LOS ANGELES — A new essay titled "Porn Literacy in the Digital Age" urges researchers and psychologists alike to abandon preconceived notions of what constitutes acceptable sexual expression and listen with a truly open mind to young adults who consume porn.
The essay, penned by David Ludden, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Georgia Gwinnett College, was published last week for the "Talking Apes" blog on PsychologyToday.com.
Ludden spotlights University of Technology Sydney (Australia) psychologist Paul Byron and his colleagues in a review article they recently published in the journal Sexuality & Culture.
"The theme of the article is 'porn literacy,' which Byron and colleagues view as an extension of media literacy," Ludden observed. "The World Wide Web has placed the entirety of human knowledge and discourse at our fingertips, mostly uncensored. While it’s easy to be led astray on the internet, those with media literacy understand where to go for information and how to evaluate the reliability of sources."
He noted Byron and colleagues argue "porn users need to develop porn literacy." However, "(a)lthough hundreds of academic articles on pornography use have been published in the last twenty years, Byron and colleagues could only find seven that presented data on young people’s porn literacy. That is, the authors of these articles actually asked young people to report on their experiences with and feelings about pornography."
Two of the articles "looked at pornography use among young gay men, and the researchers concluded that porn viewing was a way for these emerging adults to learn about their sexuality... Yet the attitude was quite different when it came to heterosexual young adults," said Ludden. "Here, the focus was on 'educating' young people that pornography is not 'real.' In other words, there’s a double-standard in evaluating porn use, viewing it as a positive educational experience for young gay men but as a negative and potentially harmful one for heterosexual emerging adults that they need to be educated about."
When commentators claim that pornography isn’t real, Ludden wrote, "the subtext is that only sex between a man and a woman in a loving relationship is 'real,' and any other sexual depiction is not. Thus, these researchers also implicitly reject any alternative form a sexual expression, such as group sex or BDSM, whether in real life or on film."
In each of the five studies that looked at heterosexual porn use, the researchers maintained the attitude that porn is not "real" or that it is "harmful."
"Thus, even when the researchers directly asked young people about their experiences, they interpreted the data from their preconceived points of view," Ludden said.
"Pornography is deeply embedded in the daily lives of today’s youth, who are digital natives," he concluded. "They not only consume commercially produced porn, they also create their own sexually explicit media that they share with their current partners (sexting) or with potential partners on hook-up apps. Furthermore, they produce and post sexually explicit media on internet porn sites, where they garner comments from their peers... . If we want to understand them, we’d best keep our mouths shut and our ears open, so that we can listen to what they have to say."
Visit PsychologyToday.com for the complete essay.
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