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’

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.

We do not have data about whether people who consume pornography have better levels of porn literacy.

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 crucial points of instruction, reflection and deliberation for himself’ (p. 455).

healthy sexual development 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 nigh

When we examined what academic research describes as ‘unrealistic’ 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 unrealistic.

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 a

‘Pornographic messages were described as … depicting a distorted reality’

Messages from society regarding gender equality and public health seem to be in conflict with those from pornography and other media with pornographic messages.