagina. I thought it was just like when you hump somebody. Like
I used to sit on people’s laps and think that I was havin’ sex.
(p. 88)

And a 17-year-old man:

At first I was just humpin’ and stuff but and then seein’ that you stick it
in the hole so it went on from that. I don’t know, I thought I was good
at it … I just copied what I seen and since … like … like at that time, I
thought like anybody who was on TV or tape must be great so I thought
I was great and good at it.
(p. 90)

In another of the articles, participants who realised that their knowledge was
lacking from personal experiences chose to privately address their ‘igno-
rance’ by consulting pornography:

Participants described risking considerable social embarrassment if

they were to ask others about sexual behaviours because their peer
group stigmatised anyone who seemed to be ignorant about sex. Thus,
online SEM offered participants the opportunity to learn more about
these topics without risking embarrassment or loss of status.
(Smith, 2013, p. 69)
56 Learning from pornography
Pornography was part of an ongoing process of learning about sex:
youth described sexual development as a process that occurs over time
and not all at once where participants described learning about sexual
performance through a series of experiences and experiments to deter-
mine what felt enjoyable.
(Arrington-Sanders et al., 2015, p. 603).

Rothman et al. (2015) studied pornography use among 16 to 18-year-olds

in the USA and reported that pornography was used to learn sex techniques,
including how to perform oral, anal and vaginal sex. A 17-year-old woman
explained:

I never knew how to like, suck dick, basically, and I went on there to
see how to do it. And that’s how I learned.
(quoted in Rothman et al., 2015, p. 740)

Young people commonly noted the lack of practical sex education at school,
particularly in studies of men who have sex with men. In Kubicek et al.’s
(2010) study, for example, one participant stated:

Because there’s really no information on [anal sex] … there’s really

no strong definition nor strong advice about anal sex. It’s usually just
through word of mouth or from porn.
(p. 251)

Finally, some respondents talked about using pornography to work out

if they were ready to start having sex, as well as pornography’s value in
helping to relax and feel prepared. For example, Arrington-Sanders et al.
reported:

Youth described watching SEM to determine their readiness to have

sex. Participants described if they felt aroused by the sex and that [if]
they understood how to perform the sex, they were more likely to be
ready to engage in sexual activity. SEM served as a bridge to begin
sexual activity by calming nerves about sex and helping them to men-
tally prepare for initiation of sexual activity.
(p. 602)

Learning about sexual identities and sexualities

As well as learning about the mechanics of sex, research has shown that
young people learn about sexual identities and sexualities from watching
 Learning from pornography 57
pornography – the second theme we identified. This includes their own
and other people’s sexualities, and what they find to be sexually arousing.
Studies of same-sex-attracted young men reported that pornography use
helped them to realise their sexual orientation. For example, an 18-year-old
gay man says:

I started [sic] straight porn but I noticed that I didn’t like it because it
had a female in it for real and I didn’t like it. It was just something that
I would just look at the guy. I watch it but I just look at the guy do the
stuff.
(quoted in Arrington-Sanders et al., 2015, p. 602)

In the same study, a 19-year-old gay man says:

Porn taught me a lot. I first started out with straight porn. Porn actually
helped me realize that I was gay. When I was watching porn, it started
from just boys and girls but I started looking at the guy more. So then
I got interested in two guys and a girl and then it just went to two guys
and then to more guys and that’s when I noticed, ‘Wow, I don’t like
girls anymore’.
(p. 602)

Some young people’s first exposure to gay culture was through watching
pornography:

I started going to gay porn sites and I was like ‘That’s hot’. So then
that’s kind of how I got exposure to, I guess, gayness.
(quoted in Kubicek et al., 2010, p. 252)

When schools and parents offer little information about sexual identi-
ties, it is unsurprising that young people may learn a lot about this from
pornography (as well as using pornography for other reasons, such as
pleasure).

Inadequate information through pornography

The third theme we found in the research was that young people stated
that pornography did not provide them with adequate sexual health infor-
mation. Many of the articles reported that participants did not see por-
nography as useful for learning about sexual health. Indeed, some of the
participants took a normative approach (see Chapter 3) when they talked
about what they wanted to learn about sex – for example, saying that por-
nography focussed too much on ‘fetish’ and ‘kinky’ behaviours (such as
58 Learning from pornography
fisting, water sports and bestiality) (Kubicek et al., 2010). One participant
said that they:

only learned dirty stuff because they really do dirty things, not healthy.
And I’m like … I would learn nothing positive from those movies.
(quoted in Kubicek et al., 2010, p. 252)

Some respondents mentioned that many porn videos do not use condoms, or
more generally provide medical information – about, for example, how to pro-
tect from Sexually Transmissible Infections (STIs) and unwanted pregnancies.
Castro-Vazquez and Kishi (2002) cite a 16-year-old heterosexual man saying:

If you ask if I learnt about contraception, I would say, no … but any-

way, I would say that all those videos show us about sex, but not about
‘etiquette’, reproduction, contraception and stuff like that. We see vid-
eos to satisfy our sexual desires.
(p. 475)

In this area, formal sex education often does a better job – teaching about
using condoms is one aspect that is common to much school-based sex
education.

Third person concerns about the ‘wrong’ lessons from porn

The fourth theme we identified was a concern, both amongst researchers
and young people, that consumers might get the ‘wrong’ lessons from porn.
Pornography was described in general as providing unrealistic expecta-
tions about sexual encounters. Young people who used pornography were
concerned that other consumers (but not themselves) might get the wrong
lessons from pornography via a ‘third person’ effect such as by encoun-
tering ‘unrealistic’ messages about sex, bodies, pleasure and ‘risky’ sex
acts. The third person effect describes a common way of thinking whereby
people know or believe that they are too intelligent or well-informed to
be influenced by media – but assume that other people (often people who
are younger than them) will be influenced (Hald & Malamuth, 2008).
Participants in research worried that pornography sent lessons about having
sex that was too kinky or rough. Doornwaard et al. (2017) report a 17-year-
old man participant as saying:

Porn is often loveless, women are frequently treated disrespect-

fully, and the actors do things that aren’t comfortable or arousing in
real-life.
(p. 1043)
 Learning from pornography 59
While some participants regard this kind of pornography as being arousing,
they question the ‘unrealistic’ aspects of what they have watched, exempli-
fied by this 16-year-old male participant:

When I am aroused, pornography is fun to watch. But afterwards I

regularly ask myself what I just looked at. Not that I view very absurd
stuff, but it often is very unrealistic.
(p. 1044)

Young women, in particular, reported concerns relating to their self-image,

the unlikely scenarios and the unrealistic expectations placed on them
through watching pornography (Smith, 2013). Young women who did not
watch pornography also stated that they felt insecure about their appearance
and their sexual performance (Doornwaard et al., 2017). For example, a
20-year-old said:

So I’d almost be like pissed if that is how it turned out just because the
woman is doing everything that the guy wants to do, and I’m definitely
not like that at all.
(quoted in Smith, 2013, pp. 71-72)

These comments overlap with concerns about ‘porn literacy’: in the next
chapter, we return to the issue of ‘unrealistic’ representations of sex in por-
nography and explore what kinds of sex are counted as being ‘realistic’ in
these debates.

A need for more relevant sex education

The final theme we identified in the research about pornography and
education is a repeated call by researchers for improved sex education
in schools that better addresses the needs of young people. Researchers
consistently judged that young people were getting the wrong kinds of
lesson about sex from pornography; and wanted to balance that out with
better messages provided by schools and parents. Some researchers are
keen for schools to focus on traditional ‘sexual health’ information but to
do it better:

schools need to develop strategies on how to teach students basic and

effective search methods on obtaining information pertaining to sexual
health on the Internet. This would ensure that students receive compre-
hensive sexual health information from credible websites.
(Mattebo et al., 2014, p. 197)
60 Learning from pornography
By contrast, other researchers call for a broadening of the scope of sexual
education: ‘to lean away from only teaching about pregnancy prevention
and male erections’ (Hesse & Pedersen, 2017, p. 768). They insist on ‘the
need to improve knowledge about different aspects of sex’ (Aggarwal et al.,
2000, p. 226). In addition, researchers suggest that specific education for
same-sex-attracted young people is required, along with a need for teachers
to be well-trained and comfortable in discussing sexual diversity (Kubicek
et al., 2010); for example

More policy level strategies are needed that insure federal funding is
allocated to comprehensive sexual health education programs that pro-
vide [same-sex-attracted] young men with the skills and information
needed to make an informed, responsible, and healthy decisions prior
to first same-sex.
(Arrington-Sanders et al., 2015, p. 606)

What we don’t know

After reviewing existing pornography research that engages with porn users
about issues of sexual education and learning, it seems clear that we still do
not have an answer to the question: do people who consume more pornog-
raphy know more about how to have sex? Or, to focus on a subset of that
question – do people who consume pornography know more about how to
have good sex? Two of our themes – inadequate information through por-
nography and wrong lessons from pornography – point to concerns among
young people that pornography is providing limited or inaccurate informa-
tion about sex and sexual health. Young people and researchers note that
much pornography does not deliver sexual health information. This would
seem to be uncontroversial. Most pornography is not designed to deliver
sexual health information – it is designed to deliver sexual pleasure. It is
designed to be entertainment, not education (McKee, 2012) – even if it
does end up serving as de facto education for young people because their
formal schooling and parents are not going to tell them about how to give a
good blow job. We don’t find complaints in the literature that pornography
is doing a bad job of teaching a variety of different sexual positions, for
example. At the moment, at least, it seems that formal sex education and
pornography are teaching very different aspects of sex – schools can teach
about condom use, while pornography can teach about the infinite varie-
ties of ways to gain sexual pleasure. Perhaps it is for this reason that there
is no clear evidence that more formal school-based sex education leads to
less reliance on pornography for education. There is only limited cross-
national research on this topic. We found one article that reported on work
 Learning from pornography 61
with an Irish university student sample, aged 18–24 years, which showed
that satisfaction with school-based sex education was not associated with
pornography use as a source of sexual information and that individuals may
use pornography for information regardless of their sex education in school
(Dawson et al., 2019) – because, no matter how much sex education they’re
getting in school, it is unlikely to include tips on, for example, how to give a
good erotic massage. This does raise the question of whether we think peo-
ple should learn how to develop skills to enhance sexual pleasure: can we
imagine this as part of a formal curriculum? Should parents be giving this
advice? Or, if not, do we come back to pornography as the only reasonable
place in which such learning can be promoted, or at least accessed?
One article in our sample claimed that pornography was the only avail-
able source for men who have sex with men to learn about anal sex, since
information about this was not provided through school-based sex educa-
tion (Kubicek et al., 2010). However, this paper does not provide evidence
of specific ways of using pornography, nor whether pornography users
gain better sexual knowledge, sexual skills and attitudes in comparison to
non-users.
We also note that much of the concern that pornography is giving the
‘wrong’ lessons about sex is expressed in normative terms (as discussed in
the previous chapter) – that pornography teaches people about the existence
of ‘dirty’ sex practices like fisting or watersports, or sex that is for fun –
‘loveless’ rather than within a loving committed couple. Such an approach
reinforces conservative norms about acceptable sexual practice – those sit-
ting within Rubin’s ‘charmed circle’ (Rubin, 1992).
One final note – although we were looking for any articles that addressed
learning about sex from pornography, most of the research is focused on
young people. We would propose that this is one of the problems with the
way in which we conceive ‘sex education’ in our cultures – as something
that is only necessary for young people, as though as soon as you turn
21 there is nothing left to learn about sex. One of the 15 domains of healthy
sexual development is ‘lifelong learning’:

learning about sexuality does not stop at the point where sexual inter-
course begins. Adults continue to learn about their sexuality throughout
their lives, improving their knowledge of and attitudes toward their sex
lives.
(McKee et al., 2010, p. 17)

Are people who consume pornography later in life more likely to continue
their sexual education, exploration and development than people who
don’t? Unfortunately, we did not find any data on this point. We did search,
62 Learning from pornography
but only located three articles that vaguely addressed this domain of healthy
sexual development.
Having established that there is, as yet, no data about the relationship
between pornography consumption and knowing more about sex, we move
on to our next, related, domain of healthy sexual development – pornogra-
phy literacy.

Note
1 Some elements of this chapter were originally published in Litsou, K., Byron,
P., McKee, A., & Ingham, R. (2021). Learning from pornography: Results of a
mixed methods systematic review. Sex Education, 21(2), 236–252. https://doi​
.org​/10​.1080​/14681811​.2020​.1786362.

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6 Pornography and porn
literacy1
Paul Byron, Alan McKee, Ash Watson,
Katerina Litsou and Roger Ingham

Pornography, literacy, expertise

Do people who consume more pornography have a better understanding of
how pornography works as a genre? Do they have a more detailed under-
standing of the languages of pornography, how it is shot and edited, the
meanings that consumers make of it? Are they more familiar with subgenres
of pornography, and the similarities or differences between them?2
Healthy sexual development requires that we develop competence in
mediated sexuality – that is, ‘skills in accessing, understanding, critiquing
and creating mediated representations of sexuality in verbal, visual and per-
formance media’ (McKee et al., 2010, p. 8). This ability is more commonly
named in academic research as ‘media literacy’ or ‘porn literacy’ (Dawson
et al., 2020). Our Delphi panel had nominated this as the most important
aspect of healthy sexual development in regard to pornography, and so we
were particularly interested to find out what the academic research in this
area had discovered. It would seem to be common sense that the more por-
nography people consume, the more literate they will become – after all,
when we think about literacy in terms of reading and writing, the more
books that are read, and the more writing is practiced, the more literate
people become. However, our review of the academic literature showed that
this is not how ‘porn literacy’ is usually defined by researchers; and that we
don’t have much data about whether consuming more pornography leads to
better porn literacy.
For this domain we used the search terms:

porn* OR “sexually AND fantasy OR genre OR representation* OR

explicit material” literacy OR play OR convention* OR
OR “visual sexual visual* OR real* OR education
stimuli”

DOI: 10.4324/9781003232032-6
66 Pornography and porn literacy
As in our other reviews, our date range was 2000–2017. Because smart-
phones arrived in the 2000s, these dates encompass over a decade in which
mobile digital media has played a significant role in how pornography is
accessed, used, produced and shared. We therefore anticipated discussion of
digital media literacies in relation to pornography use, as per a rich schol-
arship of ‘digital literacies’ (Pangrazio, 2018). However, while our initial
search yielded 1,127 articles, after reviewing every one of these for rel-
evance to the domain of competence in mediated sexuality, we found that
only seven articles provided original data about the relationships between
pornography and its audience in relation to porn literacy (a full list of the
articles can be found at http://bit​.ly​/3xjBPBZ).
The lack of literature in this area might seem surprising, given current
public attention to porn literacy. We found articles calling for more porn
literacy education for young people, and details of proposed curricula in the
area. But we found little data that attempted to measure, record or under-
stand young people’s porn literacies. Beyond this we note that none of the
articles we found provided data that directly addressed our key concern
– whether people who consume more pornography have better or worse
understandings of how sex in the media, including pornography, works as
forms of representation, and as genres with particular rules. This, then, is
our important finding: that, despite thousands of pieces of academic research
there exists little that addresses the relationships between porn consumption
and this aspect of healthy sexual development. Unfortunately – as we’ll
explain below – this may not be surprising as, for some researchers, ‘porn
literacy’ means teaching young people to avoid pornography – the opposite
of what the term ‘literacy’ means in other contexts.
We note that not all of the articles we reviewed explicitly used the word
‘literacy’, but they all engage with the question of how well consumers under-
stand the rules of this genre. Of the seven articles, five relate to young people
(Mattebo et al., 2012; Hald et al., 2013; Smith, 2013; Antevska & Gavey,
2015; Baker, 2016) and two relate to gay men (Mowlabocus et al., 2013;
Goh, 2017). None addresses the porn literacy of mature heterosexual people.
The articles report on empirical research from the UK, the US, Malaysia,
New Zealand, Sweden and Denmark. We found four key themes in the data3.
The first theme is education – which overlaps with our previous chapter.
Researchers found that some people used pornography for education and
thus called for more training in porn literacy in order to ensure that consum-
ers were not learning the wrong things from pornography. This begins to
point to the way in which the term ‘porn literacy’ is used – not as an exper-
tise in the genre, but as a corrective against it.
The second theme is a common reference to ‘perceived realism’ in this
literature. Particularly in the social science literature there is a concern that
 Pornography and porn literacy 67
the more realistic consumers think pornography is, the more likely they are
to treat it as a model of sexuality and its expression. Underlying this strand
of research is a concern that pornography is not ‘realistic’, and worries that
consumers – and particularly younger consumers – won’t be able to tell the
difference between pornography sex and sex in reality.
The third theme we named ‘fiction/fantasy’, and this relates to research
showing that consumers think of pornography as fantasy or fiction, rather
than an instruction manual, and take pleasure from it both in spite of, and
because of, this. This theme demonstrates that engagement with pornogra-
phy (including among young people) is not done naïvely.
The fourth theme was a focus explicitly on media literacy. A number of
articles explored what purposes media/porn literacy education should serve,
how it should be developed and how it should be delivered to young people.
Because these four themes overlap and inform each other, we have
decided to explore what we found in this domain under a single heading
that pulls much of the research together – the belief that pornography is
‘unrealistic’. What does that mean? What do consumers say about how
‘realistic’ pornography is? And what does it have to do with healthy sexual
development?

Literacy, media literacy, porn literacy

Literacy is ‘the ability to read and write’, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary. Before ‘porn literacy’ there was ‘media literacy’: ‘the ability of
a citizen to access, analyse, and produce information for specific outcomes’
(Aufderheide, 1993, p. 6). Although the term encompasses a range of
approaches, media literacy fundamentally means understanding that ‘media
are constructed, and construct reality’ (Aufderheide, 1993, p. 2). Media
literacy education emerged in Britain, Canada and Australia in the 1970s
(Davis, 1993, p. 20) and, from its earliest days, was understood and taught
quite differently from ‘print literacy’ – as found in the study of English
literature, for example. Whereas young people were to be taught to become
more literate by appreciating books, they were to be taught to become more
media literate in exactly the opposite way – by learning to ‘reject’ media
texts (Albury & McKee, 2013, p. 416). Media literacy training for young
people typically took a ‘protectionist approach for dealing with the [sup-
posedly] essentially negative impact of popular media’ (Davis, 1993, p. 21).
Media literacy programmes evolved and became more sophisticated in
their engagement with entertainment media:

from the 1970s onwards, many researchers in the fields of media and
cultural studies have rejected the notion that media texts (and indeed
68 Pornography and porn literacy
media genres) have singular meanings. Moreover, these disciplines
tend to view media representations of gender, power, race, sexuality,
and other aspects of identity as contextual. For example, Stuart Hall
… has argued that media representations are not as ‘distortions’ of an
objective reality, but are one aspect of our broader ‘meaning making’
practice.
(Albury & McKee, 2013, p. 416)

In the 2010s, the concept of ‘porn literacy’ began to emerge (Albury, 2014).
Like ‘media literacy’ in the 1970s …

These debates on porn education tend to presume that young people

aged under 18 should be provided with porn literacy education that
promotes critical disengagement from pornographic texts.
(Albury, 2014, p. 173)

For Dawson et al. (2020, p. 10), ‘Porn literacy education aims to facilitate
youth in thinking critically about the content they see’. For some schol-
ars, this involves thinking beyond the content of pornographic texts, to also
think about power, gender, sexuality and a range of other social-cultural
aspects at play through (but also beyond) these media texts (Jenkins, 2004).
However, much research on young people and pornography tends to isolate
pornography from broader media ecologies (Goldstein, 2020). Further to
this, a media studies approach to porn literacy can also (but rarely does)
address the cinematic, technological and economic aspects of porn and its
production and industries (Jenkins, 2004). However, most approaches to
porn literacy continue to engage with young people to promote what Albury
terms ‘critical disengagement’, whereby young people are simply taught to
list the (perceived) social and personal harms of pornography. This is what
Goldstein refers to as ‘traditional media literacy interventions’ in her argu-
ment for a need to move beyond these in relation to porn literacies (2020, p.
59). Our review of the literature suggests that this approach to porn literacy
remains dominant: it still aims to train people to reject pornography, not to
develop a better understanding of the genre. Also, although media literacy
aimed to help students learn to make their own, better media, we found no
evidence of this strand of production studies in porn literacy programmes.

Porn literacy and realism

The articles we reviewed were largely congruent with this tradition of work
on media literacy and porn literacy. Researchers and interview subjects
used this language to express their concerns about pornography:
 Pornography and porn literacy 69
Perceived realism, that is, the extent to which the consumer perceives
the pornographic content as realistic … has been found to be … a medi-
ator of the impact of internet pornography consumption on adolescents’
instrumental attitudes towards sex [i.e. if they are likely to have casual
sex].
(Hald et al., 2013, p. 640)

Pornography is ‘very degrading to women and unrealistic’ says one female

student (quoted in Baker, 2016, p. 220), and Baker’s study found that ‘about
76.8% of young people reported that they did not think the pornography
they had seen offered a realistic representation of typical sexual relation-
ships’ (Baker, 2016, p. 223). In another study, a young male participant
states: ‘pornography on the whole builds on incorrect gender roles. Reality
does not exactly look like that’ (quoted in Mattebo et al., 2012, p. 42). In
summary, Mattebo et al. (2012) note that ‘Pornographic messages were
described as … depicting a distorted reality’ (p. 40). In a third study, Smith
(2013) found that among young porn users interviewed ‘negative assess-
ments included … feeling that SEM portrayed unrealistic sexual behaviors’
(p. 70).
This approach to porn literacy – insisting that it is important that con-
sumers be taught that pornography is ‘unrealistic’ – is common. We do not
agree that this is a useful way to think about pornography or porn literacy.
In order to explain why this is the case, we need to think about the language
of media being ‘unrealistic’. When we call a representation ‘unrealistic’,
we automatically imply that there could be a more ‘realistic’ representation.
So – what would a more ‘realistic’ representation of sex look like?
When we examined what academic research describes as ‘unrealis-
tic’ sex in pornography we found that researchers commonly described
or implied conservative sexual practices as realistic; while progressive
sexual attitudes or minority sexual practices were described as unreal-
istic. For example, Hald and Malamuth (2008) write that ‘Pornography,
while depicting people actually engaging in sexual acts, often portrays
an unrealistic picture of sexuality as it is practiced in real life’ (2008,
p. 615) referencing as evidence the book Pornified: How Pornography
is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families (Paul,
2005). That book argues that ‘Unlike women in real life, the girls in por-
nography seem willing to share themselves with a man’ because ‘real
women aren’t nearly as into sex’ (p. 43). Pornography is unrealistic, says
Paul, because women will, among other acts, ‘dominate or act submissive’
and they will have ‘anal sex, double penetration, or multiple orgasms’
(p. 44). Pornography, she argues, ‘gives men the false impression that
sex and pleasure are entirely divorced from relationships’ (p. 80). Hald
70 Pornography and porn literacy
and Malamuth (2008) also quote Fordham who worries that pornography
‘creates unreal (and unrealistic) expectations’ about ‘frequency of sexual
activity [and] the kinds of sex acts performed’ (Fordham, 2006, p. 82). We
note that neither of these references cited by Hald and Malamuth (2008)
is refereed academic research – one is a book by a journalist, the other
an unrefereed report prepared for an evangelical Christian organisation.
Yet these ideals connect with research approaches to pornography use,
particularly when there are concerns about the ‘effects’ of pornography
on young people.
Two other non-peer-reviewed examples that have featured heavily in
research discussions of pornography’s effect on young people, and there-
fore influence discussions of young people’s porn literacies, are Horvath
et al.’s Basically… porn is everywhere report (2013), and the Sexualisation
of Young People Review by Papadopoulos (2010). Horvath et al. write: ‘por-
nography has been linked to unrealistic attitudes about sex; maladaptive
attitudes about relationships; more sexually permissive attitudes; greater
acceptance of casual sex’ and more (p. 7). Papadopoulos writes that por-
nography ‘shapes young people’s sexual knowledge but does so by por-
traying sex in unrealistic ways’, and ‘online pornography’ in particular ‘is
increasingly dominated by themes of aggression, power and control’ (p.
12), citing sadomasochism as an example of ‘harmful’ or ‘extreme’ behav-
iours depicted in online porn (p. 12).
These authors quote these sources in order to suggest that casual sex
is unrealistic. Strangely, anal sex, women enjoying sex, and BDSM are
somehow rendered fictional too – despite all evidence that these exist in the
real world. Minority sexual groups, or non-traditional accounts of sex (for
example, sex as healthy and enjoyable for women) seem to be written out
of ‘reality’. We suggest that this speaks to conservative ideals about gender,
sexuality and pleasure that pervade much public concern about pornogra-
phy (see discussion of Rubin’s ‘charmed circle’ in Chapter 4).

Young people as ‘critical’ consumers of porn

Reading the data provided in these articles, we got the sense that young peo-
ple are indeed already ‘critical’ consumers of pornography – in that, when
they are asked by researchers about how porn represents sex, young people
routinely criticise it:

Many participants viewed sexually explicit content with a critical eye

in terms of lack of realism, problematic representation of bodies, and
other messages conveyed about sexuality.
(Smith, 2013, p. 73)
 Pornography and porn literacy 71
Mattebo et al.’s (2012) evidence of young people’s mediated competen-
cies – framed by them as a ‘critical-analytical approach’ (p. 46) – includes
the following discussion of how participants described pornographic bodies
and sex:

The women were represented as underweight with large breasts. This

was viewed as demanding if it became an ideal of how young women
should look.
(p. 44)

In these articles, critical engagement is also constituted by questioning the

gendered aspects of pornography:

Messages from society regarding gender equality and public health

seem to be in conflict with those from pornography and other media
with pornographic messages. Some participants reflected on it and had
a critical-analytical approach towards these messages, whereas others
did not give it much attention.
(p. 46)

We note here another possible quirk in this data: could we perhaps read this
feedback from young people as evidence not of porn literacy, but of cultural
literacy – they are aware of dominant discourses about pornography in our
cultures and how one is meant to talk about it? Or perhaps it could even
be interpreted as academic researcher literacy – young people know what
university researchers think they should say, and so they want to perform
for researchers that they know the right things to say? This is often referred
to as ‘social desirability bias’ (Grimm, 2010). For example, Mattebo et al.
(2012) note that:

The participants also commented on the lack of contraceptives and

expressed opinions of discontent suggesting an ability to critically
think in relation to pornographic films and messages.
(p. 46)

How did the young people come to be talking about contraception in rela-
tion to pornographic films? What kind of questioning framed those discus-
sions? Did the researchers ask about sexual health knowledge? Did the
young people in the research raise this spontaneously? Is that how young
people talk about pornography outside of the academic research context?
We would argue that a ‘critical-analytical approach’ is sometimes per-
formed by young research subjects within parameters set by adult concerns
72 Pornography and porn literacy
about young people’s sexual health risks and safeties. Perhaps this is linked
to the classist assumptions that permeate many analyses of young people’s
media literacies, also present in these articles:

The vast majority of participants in this research were from relatively

privileged backgrounds in terms of socioeconomic status and educa-
tion. This likely influenced their ability to be critical consumers of
information generally and SEM specifically.
(Smith, 2013, p. 73)

In claims such as this, competence in mediated sexuality is aligned with ‘the

educated’ young person and so it is presumably the ‘less educated’ young
people that we must focus on – that is, those less likely to demonstrate or
recite negative attitudes towards, or perform awareness of the artificiality
of, pornography.

Porn literacy as ‘reading well’

There are other ways of thinking about porn literacy rather than simply
rejecting pornography as unrealistic. Think about other kinds of literacy
– for example, literacy about Shakespeare’s dramas. Those are clearly not
‘realistic’. But if that were the entirety of what a student could tell us about
them it would not represent a high level of literacy about Shakespeare. There
is more to say about how Shakespeare is put together than simply ‘that isn’t
how people talk in real life’. In his ethnographic article engaging with gay
men that appeared as part of our sample, Goh (2017) reflects on how his
participants’ lived experiences indicated a need for pornography debates ‘to
adopt a more honest, critical and practical trajectory, rather than a notion of
pornography as incontrovertibly exploitative, degrading and destructive’ (p.
459). From this perspective, porn literacy would mean a positive engage-
ment with pornography that allows consumers to engage productively with
sexually explicit material. We find evidence of this form of porn literacy in
each of the two articles that focus on gay men and pornography use. Goh
(2017) argues that:

pornography consumption is understood by gay-identifying men as: a

means to perform and make sense of sexuality; a self-validated avenue
of pleasure; and a site of interior struggle.
(p. 448)

This suggests an approach to porn literacy that is not simply about reject-
ing pornography and seeing it as a bad or dangerous object to be avoided
 Pornography and porn literacy 73
or dismissed, but instead (linking back to the previous chapter) proposing
that pornography can be – and often is – a source of information about sex.
From this perspective, porn literacy includes working out how to learn from
pornography in a positive rather than negative way. Under this approach, a
porn literacy framework should not simply focus on what is read (that is,
media content) but how it is read (that is, media use), acknowledging that
pornography can be read well to gain useful information about sex, sexual-
ity and pleasure.
Discussing one of his participants, Goh (2017) argues that porn use helped
him ‘to increasingly clarify his own sexuality’ (p. 454), while another of his
participants ‘suggests that his own use of pornography can provide cru-
cial points of instruction, reflection and deliberation for himself’ (p. 455).
Similarly, in the second article engaging with gay men, Mowlabocus et al.
(2013) argue that:

By far the most popular understanding [of porn] was its perceived edu-
cational dimension, offering instruction on, and experiences of, gay
male sexual practices.
(p. 527)

As one of their participants states:

when you want to find out about it more, it’s kind of like a research
tool because you want to find out the right positions to do, the right
methods, you know, the right actions, to help … just to help pleasure
someone properly, you know. And you kind of … it sounds weird, but
you kind of learn that in the back of your head and you keep it there.
(p. 527)

Reflecting on such data, Mowlabocus et al. (2013) argue that ‘for many
gay men pornography is more than “just” material for masturbation’ (p.
530), and also offers the possibility of ‘learning new sexual techniques’ and
assistance toward ‘validating a sense of self’ (p. 530). Porn literacy here
means learning to ‘read well’, to engage with sexually explicit texts in a
productive way.

Digital cultures, ‘authenticity’ and reading

pornography well
We do not think it is a coincidence that we only found evidence of a porn
literacy approach as ‘reading porn well’ in relation to gay men. Many of
the debates about pornography’s supposed negative effects are based in
74 Pornography and porn literacy
heterosexual relationships – and even in those rare cases where gay authors
argue that pornography damages gay relationships, they often do so by
arguing that pornography promotes heterosexual-style gender roles for gay
couples (Kendall, 2006). For many reasons (such as a recognition that sex
education is not provided for gay men), it is more accepted in these articles
that gay men might engage positively with pornography than young straight
men, for example. Nevertheless, we would argue that, if we are interested
in healthy sexual development, we must take this risk and consider porn
literacies and uses more widely.
Such an approach to porn literacy would require researchers, educators,
parents and others to take into account young people’s engagements with,
and understandings of, sexually explicit materials. That would mean pay-
ing particular attention to digital cultures of intimacy. It would also mean
paying attention to the forms of porn literacy that young people demon-
strate beyond simply saying that pornography is negative – including under-
standings of the various subgenres of pornography and the rules for how
they work. Bringing these two ideas together – digital intimacies and an
expanded understanding of porn literacies – fundamentally destabilises the
discourse that pornography is, in any simple way, ‘unrealistic’.
The articles we read are aware that the digital distribution of media is
an important part of understanding how pornography works – all citing the
internet as providing easy access to pornography. But they don’t seem to
understand much more about digital media than the fact that it is ‘acces-
sible’ (Hald et al., 2013, p. 639; Baker, 2016, p. 213). They note ‘the avail-
ability of sexual content online’ (Smith, 2013, p. 62) and the ‘presumed
universality of pornography consumption’ (Antevska & Gavey, 2015, p.
611); or, as a participant from Mattebo et al.’s (2012) study states: ‘It is
shown everywhere’ (p. 43). For most of these articles, claims of prevalence
and ease of access are the extent of their reflection on digital cultures of
pornography. But there is more to say on this.
One important insight about digital cultures is the increasing impor-
tance of ‘authenticity’ as a virtue in entertainment, in cultural arenas such
as social media and amateur pornography (Paasonen, 2011). For Paasonen,
these overlapping media genres thrive on depictions of authenticity, even
in texts that are obviously constructed and therefore not authentic in the
sense of presenting unmediated reality. In other words, ‘authenticity’ is
often an aesthetic strategy. In social media such as Instagram, Snapchat
or Tinder, media content is often read as dubious, and sometimes pub-
licly challenged, if it seems too staged, polished, filtered or ‘professional’
(Duguay, 2017). As such, we can argue (as Paasonen and others do)
that amateurism is a logic – one that carries through many sites, includ-
ing social networking, digital dating, television and pornography – that
 Pornography and porn literacy 75
conveys intimacy. It is also a preference, as well as a genre. Through vari-
ous digital media practices – informed by digital media literacies and an
ongoing development of media themes and genres – ‘reading for realness’
can filter out risks of inauthenticity in one’s everyday media practices
(Albury et al., 2019), and this literacy can structure our affective engage-
ment with everyday media as well as our pleasure preferences. Digital
media trade in affect – ‘intensities of feeling that both precede and give
shape to nameable emotions’ (Paasonen, 2016, p. 428). Authenticity is a
key aspect of DIY/amateur porn being read as intimate and representing
ordinary people. On this basis, it can be argued that ‘perceived realism’ –
to re-signify this term – is necessary to incite particular kinds of affect and
erotic pleasure for young people. Indeed, many participants in the stud-
ies we reviewed did speak to these pleasures, as highlighted below. With
this in mind, simply telling young people that (all) porn is ‘unrealistic’
makes no sense; because many are already involved in a project of looking
for sexually explicit material that is more ‘authentic’. These discourses of
authenticity are important in the ways that young people make sense of
the pornography they consume; and this challenges the discourse that por-
nography is ‘unrealistic’ in important ways. As Paasonen (2011) observes:
‘Amateur porn revolves around notions and promises of real bodies, real
pleasures, real people, and real places’ (p. 84). Yes, there are rules for
representation and how the (sub) genres of pornography work – but just
saying it is not ‘realistic’ barely scratches the surface of those complexities
of representation.
When we revisit the data provided in the porn literacy articles with this
new perspective, we think we can see evidence that the young respond-
ents show high levels of porn literacy – not in the sense of rejecting all
pornography, but in the sense of reading pornography well. They dem-
onstrate a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of how pornography
works – perhaps a greater sense of porn literacy than many researchers.
For example, several participants in these studies discuss their preference
for ‘real bodies’ and how these are available through DIY and amateur
pornography:

Positive assessments of SEM included that it portrayed a more realistic

range of people and bodies than mainstream sexual content and that it
provided a safe means of exploring and learning about sexuality.
(Smith, 2013, p. 70)

Participants are aware that what they are seeing is still a representation, but
they engage in nuanced discussions about the relationship between perfor-
mance and authenticity:
76 Pornography and porn literacy
I actually prefer the amateur stuff because I feel like it is more realistic
… [people in amateur SEM] are putting on an act, but I think it’s also
even more of a realistic act than porn from the porn industry. They look
more real, they act more real.
(Marion, aged 20, quoted in Smith, 2013, p. 71)

Amateur porn[ography] does a surprisingly good job of varying every-

thing and so I never felt intimidated or bad about myself while watch-
ing it.
(Sophie, age 22, quoted in Smith, 2013, p. 70)

Paasonen argues that pornography’s attraction is also about the ‘evidence

of sexual pleasure captured by the camera’ (2011, p. 81). Again, this is
linked by young consumers to questions of authenticity, and is evidenced
in these articles by the research participants (male and female) who
express concerns for the situation of female performers (see, for example,
Antevska & Gavey, 2015). For many porn users (including these young
people), the pleasure of amateur/DIY porn relies on authenticity, and this is
contextualised through critical understandings of pleasure and reality and
where these meet. In the context of broader digital media use, a model of
porn literacy that simply seeks to label pornography as ‘unrealistic’ fails
to engage with the complexities of understanding realism or authenticity
across young people’s broader digital media practices. Such an engage-
ment offers a useful elaboration for pornography researchers and sexuality
educators who want to better understand, and build upon, young people’s
porn literacies.

The ability to produce porn well

As we noted above, media literacy historically includes a commitment to
‘the ability of a citizen to access, analyze, and produce information for spe-
cific outcomes’ (Aufderheide, 1993, p. 6). We’ve added emphasis on ‘pro-
duce’ here because it is important to note that in the development of porn
literacy out of media literacy the ability to be literate in the ‘production’
of pornography has fallen by the wayside. We emphasise here that we are
not talking about industrial production, training young people to move into
careers as professional pornography directors. In a digital context, young
people are increasingly producing and circulating their own sexual images,
using camera phones, sexting and sharing material with their sexual part-
ners. A focus on how young people engage with digital cultures – and par-
ticularly in the importance they place on ‘authenticity’ – can help us to
address that missing element.
 Pornography and porn literacy 77
Once again, though, our systematic literature review found little existing
research on a fundamental question about the effects of pornography: do
people who consume porn have a better understanding of the rules of the
genre? In the next chapter we explore our final domain of healthy sexual
development – awareness and acceptance that sex can be pleasurable – and
find yet another surprising gap in the research.

Notes
1 Some elements of this chapter were originally published in Byron, P., McKee,
A., Watson, A., Litsou, K., & Ingham, R. (2021).
2 For the formally refereed version of this data see Byron, P., McKee, A., Watson,
A., Litsou, K., & Ingham, R. (2021). Reading for realness: Porn literacies, digi-
tal media, and young people. Sexuality & Culture, 25(3), 786–805. https://doi​
.org​/10​.1007​/s12119​-020​-09794​-6.
3 Our profound thanks to our Research Assistant Ash Watson, for her formulation
of the key themes for this domain.

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7 Pornography and pleasure1
Alan McKee, Katerina Litsou,
Paul Byron and Roger Ingham

The still, still missing discourse of desire

In 1988, Fine famously wrote about ‘the missing discourse of desire’
in school sex education, noting that ‘The naming of desire, pleasure, or
sexual entitlement, particularly for females, barely exists in the formal
agenda of public schooling on sexuality’ (Fine, 1988, p. 33). In 2006,
almost 20 years later, she noted that pleasure in sex education was ‘still
missing after all these years’ (Fine & McClelland, 2006). A 2018 survey
of Australian school students suggests that the problem still exists. As one
student put it:

Please teach students that sex is a healthy part of growing up and that
they should practice it safely if they want to and they shouldn’t feel
ashamed of themselves for enjoying it.
(quoted in Fisher et al., 2019, p. 80)

The final domain of healthy sexual development that we report on in this

book is pleasure.2 Our question is simple: do people who consume more
pornography have more pleasurable sex lives? The capacity to experience
pleasure without shame is a vital part of a healthy sex life, and so under-
standing the effect of pornography consumption on that is, you would think,
vitally important. Surely there has been a lot of academic research con-
ducted on this?
Our search terms for this systematic review were:

porn* OR “sexually AND pleasur* OR fun OR satisfaction OR

explicit material” arousal OR orgasm OR recreational OR
OR “visual sexual permissive OR desire OR “role play” OR
stimuli” fantas*

DOI: 10.4324/9781003232032-7
 Pornography and pleasure 81
The initial search, after removing duplicates, returned 524 articles. After
reviewing these against our criteria 68 articles were identified as providing
relevant data about the relationship between the consumption of pornog-
raphy and sexual pleasure and were thus included for thematic analysis.
A table with details of all included articles can be found at http://bit​.ly​
/2JMAhfs.
The journals in which most articles were published were Archives of
Sexual Behavior (N = 8), Journal of Sex Research (N = 3), Sex Roles (N =
3) and Sexologies (N = 3), each of which publishes articles mainly using
methods of data gathering and analysis derived from psychology; and Porn
Studies (N = 7) and Sexualities (N = 3) which are interdisciplinary. Initial
coding revealed that, of the 68 papers coded, 58 reported on data collected
from a single point in time. Six papers reported data collected at more than
one time point, and four were based on experimental designs. Data was
mostly collected through surveys only (N = 45) with 11 using interviews
and/or focus groups. A minority of articles (N = 7) used mixed methods.
In this review we once again found a lot of mistaken claims for causality
(see discussion in Chapter 2). Most of the articles in this sample (42 of 68)
reported correlations. In this sample, ten of the articles explicitly claimed
that pornography causes changes in the behaviours of people who use it,
despite the fact that the presented data does not support this claim. Another
23 implied causality, again without appropriate data. Only 35 of the articles
(around half the sample) avoided inappropriately claiming or implying cau-
sality. As with our analysis of pornography and consent, the fact that almost
half the sample of articles inappropriately claimed or implied that pornogra-
phy causes changes in behaviours – when in fact the results presented only
correlations – is extremely important and represents one of the key findings
across this project.
The thematic analysis of these articles identified two key themes: the
first relates to pleasure and the second to satisfaction. We report first on the
theme of pleasure as that is the focus of this analysis, although the theme of
satisfaction was actually more dominant in the sample.

Pleasure
The theme of pornography use and pleasure was organised into two sub-
themes. The first subtheme is about masturbatory pleasure resulting from
the use of pornography. The second relates to sexual pleasure with partners,
and whether pornography use impacts this.
Masturbatory pleasure: We noted at the start of this book that this pro-
ject was explicitly interdisciplinary. Involving researchers from a variety
of humanities and social science backgrounds in this work meant we could
82 Pornography and pleasure
include, understand and synthesise the data produced by researchers using
quite different methodologies. In some instances, this approach also revealed
differences between humanities and social scientific approaches to under-
standing the relationships between pornography and its consumers – as is
the case here. We noticed that research on pornography and pleasure tends
to take different forms in the humanities articles reviewed compared with
the articles from the social sciences. In humanities research we noticed more
engagement with pornography consumers about what pornography they use,
why they use it and how that feels. This research presents more context and
information from consumers about conflicted feelings in regard to their use of
pornography. Such an approach seeks to understand the ways in which con-
sumers make sense of the material they view. The research shows that most
consumers take sexual pleasure from their consumption of pornography:

speaking to the pleasurable aspect of consuming pornography, and in

addition to sexual gratification, some participants [young men with
non-exclusive sexual orientations] also discussed the importance of
‘quality’ in their usage. For example, Rory said, ‘I will think, “I’m
going to find a good video and take a little more time with this and get
some release and feel good about that”’.
(McCormack & Wignall, 2017, p. 983)

The research also suggests that sexual pleasure may have some relationship
with the development of sexual agency – that is:

an individual’s feelings of empowerment within the sexual domain …

sexual agency provides a sense that an individual has the right to create
and take action on his or her own behalf, to make sexual choices, and
to meet his or her sexual needs.
(Horne & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2005, p. 29)

So, for example, humanities researchers noted of one consumer that:

Ava also noted how her consumption of online pornography helped her
to focus on her own sexual pleasure and to put her own sexual needs
first. She explained, consuming SEM [Sexually Explicit Material]
online helps her to remember ‘my own pleasure is actually of para-
mount importance’.
(McKeown et al., 2018, p. 347)

This can also be related to the development of sexual identities; in an article

that turned up both in our sample for porn literacy, and for our sample of
 Pornography and pleasure 83
articles on pornography and pleasure, a researcher found that ‘gay-identi-
fying research participants perceive pornography as a personally validated
avenue to pleasure’ (Goh, 2017, p. 455).
The articles also reported that, while consumers take pleasure from the
consumption of pornography, this can be conflicted because of cultural fac-
tors, especially amongst women. Several articles, both from social sciences
and humanities, noted a tension between the sexual pleasure that women
take from pornography and wider cultural discourses

Although Julia acknowledges the pleasurable sexual stimulation that

pornography offers, she strives to restrict her personal porn use, as it
clashes with the accepted cultural script of being ‘a good girl’. It seems
that awareness of these cultural scripts causes more distress to Julia
than the actual pornographic content she consumes.
(Spišák, 2017, p. 365)

Women’s enjoyment of porn, in particular, poses ideological and aes-

thetic dilemmas … their pleasures are difficult to reconcile with their
reservations.
(Gurevich et al., 2017, p. 577)

Articles in this subtheme tend to focus on women and gay men as consumers
of pornography. By contrast, research with heterosexual men overwhelm-
ingly presents their use of pornography – and indeed we might say, het-
erosexual masculinity itself – as a risk (Szymanski & Stewart-Richardson,
2014). The sample includes no articles that seek to find out whether pornog-
raphy can serve to increase heterosexual men’s experience of sexual pleas-
ure. We noted a similar point in the previous chapter about research on porn
literacy, where researchers could imagine gay men ‘reading porn well’ – but
we found no evidence of research taking a similar approach to heterosexual
men’s engagement with pornography.
When articles from the social sciences do focus on masturbatory pleas-
ure they tend to avoid the term ‘pleasure’ and instead talk about ‘arousal’.
These articles generally find that participants are ‘aroused’ by pornography
(Lofgren-Martenson & Mansson, 2010; Reid et al., 2011; Laier et al., 2013),
are more ‘aroused’ by pornography than by neutral films (Glascock, 2005;
Staley & Prause, 2013) and that men are more ‘aroused’ by pornography
than women (Glascock, 2005; Lofgren-Martenson & Mansson, 2010). They
find pornography is ‘used’ for purposes including masturbation, mood man-
agement, entertainment when bored and as a contributor to sexual practice
with a partner (Paul & Shim, 2008; Sun et al., 2016).
84 Pornography and pleasure
Sexual pleasure with partners: A second subtheme – more prevalent in
articles from the social sciences – is not about the (masturbatory) pleas-
ure that results from consuming pornography itself, but is rather concerned
with how the use of pornography is related to later (non-pornographic)
sexual pleasure between people; that is to say, if someone uses pornog-
raphy for masturbation, does this have an impact on their sexual pleasure
with another person? Research falling within this subtheme takes a media
effects approach (Bryant & Oliver, 2008) to understand the relationship
between pornography and pleasure and tends to position pleasure as a sub-
factor in relationship/marital satisfaction. As we mentioned in Chapter 2,
approaching the relationship between audiences and pornography use as
‘effects’ tends to minimise or deny the agency of consumers, and differ-
ences between them (Gauntlett, 1998). These articles are discussed in more
detail under the theme of ‘Satisfaction’ below.
It is of interest that some of the articles reviewed – primarily from the
social sciences – see pleasure itself as risky, or even negative. We can see
this, for example, in articles which view masturbation with suspicion:

Previous research illustrates that some pornography use may be ‘auto-

erotic sexuality’ where one has a sexual experience through mastur-
bation. These autoerotic sexual experiences through pornography use
may potentially shape an individual’s attitudes that sex is primarily to
extend your own pleasure and is strictly physical.
(Brown et al., 2017, p. 468)

As researchers who are committed to sexual health, we note that masturba-

tion often makes an important contribution to healthy sexual development
(Coleman, 2002), including – as noted above – in the development of sexual
agency. Concerns about the selfishness of masturbation are moral, rather
than being about sexual health.

Satisfaction
This brings us to our second theme. Although our primary focus for this
domain of healthy sexual development was research on pornography use
and pleasure, our systematic review revealed that attention to pleasure was
often a secondary theme in the articles we found. Interestingly, and particu-
larly among articles from the social sciences, we found a primary focus on
satisfaction.
Twenty-one articles in the sample addressed sexual satisfaction,
11 addressed relationship satisfaction and five addressed marital satisfaction.
 Pornography and pleasure 85
In total, 37 articles in the sample – more than half – addressed some kind
of satisfaction.
Satisfaction is a rough synonym for pleasure; but it is not quite the same
thing. Many articles in the sample gathered data about satisfaction using,
between them, 13 separate scales to measure ‘sexual satisfaction’, ‘couples
satisfaction’ and ‘marital satisfaction’. By contrast, no scales were used to
measure sexual pleasure. Articles in this same category also discuss ‘rela-
tionship satisfaction’ and ‘dyadic adjustment’ – the latter defined as ‘the
quality of adjustment in romantic relationships’ (Stewart & Szymanski,
2012, p. 262). Other articles are not explicitly about relationship satisfac-
tion, but implicitly link sex with relationships. These articles draw on sat-
isfaction scales which are labelled as measuring ‘sexual satisfaction’ but
which ask questions which firmly position sexual practice within couple-
based (and implicitly monogamous) relationships, asking more about rela-
tionship quality than sexual pleasure. For example, the Golombok-Rust
Inventory of Sexual Satisfaction (Rust & Golombok, 1985) asks ‘Are you
dissatisfied with the amount of variety in your sex life with your part-
ner?’ (emphasis added in all quotations); the Global Measure of Sexual
Satisfaction (Lawrance & Byers, 1995) is ‘used to assess global satisfac-
tion with various aspects of the sexual relationship’; the Sexual Satisfaction
Questionnaire (Butler et al., 2011) includes statements such as ‘I wish that
my partner would be more experimental/adventurous during sexual activ-
ity’; the Multidimensional Sexuality Questionnaire (Snell et al., 1993)
includes the item ‘My sexual relationship is very good compared to most’.
Of the many scales used, only two ask about sexual pleasure independent
of emotional intimacy, a dyadic relationship or marriage. The Arizona Sexual
Experiences Scale (McGahuey et al., 2000) asks about ‘sex drive, arousal,
vaginal lubrication/penile erection, ability to reach orgasm, satisfaction
from orgasm, and pain during sex’ – although it is notable that the authors
also feel the need to use ‘the Sexual Compulsivity Scale (Kalichman, 2010)
and the Sexual Avoidance Subscale of the Sexual Aversion Scale (Katz
et al., 1989)’, ensuring that the question of sexual pleasure as risk is also
present. Snell’s Index of Sexual Satisfaction (Snell et al., 1993) measures
‘the way in which one’s sexual needs are being met, the degree in which
one feels sexually fulfilled, and the appraisal of whether something is pres-
ently missing in one’s sexual life’. Only research from the social sciences
wrote about satisfaction; it was not mentioned in humanities research. The
relationship between relationship/marital satisfaction and sexual pleasure
per se is not made explicit in any article in the sample.
One subtheme of writing about satisfaction was that ‘Higher frequencies
of SEM use were associated with less sexual and relationship satisfaction’
(Morgan, 2011, p. 520). Several articles in the sample were interested in this
86 Pornography and pleasure
topic and provided similar findings (Stewart & Szymanski, 2012; Poulsen et
al., 2013; Perry, 2016). As noted early in this chapter, there is confusion in
some articles about the role of causality in the association between pornog-
raphy use and sexual satisfaction. Even within a single article authors can
move between a recognition that causality cannot be assumed and attempts
to assume causality. For example, Morgan writes:

It is important to recognize that SEM viewing frequency either could

contribute to lower sexual and relationship satisfaction or a non-satis-
fying sex-life or relationship might contribute to more frequent SEM
viewing.
(Morgan, 2011, p. 528)

But, on the same page, she also writes:

This difference could reflect a disconnect between their preferences

and their actual sexual and relationship experiences, suggesting that
SEM viewing may indeed set up young adults to expect unrealistic
sexual encounters.
(p. 528)

Many articles in the sample claim or imply causality where they have in fact
only demonstrated association:

It appears that pornography has a negative impact on love and marital

satisfaction. The results indicated that love and marital satisfaction had
a significant negative relationship with pornography.
(Fadaki & Amani, 2015, p. 245)

The data was consistent with the notion that more gender role conflict
leads to more anxious and avoidant attachment styles which in turn
lead to more pornography use which in turn leads to less relationship
quality and less sexual satisfaction.
(Szymanski & Stewart-Richardson, 2014, p. 76)

Within this subtheme, researchers also examined the role of a number of

intervening variables in the relationship between pornography use and
relationship satisfaction, including ‘discrepancies’ between partners in por-
nography use rather than simple frequencies of pornography consumption
(Willoughby et al., 2016), attachment styles (Gouvernet et al., 2017) and
religiosity (Perry, 2016).
 Pornography and pleasure 87
The normativity of relationship research
We take a moment here to note that relationship satisfaction is not a neces-
sary part of healthy sexual development. People can have happy healthy sex
lives without being in a relationship; and people can be satisfied with their
relationships while having no sex. This approach to pornography and sex
is, once again, a profoundly normative one. It values stable relationships
more than sexual pleasure. It also normalises (monogamous) sex as a neces-
sary part of a dyadic relationship and ignores that many people are asexual
(Scherrer, 2008).
All of the articles reviewed addressed, in some form, the question of
pornography and pleasure; but the different disciplines involved do so in
different ways. As we note above, some of the articles explicitly refer to
‘pleasure’; but others used the language of ‘arousal’. While these terms
may seem to be synonymous, they represent different lenses through which
pornography use experiences are viewed. People have and enjoy a range
of experiences of pleasure, and this is an important part of healthy sexual
development. The pleasure of pornography often involves bodies, such as
through masturbation, but it need not. Arousal, however, centres a physio-
logical response to pornography, and this is not necessarily a part of healthy
sexual development. It is also interesting to note that in psychology arousal
is not a straightforwardly positive term – indeed, in studies of aggression,
arousal can be seen as risky and even something to be avoided.
This difference in language points to the different theoretical traditions
and research agendas that converge in the field of pornography studies.
Once again, different disciplines, our results suggest, are asking different
questions about the effects of pornography, or the relationships of audiences
with their pornography consumption. For some research traditions, pleas-
ure is something that is seen as worthwhile and important in and of itself,
warranting the study of the varied practices and experiences of pleasure, as
well as ways in which it can be maximised. For other research traditions,
pleasure is side-lined to focus on the satisfaction of marital (or marriage-
like) relationships.
A focus on relationships rather than on pleasure in the articles we
reviewed is, as we noted above, a normative approach that accepts the
‘charmed circle’ identified by Rubin (1992), whereby ‘Sexuality that is
“good”, “normal” and “natural” should ideally be … marital, monogamous,
reproductive … coupled, relational’ (pp. 280–281). Relationship-focused
research is grounded in the dominant sexual ideology. Rubin also draws
attention to the fact that the production of such hierarchies is imbricated
in ‘sex negativity’ – the tendency to treat sex with suspicion and regard it
as requiring excuses such as love or marriage. We argue that the articles
88 Pornography and pleasure
in this sample which privilege relationship quality over sexual pleasure
are taking a ‘charmed circle’ (and thus, normative) approach. They are
not interested in whether the consumption of pornography leads to more
masturbatory sexual pleasure; they are interested rather in the association
between the consumption of pornography and ‘good’ stable relationships,
measured by way of marital/relationship/couple satisfaction. Conversely,
in humanities disciplines such as media and cultural studies pleasure has
long been an object of fascination for its potential to disrupt problematic
cultural systems such as heterosexual marriage –a patriarchal institution
opposed by many feminists (Gotfrit, 1988). These different approaches
to pleasure represent more fundamental orientations towards culture –
a desire to keep things stable versus a desire for disruptive progressive
change.
Another finding from our review of these articles reinforces our suspi-
cion that much pornography research takes a normative approach: because,
notably, another theme of these articles is a focus on ‘risk’ (the next most
common theme after pleasure and satisfaction). Mentions of risk appeared
in the majority of articles considered (44 out of 68), suggesting that por-
nography’s pleasure is often understood within a risk framework. We coded
these mentions of risk into subthemes, and found ‘risky sexual behaviours’
(or ‘sexual risk behaviours’) to be the most common. This can refer to
particular sexual acts depicted in pornography (for example, unprotected
anal intercourse), or sexual behaviours of pornography users, potentially
influenced by pornography use (including ‘casual sex’ and having multiple
partners). Other risks commonly discussed include pornography addiction,
HIV/STI transmission risks, sexual abuse or aggression and the gendered
risks of pornography (specifically the social risks to women who engage
with pornography). Some concern was also raised about pornography users
‘modelling risk behaviours’ or learning about sex through pornography (a
concern among researchers that we found in all four of our reviews). Finally,
several studies suggested that the internet itself was risky for providing easy
access to pornography. We call this approach ‘normative’ because healthy
sexual development does not mean avoiding risk entirely; it means being
aware of various risks, and making informed decisions about what ones to
take, and how best to mitigate against them. Similarly, there are many risks
involved in sex beyond catching STIs – for example, forced abstinence can
be ‘risky’ in that it can lead to mental health difficulties; or being in a het-
erosexual relationship can be ‘risky’ for a woman as that greatly increases
her chances of being murdered by her intimate partner. None of the articles
in our sample that discusses the ‘risks’ of pornography and pleasure men-
tioned these kinds of risks. Because abstinence and heterosexual relation-
ships are part of the ‘charmed circle’, the risks they carry are ignored.
 Pornography and pleasure 89
We noted above that articles about pornography and pleasure tend to
focus on women and gay men as consumers while research with hetero-
sexual men tends to present their use of pornography as a risk. This reflects
the disparate traditions and theoretical paradigms in pornography research,
and the fact that different questions tend to be asked concerning different
population groups. Traditional ‘effects’ research focuses on heterosexual
men, and is concerned with ‘risk’, whereas research on women and gay
men often enquires into the subjective experience of pornography con-
sumption, and centres on questions of sexual agency and sexual identity
development. This is related to the fact that women and men are positioned
differently in respect to pornography, and with the differing functions that
pornography fulfils in the lives of gay and straight men. We did not encoun-
ter any research papers about the use of pornography among lesbian/queer
women, which underscores how much of this scholarship is underpinned
by (hetero)normative approaches to female sexuality – with researchers
often focusing on how this is represented and ‘risked’ by pornography and
its use.
This concludes the substantive chapters of the book. We have presented
our analysis of what academic research knows, after 50 years, about the
relationships between consuming pornography and four aspects of healthy
sexual development – consent, education, literacy and pleasure. To get here
we’ve reviewed thousands of academic journal articles, and engaged in
many months of discussion and analysis to find ways to make sense of the
data across a variety of disciplinary approaches. It will have been noticed
that several recurring themes have emerged in our analysis. In the conclu-
sion we review the four projects, draw attention to the recurring themes –
and bring our analysis up to date.

Notes
1 Some elements of this chapter were originally published in McKee, A., Litsou,
K., Byron, P., & Ingham, R. (2021).
2 For the formal refereed version of this data see McKee, A., Litsou, K., Byron,
P., & Ingham, R. (2021). The relationship between consumption of pornogra-
phy and sexual pleasure: Results of a mixed-method systematic review. Porn
Studies, 8(3), 331–344. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/23268743​.2021​.1891564.

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relationship quality and sexual satisfaction. Sex Roles, 67(5–6), 257–271. https://
doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s11199​-012​-0164-0
Sun, C., Bridges, A., Johnson, J. A., & Ezzell, M. B. (2016). Pornography and the
male sexual script: An analysis of consumption and sexual relations. Archives
of Sexual Behavior, 45(4), 983–994. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s10508​-014​-0391-2
Szymanski, D. M., & Stewart-Richardson, D. N. (2014). Psychological, relational
and sexual correlates of pornography use on young adult heterosexual men in
romantic relationships. Journal of Men’s Studies, 22(1), 64–82. https://doi​.org​
/10​.3149​/jms​.2201​.64
Willoughby, B. J., Carroll, J. S., Busby, D. M., & Brown, C. C. (2016). Differences
in pornography use among couples: Associations with satisfaction, stability, and
relationship processes. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 45(1), 145–158. https://doi​
.org​/10​.1007​/s10508​-015​-0562-9
8 Recent academic research
on pornography and healthy
sexual development
Alan McKee, Katerina Litsou,
Paul Byron and Roger Ingham

Key findings
We started this book with the moment, around 50 years ago, when the US
President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography provided its Report
on ‘the effect of obscenity and pornography upon the public, and particu-
larly minors, and its relationship to crime and other antisocial behavior’
(Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970, p. 1). As we noted in
the Introduction, 50 years later academics are still trying to answer many
of the same questions, and the issues remain as incendiary as ever. This
remains an area where academic knowledge is of fundamental and urgent
interest to a range of stakeholders in public debate. Just what do we know
about the relationship between the consumption of pornography and healthy
sexual development after 50 years of academic research across disciplines?
We hope that this book will be a useful resource to anybody who is con-
cerned by, and wants to participate in, these debates.
The book presents the first overview of the literature across academic
disciplines: the trends, the contradictions, the findings and the problems in
pornography research. Our search process only extends to December 2017,
and we are very aware that some important research has emerged since
then – some of which we point to below. We also note that, because our
research method favoured replicability over exhaustiveness (that is, using
a scientific method that can be replicated by others), we may have missed
some relevant literature. However, we are confident that our accounts of the
broad trends are accurate.
So – after 50 years of academic research, what do we know about the
relationship between pornography consumption and healthy sexual devel-
opment? Our key findings are as follows:

1. Although we can identify thousands of pieces of academic research

about pornography’s ‘effects’, surprisingly little of it explores

DOI: 10.4324/9781003232032-8
94 Recent research on pornography and HSD
relationships between various aspects of healthy sexual development
and consumption of pornography.
2. A lack of agreement about what is being measured has led to confusion;
this includes lack of agreement about the definition of pornography.
3. Much of the relevant research we identified on the relationship between
consumption of pornography and aspects of healthy sexual develop-
ment misinterpreted correlation as causality.
4. There is no agreement in the literature as to whether consumption of
pornography is correlated with better or worse understandings or prac-
tices of sexual consent, including having attitudes accepting of sexual
violence, or the likelihood of bystander interventions in cases of sexual
violence or coercion.
5. The literature does not provide data about whether people who use por-
nography are likely to have more information about how to have (good)
sex than people not using pornography. We know that people say they
use pornography to learn about sex, but we do not know how formal
sex education, parents, friends and sexualised entertainment compare
as sources of information about how to have (good) sex.
6. We do not have data about whether people who consume pornography
have better levels of porn literacy. We know that some people refer to
‘porn literacy’ as encouraging young people to reject pornography as
‘unrealistic’; we also note an alternative – and we think more useful
– approach that takes porn literacy to mean learning how to read porn
well.
7. We do not have data about whether people who consume pornography
have more or less pleasurable sex lives. We note there is little research
on pleasure; there exists more research, particularly from the social sci-
ences, on relationship satisfaction. This seems to show that people who
have less satisfying relationships may use more pornography.
8. Much of the research on pornography has been normative; it has
assumed that the only healthy form of sexuality is vanilla sex (that
is, not kinky) between monogamous couple-based partners for reasons
beyond simply pleasure.

Pornography across disciplines

This project draws on published academic research from all social science
and humanities disciplines and brings together research that is often quite
siloed. This is a unique, and important, approach. The four researchers
working on this project have distinct intellectual histories and quite dif-
ferent personalities. Each of us brought different perspectives and skills to
the project. We also began to see some trends in the different ways our
 Recent research on pornography and HSD 95
disciplines have trained us to approach academic research. The researchers
trained in the humanities were vigilant for normative discourses, informed
by years working with cultural studies approaches and engaging with queer
theory. The social science researchers insisted on rigour and set a clear level
for the evidence needed to support any claims we made. The humanities
researchers argued to expand what we counted as data; the social scientists
insisted on what ‘traditionally’ counts as data. The humanities researchers
were obsessive about language choices and written expression; the social
science researchers insisted that clarity was more important than beauty or
nuance in our writing.
We also noticed, to take a broad-brush approach, that there were some
differences between humanities and social scientific research into pornog-
raphy. It was more common for humanities researchers to study pleasure
– with its implications of being disruptive and political – while it was more
common for social science researchers to explore relationship satisfaction.
Humanities research was more interested in the meanings that consumers
made of pornography and more commonly listened to consumers as their
own experts about pornography use; social scientific research was broadly
less interested in treating pornography consumers as co-creators of knowl-
edge about pornography consumption. We also found that studies more
likely to engage with porn consumers and the pleasures and knowledge they
gain from pornography were more often reported by qualitative researchers
working in humanities disciplines, and that they were more likely to engage
with women and gay men about their pornography use, and rarely straight
men for whom pornography use was mostly framed as problematic across
the broader interdisciplinary literature.
The majority of this book reports on a series of systematic reviews of
academic research across disciplines, up to the end of 2017. After designing
and implementing the Search and Analysis Protocol in a way that satisfied
all the disciplines involved (drawing on consultation with a Delphi panel of
experts), we then engaged in repeated iterative discussions about the data
that was found, the themes that we identified and how to report on them.
It was a lengthy process but guaranteed the robustness of the data that we
report on here. In what follows are some examples of more recent research
literature (since 2018) that has furthered the conversations offered by this
book.

Consent and pornography

The next four sections of this conclusion look at some of the academic
research that has been published since the end of our systematic reviews
on the relationships between pornography consumption and the domains
96 Recent research on pornography and HSD
of healthy sexual development that we studied. These following sections
might be called ‘unsystematic reviews’; we gathered relevant articles from
a range of sources, by searching databases, reviewing our own records of
material we have encountered, asking colleagues and snowball sampling –
and then identified articles that we thought were interesting or important in
relation to pornography consumption and consent, education, literacy and
pleasure.
In relation to pornography and sexual consent, recent research addresses
a range of variables – such as rape myth acceptance (Maas & Dewey,
2018), coercive behaviours (Stanley et al., 2018) or self-reported inclina-
tion towards rape (Palermo et al., 2019). There is no clear pattern in the
findings. Some studies find associations between pornography consumption
and consent variables (Stanley et al., 2018); some studies find no associa-
tion (Dawson et al., 2019); others find an association between pornography
consumption and one form of non-consensual behaviour but not with others
(Maas & Dewey, 2018); and others find no association with non-consensual
behaviour measured using one scale, but they do find an association when
it is measured using another (de Heer et al., 2020). Some researchers have
differentiated between different kinds of pornography, finding an associa-
tion between only ‘violent’ pornography (using a definition of violence that
excludes consent) and non-consensual behaviour (Rostad et al., 2019); oth-
ers have found associations between only ‘violent’ pornography and some
forms of non-consensual behaviour but not others (Ybarra & Thompson,
2018). Still other researchers have focused on intervening variables, includ-
ing hostile masculinity and impersonal sex orientation, which has only
resulted in less clarity in claims of association (Huntington et al., 2020;
Kohut et al., 2021).
Reviewing these data we note that it remains the case that no simple
conclusions can be drawn about associations between consuming (vari-
ous kinds of) pornography and (various kinds of) (non-)consensual sexual
behaviours. Despite this fact, many recent articles display an unwarranted
confidence that the state of knowledge in regard to pornography consump-
tion and consent is more settled than is in fact the case, with many making
claims similar to Seabrook et al.: ‘Previous research has documented con-
nections between media use and violence against women’ (Seabrook et al.,
2019, p. 536; see also Palermo et al., 2019, p. 246; Rostad et al., 2019, p.
2137; Dawson et al., 2019, p. 588; Huntington et al., 2020, p. 3; de Heer
et al., 2020, p. 2). Having read this book, the reader will understand that the
actual data do not support such confident claims of a causal relationship
(see Stanley et al., 2018, for a more nuanced account of the literature).
We note that the articles published since January 2018 also tend to con-
tinue to take a normative approach towards sex by, for example, referring
 Recent research on pornography and HSD 97
to casual sex as being ‘promiscuous’ (quoted in Kohut et al., 2021, p.
648). Researchers continue to conflate consensual BDSM with violence
in accounts of ‘violent pornography’ (Stanley et al., 2018; Ybarra &
Thompson, 2018; Palermo et al., 2019; Rostad et al., 2019). We also note
that articles continue to imply causality in their use of language and fram-
ing of questions – talking about, for example, ‘the relationship between
pornography consumption and sexually aggressive behavior’ rather than
‘the relationship between sexually aggressive behaviour and pornography
consumption’ (de Heer et al., 2020; see also Palermo et al., 2019; Rostad
et al., 2019). We note that all of the articles we found on pornography use
and consent used research methods from social psychology. We found no
articles that attempted to measure consumers’ understandings of consent,
or which listened to their perspectives on how to make ethical decisions
about consensual behaviour. This is important given the precise wording of
the domain of healthy sexual development, which involves the individual
learning to:

Understand the nature and complexity of consent—not just their own

but also other people’s—in sexuality. They need to learn about the eth-
ics of human relationships and how to treat other people ethically.
(McKee et al., 2010, p. 17)

As we noted in Chapter 4, ethical and consensual conduct is contextual; it

doesn’t just mean ticking a box. There is a significant difference between
being able to explain the thinking behind our ethical conduct towards peo-
ple and just answering ‘No’ to a question about whether we would rape
someone if we could get away with it.

Sexual learning and pornography consumption

We reviewed articles about sexual learning and pornography that were
published after our systematic review – we note that we still cannot find
research that seeks to answer the question: do people who consume por-
nography have better knowledge about how to have sex than people who
do not?
We did find some articles about pornography and sex education more
broadly. While all of the recent articles about consent we reviewed used meth-
ods derived from social psychology, several of the articles about the potential
for pornography to function as sex education took qualitative approaches and
were often published in journals with a more humanities focus. For example,
Carboni and Bhana found that teenage girls used sexually explicit material
to ‘expand their knowledge’ (Carboni & Bhana, 2019, p. 371); Chesser et al.
98 Recent research on pornography and HSD
found that women used SEM to ‘strengthen sexual subjectivity’ (Chesser
et al., 2018, p. 1234); and Fox and Bale found that ‘media and pornography
contribute affects that open up new possibilities for young people’s emer-
gent sexualities’, offering sources of information as well as opportunities for
pleasure (Fox & Bale, 2018, p. 405). Researchers still make the point that for-
mal sex education is failing to provide young people with information about
‘female sexual agency’ (Carboni & Bhana, 2019, p. 386), sexual pleasure or
desire (Carboni & Bhana, 2019, p. 386) or information about diverse sexual
identities (Dawson et al., 2019). We again note that research with women
allows for the possibility of positive education from engagement with sexu-
ally explicit materials for developing sexual agency and exploring sexual
pleasure (Chesser et al., 2018; Carboni & Bhana, 2019) – but that we still did
not find any research that posited the same possibility for heterosexual men.
By contrast to this work from the humanities perspective, the recent
research we found in this area that used social psychological approaches
often presented sexual learning as a negative thing. This was presented as
negative in relation to ‘risky sexual behaviors’ (Shallo & Mengesha, 2018,
p. 461), the risk of learning to have condomless sex (Wright et al., 2020, p.
1576) or the ‘acceptance of teen sex’ (Wright et al., 2018).
In raising concerns about what is learned from pornography, authors
offered varied language that often moved away from discussing ‘learn-
ing’, ‘education’ and ‘pedagogy’. While these were certainly used by social
scientists (see, for example, Wright, Sun & Miezan, 2019) some authors
referred instead to the ‘influence’ of pornography (Nelson et al., 2019) – a
rough synonym for ‘education’, but one that denies the agency of learn-
ers. Shallo and Mengesha (2018) report on how undergraduate students in
their research ‘search’ for SEM (suggesting greater agency of users); they
also describe this as ‘exposure’ – again, suggesting that young people are
victims of pornography, rather than willingly accessing it as a source of
learning and pleasure.
Not all articles that take a quantitative approach present education as
negative. A number of quantitative articles report on correlations between
learning from pornography and other variables (Miller et al., 2018; Dawson
et al., 2019; Charest & Kleinplatz, 2021; Rothman et al., 2021). However,
none attempted to measure levels of knowledge about how to have sex. We
still find ourselves with no data about whether people who consume por-
nography have more information about how to have (good) sex.

Porn literacy and pornography consumption

Our key question in regard to porn literacy is: do people who consume more
pornography have a better understanding of how pornography works as a
 Recent research on pornography and HSD 99
genre? It was encouraging that we found little new research continuing with
the problematic idea that porn literacy simply means convincing young peo-
ple that pornography is not ‘realistic’ (see Chapter 5) in order to prevent the
transmission of bad messages – like having sex without condoms (Wright
et al., 2021). Instead, we found that the last few years have produced some
valuable research that gathers data from consumers about how they under-
stand their porn consumption in order to develop an empirically based model
of porn literacy – which is substantially more complex than understanding
pornography as ‘unrealistic’. For example, Attwood et al. (2018) found that
consumers use pornography for a range of different reasons, from mastur-
bation to education to exploration of identities or fantasies. This demands
that we rethink porn literacy in terms of understanding the different kinds
of pornography available, the uses to which they might be put and the abil-
ity of consumers to navigate these possibilities through their ‘reading’ of
pornography. These authors reported that the consumers they talked to had
never ‘stumbled across’ pornography, and were able to outline their search
strategies, and why they looked for the particular kinds of material that they
did: ‘the acquisition of skills and the becoming practiced enough to view
oneself as a hobbyist with tastes and preferences’ (Attwood et al., 2018, p.
3747). Their data suggest that consuming more pornography leads to greater
levels of porn literacy, though they do not explicitly measure this:

Tastes in porn shift and develop with experience and knowledge, as

with other kinds of cultural practices. In this extract, porn begins as
unknown and monolithic – an ‘it’ – but becomes ‘kinds’ over time and
with the investment of browsing.
(Attwood et al., 2018, p. 3749; see also Goldstein,
2021, pp. 6, 8, 9, 15; Wright & Štulhofer, 2019, p. 43)

Other recent research reiterates that young people are aware of, and quite
capable of replicating for researchers, cultural discourses about the harms
of pornography. Researchers report on the ‘third person’ effect in which
research participants believe that pornography does not harm them person-
ally but may harm other people (Healy-Cullen et al., 2021), and therefore
support ‘education’ programmes to teach the difference between ‘pornogra-
phy and sex in “real life”’ (Lim et al., 2020, p. 2) (as discussed in Chapter 6).
Several recent articles report on the development of educational materi-
als to teach porn literacy. While some retain a ‘critical’ approach that is not
student-centred and assumes primarily negative effects from the consump-
tion of pornography (Rothman et al., 2020), a more encouraging develop-
ment has been the emergence of co-design with young people to develop
programmes in porn literacy (Davis et al., 2020; Dawson et al., 2020). The
100 Recent research on pornography and HSD
programmes emerging from such approaches take a different approach to
‘porn literacy’, including the ability to ‘communicate [their sexual] needs’
(Davis et al., 2020, p. 8) and ‘reducing shame regarding pornography’
(Dawson et al., 2020, p. 1; see also Goldstein, 2020, p. 64).

Porn consumption and pleasure

Our review of recent articles on the relationship between consumption of
pornography and sexual pleasure suggests that researchers have continued
to focus on relationship satisfaction rather than pleasure per se. Some recent
studies we reviewed about associations between pornography consump-
tion and relationship satisfaction offer contradictory findings (Dwulit &
Rzymski, 2019; Miller et al., 2019; Shuler et al., 2021), while others intro-
duce intervening variables including masturbation (Perry, 2020) and moral
disapproval of pornography (Guidry et al., 2020).
In addition to this ongoing work, however, it is reassuring to find that
recent research has also begun to focus on pleasure as an important associate
of pornography. A recent spate of qualitative research on women’s pornogra-
phy consumption and pleasure consistently reports on women’s ambivalence
about pornography consumption, with some aspects of pornography enhanc-
ing sexual pleasure, while others interfere with pleasure (Chadwick et al.,
2018; Ashton et al., 2019; Carboni & Bhana, 2019; Marques, 2019). Common
discomforts relate to concerns about sexism (Carboni & Bhana, 2019), mis-
representations of bodies, sexual acts and pleasure and ‘concern for actors’
wellbeing’ (Ashton et al., 2019, p. 409). Marques gathered data using focus
groups and interviews and found that women actively navigate gendered
norms in order to gain sexual pleasure from pornography (Marques, 2019).
Once again, we note that we have found no data on whether pornography use
helps heterosexual men explore and embrace sexual pleasure, and that this
work is qualitative in nature and so can offer no quantitative insights.
The closest we have found to research attempting to quantitatively meas-
ure the relationship between pornography consumption and levels of sex-
ual pleasure is recent work that focuses on ‘sexual satisfaction’ or ‘sexual
wellbeing’ – which is, at least, closer to sexual pleasure than is ‘relation-
ship satisfaction’. Studies in this area are currently contradictory (Wright,
Sun, Steffen et al., 2019; Milas et al., 2020). However, they are beginning
to explore a range of possible intervening variables, including religiosity
(Perry & Whitehead, 2019), whether couples are in monogamous, consen-
sually non-monogamous or non-consensually non-monogamous relation-
ships (Rodrigues et al., 2021), how often pornography is used (Wright,
Miezan, et al., 2018), whether pornography use is individual or partnered
(Willoughby & Leonhardt, 2020; Bőthe et al., 2021).
 Recent research on pornography and HSD 101
As a final point we note that it is interesting that much of this recent crop
of articles includes sexual pleasure but does not focus on it exclusively; it
is only one part of a suite of indicators which usually includes some meas-
ure of relationship satisfaction. This could be interpreted either as a pleas-
ingly holistic approach, or a continued insistence that sex should not be only
about pleasure.

Unsystematic review: addiction

One recent trend in pornography research has been an increasing focus on
pornography addiction. This may seem to be an elephant in the room – why
are only mentioning this now, at the very end of the book?
We did not explore the question of addiction in our systematic reviews
for two reasons. Firstly, it is not a domain of healthy sexual development
– one can consume a lot of pornography and still have a healthy sex life.
Secondly, we see this is a classic example of pornography research miss-
ing the point about healthy sexual development. Clearly being addicted to
pornography – or sex, or masturbation – is not healthy. However, it is not
clear that behaviours that are currently described as sex addiction (or por-
nography addiction) are actual health issues. Humanities researchers insist
that these are moral issues; and some data from the social sciences support
this contention.
Humanities researchers have written extensively about the expansion of
the concept of addiction over the course of the 20th century to encompass
behaviours as well as substances (Taylor, 2019). Often the term ‘addic-
tion’ is used as a moral judgment (Clarkson & Kopaczewski, 2013) to keep
people’s behaviour ‘within socially acceptable boundaries’ (Keane, 2004).
Importantly, researchers have noted that it is difficult to even generate a
definition of ‘addiction’ to behaviours that does not include all leisure prac-
tices (Williams et al., 2020). To argue that a behaviour is addictive:

simply due to increased dopaminergic activity and participants’ feel-

ings of short-term pleasure is simplistic and does not adequately
differentiate—nor appreciate the complexity in attempting to differen-
tiate—behavior that may be addictive from many forms of acceptable
leisure behaviour.
(Williams et al., 2020, p. 312)

Other researchers have argued that behaviours that are described as ‘addic-
tive’ can equally well be understood as ‘non-pathological evidence of
learning’ (Ley et al., 2014, p. 94). Indeed, some researchers go so far as
to describe the concept of ‘addiction’ as ‘a myth that provides a simple
102 Recent research on pornography and HSD
explanation of the outcomes of particular behaviours so that more thor-
ough and … complex explorations of the causes for those behaviors can be
avoided’ (Clarkson & Kopaczewski, 2013, p. 130).
Both humanities and social scientific researchers have critiqued models
of sex and pornography addictions. Historians Reay, Attwood and Gooder,
describe sex addiction as ‘a response to cultural anxiety’ (Reay et al., 2015,
p. np), while Ley, Prause and Finn (as clinical psychologists and neurosci-
entists) reject the concept of pornography addiction (Ley et al., 2014, p. 96).
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders has never recognised porn addiction (or, more broadly,
sex addiction) as a phenomenon (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).
Elsewhere, the argument that the release of chemicals such as dopamine
into the brain is evidence of addiction has been described by neuroscientists
as ‘complete rubbish’ (Herbert, cited in Clarkson & Kopaczewski, 2013, p.
132). Despite these rejections, Grubbs et al. highlight that

The notion of problematic pornography use remains contentious in

both academic and popular literature’, with mental health experts being
divided on the issue, and many pornography consumers who report
their use of pornography as ‘problematic’.
(Grubbs et al., 2019, p. 397)

The fact that many people feel bad about their pornography use, and that
they may self-identify as ‘porn addicts’, demands attention and explanation.
But the model of porn addiction currently offered does not present a model
of healthy use against which perceived addiction can be judged. Measures
of porn addiction merely measure how ashamed respondents are of their
current sexual practices, and an emerging literature on ‘moral incongru-
ence’ and pornography addiction supports this point. Research has consist-
ently shown that one of the most important variables in whether people feel
they are addicted to pornography is how ashamed they are of pornography
use – so-called ‘moral incongruence’ (Grubbs et al., 2015; Grubbs et al.,
2018; Miller et al., 2018; Perry & Whitehead, 2019). We note that research-
ers who take a normative view of sexuality have begun to challenge this
finding (Palazzolo & Bettman, 2020) – but to do so they need to misrepre-
sent the data published by Grubbs et al.
How, then, do we fit this tradition of pornography research into healthy
sexual development? First, we note that the popularity of this form of
research can be explained by forces outside of healthy sexual development.
Ley et al. (2014) suggest that ‘the tenacity and popularity of the porn addic-
tion concept to describe high rates of [visual sexual stimuli] use appears to
be driven by non-empirical forces’ (Ley et al., 2014, p. 100). They propose
 Recent research on pornography and HSD 103
that these include the dominance of moralistic discourses in societies with
a strong religious orientation, and the profit motive of a ‘lucrative, largely
unregulated industry’ (Ley et al., 2014, p. 98). In terms of our model of
healthy sexual development, research on pornography addiction seems to
consistently show that large numbers of people suffer shame about sexual
pleasure. This data could potentially be used to understand the domain of
healthy sexual development that requires that – in order to become happy,
healthy sexual beings - we must embrace ‘awareness and acceptance that
sex can be pleasurable’ (McKee et al., 2010, p. 17). From this perspective,
the fact that a significant number of pornography users feel ashamed about
their masturbatory practices demands that we start to explore how we could
help lower their levels of sexual shame.

Limitations
Amongst the many issues that the social scientists in this team brought to
the table was a clarity about the importance of the limitations of research
projects – a modesty that is not always present in writing by humanities
researchers. And so we note that in this project – as with every systematic
review – it is possible that relevant articles have been omitted because they
did not appear in the searches, despite the advice of the Delphi panel and
the use of extensive databases for the searches. It is also possible that the
search terms used were not entirely exhaustive. As always, there is a tension
between the epistemic values of replicability and exhaustiveness (Fallis,
2008). Because this systematic review focused only on journal articles pub-
lished in English within a specific timeframe (January 2000 to December
2017), books, book chapters, unpublished materials, material published not
in English and material published before January 2000 and after December
2017 are by default excluded. In regard to the earlier date, it was intended
that the cumulative nature of academic research should mean that the find-
ings of earlier work would have informed the articles that were included; in
regard to the later date, it was necessary to set a final date otherwise it would
be impossible to finalise the analyses.

Future research
Another skill brought to the project by the social scientific members of
the team was the idea that, at the end of reporting findings, suggestions
should be made about directions for future research. This is less common
in humanities writing. In this case, it is easy to say what we would like to
see: pornography research that starts with an explicit definition of healthy
sexual development, and that then explores the relationships between
104 Recent research on pornography and HSD
pornography and its audiences in relation to aspects of that definition of
healthy sexuality. And we would like to see research that is not trapped in
normative principles. We want to see research that understands that casual
sex, masturbation and kink can be part of healthy sexual development – so
long as they are consensual. We’d like to see research that is more open to
engaging with a range of consumers, who are given space to share their
experiences and engagements with pornography, and how this relates to
healthy sexual development. This would mean that we, as researchers,
invite pornography consumers to challenge us about the research ques-
tions, approaches and paradigms we use to understand pornography and its
impacts, values and meanings. Importantly, we would also like to see less
research on pornography that assumes causality where the evidence does
not support such claims. This would lead to a reduced focus on ‘effects’
and ‘impact’ (unless there is evidence provided by researchers to support
these claims).
Fifty years ago, the President’s Commission on Obscenity and
Pornography found that:

there is a correlation between experience with erotic materials and gen-

eral attitudes about sex: Those who have more tolerant or liberal sexual
attitudes tend also to have greater experience with sexual material.
(Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970, p. 30)

As we noted, it also found that:

Delinquent and nondelinquent youth generally report similar experi-

ences with explicit sexual materials … Available research indicates
that sex offenders have had less adolescent experiences with erotica
than other adult … empirical research designed to clarify the question
has found no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materi-
als plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal
behaviour.
(Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970,
pp. 30, 31, 32)

Academic research in the last 50 years has continued to find correlations

between more ‘tolerant’ sexual attitudes (sometimes named ‘permissive’)
and pornography use. The research has also continued, over and over, to try
to prove that the Commission was wrong in finding no correlation between
pornography and sexual violence, insisting that the finding of no correlation
must be wrong and repeatedly seeking the elusive variable that will finally
lock down a link. While this has not been achieved, discussions within and
 Recent research on pornography and HSD 105
surrounding a continuing urge to find evidence of pornography’s harms has
pervaded public accounts of pornography and its claimed social and psy-
chological effects. This demonstrates Law’s (2004) argument that research
methods often work as ‘inscription devices’, in that they can script and
manifest certain ideals and realities about the objects we study and fore-
close a range of other approaches or perspectives. Research methods (such
as those used to measure pornography’s effects) are iterative, in that they
are repeated over time and through such repetition they come to be expected
and regarded as being ‘common sense’. As such, they make certain ques-
tions more urgent and expected (such as questions asked about pornogra-
phy’s effects over many decades), rendering other methods of inquiry more
unlikely and more easily rejected. This is evident in questions commonly
asked of pornography, such as a tendency to focus on ‘relationship satis-
faction’ rather than sexual pleasure, a focus on sexual aggression ahead of
discussing the minutiae of sexual consent and a focus on educating young
people to reject pornography – for being a poor source of knowledge about
sexual health, and for its ‘unrealistic’ depictions of sex – rather than explor-
ing what young people seek, find, want and learn from pornography. In all
such examples we note that attention to healthy sexual development is not
the common focus in interdisciplinary research on pornography use; we
think that it should be.
We hope that, after 50 years, we can now move to a different way of
studying the relationships between pornography and its audiences. Let
us explore the correlations between sexual pleasure and pornography
consumption; pornography and lifelong learning about how to have sex;
sexual agency and pornography consumption; pornography consumption
and understandings and practice of consent– in short, between the con-
sumption of pornography and healthy sexual development. It is an excit-
ing prospect.

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Index

abstinence 54, 88 fantasy 65, 67

addiction 88, 101–103 Fine, Michelle 80
agency 4, 20, 26, 84, 89, 98, 105 fisting 58, 61
Altman, Rick 33 fun 3, 59, 61, 80
Arizona Sexual Experiences Scale 85
authenticity 73–76 gay see queer
Global Measure of Sexual
BDSM 42, 47, 49–50, 70 Satisfaction 85
Bender, Paul 6 God 9
bestiality 58
Blubaum, Paul E. 10 healthy sexual development (HSD)
1–4, 19–25, 30, 39, 42–43, 48–49,
Cairns, Robert 6 53–54, 57, 61–62, 65–67, 74, 77,
Case, Herbert W. 10 80, 84, 87–89, 93–94, 96–97, 101,
casual sex 2, 7, 69, 70, 88, 97, 104 103–105
causality and correlation 18, 25–26, 44, heteronormativity see normativity
81, 86, 94, 97, 104 heterosexuality 48–49, 50n3,
charmed circle 48–49, 50n3, 61, 70, 57, 58, 66, 74, 83, 88–89, 95,
87–88 98, 100
Christian 9, 13, 70 Hoover, J. Edgar 10
Clegg, Robert 11
condoms 58, 60, 98–99 interdisciplinary research 2–3, 5,
consent 3, 20, 24, 39, 42–52, 81, 12–14, 18–21, 23–24, 29–31,
94–97, 105 35–37, 43, 81, 95, 105
contraception 58, 71 intimacy 74–75, 85
correlation see causality and correlation inventory of sexual satisfaction 85

degrading 11, 44–45, 47, 69, 72 Johnson, Lyndon 5, 14

Delphi panel 19–22, 24–25, 32, 34, 38,
54, 65, 95, 103 Keating, Charles H 9–11
dopamine 101–102 Kendrick, Walter 31, 33
kink 42, 46, 48–49, 57–58, 94, 104
education see sex education Kupperstein, Lenore 6
effects of pornography see
pornography, effects of lesbian see queer
erotic massage 61 love 49, 58, 61, 86–87
112 Index
marriage 48–49, 84–88 religion/religious 4, 9, 11, 13, 49, 86,
masturbation 7, 29, 73, 83–84, 87, 101, 103
99–101, 104 Richters, Juliet 21
media literacy 65, 67–68, 76; see also risk 3–4, 45, 53, 55, 58, 72, 74–75,
porn literacy 83–85, 87–89, 98
meta-analysis 21 Rubin, Gayle 48–49, 50n3, 61, 70, 87
monogamy 24, 49, 85, 87, 94, 100
multidimensional sexuality same-sex attraction see queer
questionnaire 85 Sampson, John 6
satisfaction see pleasure
National Geographic 30, 36 Search and Analysis Protocol 22–23,
Nixon, Richard 14 43, 54
normativity 43, 48–49, 50n3, 57, 61, sex, anal 3, 56, 61, 69, 70, 88
87–88, 94–96, 102, 104 sex, dirty 58, 61
sex, oral 3, 56
orgasm 69, 80, 85 sex, premarital 7
sex, vaginal 3, 56
parents 2, 37, 49, 53–54, 57, 60–61, sex education 3–4, 7–9, 11, 18, 20,
74, 94 24–25, 30–31, 34, 42, 49, 53–64,
Paul, James CN 6 80, 96–99
permissive attitudes see progressive sexual aggression 45–46, 105
attitudes sexual assault 42–43, 45
Playboy 30–31, 34, 36 Sexual Aversion Scale 85
pleasure 4, 33, 57–58, 60–61, 67, Sexual Compulsivity Scale 85
69–70, 72–76, 80–89, 92, 94–96, 98, sexual health see healthy sexual
100–101, 103, 105 development
Pornhub 30–31 Sexually Explicit Material (SEM)
porn literacy 24, 59, 65–79, 82–83, 94, see pornography
98–100 Sexual Satisfaction Questionnaire 85
pornography, definition of 30–39 Snell’s Index of Sexual Satisfaction 85
pornography, effects of 1–2, 6–7, Stewart, Justice Potter 30
11–13, 23–24, 26, 30–31, 37, 70, 73, straight see heterosexuality
77, 84, 87, 89, 93, 99, 104–105 systematic literature review 21
pornography, realistic or unrealistic 29,
58–59, 67, 69–70, 72, 74–76, 86, 94, thematic analysis 23, 25, 43–44, 46, 81
99, 105; see also authenticity
President’s Commission on Obscenity unrealistic see pornography, realistic
and Pornography 5–13, 26, 93, 104 or unrealistic
progressive attitudes 5, 7, 29, 69–70,
80, 88, 104 vanilla sex 49, 94
promiscuity see casual sex violence 1–2, 7, 30, 42–50, 94,
96–97, 104
queer 4, 7, 50n3, 57, 60, 66, 72–74, 83, violence, definition of 47–48
89, 95
Warner, Michael 50n3
Rainwater, Lee 13 watersports 58, 61
rape 43–46, 96–97 Wilson, W. Cody. 11
realism see pornography, realistic or Wishner, Julius 6
unrealistic World Health Organisation 2, 19