What Do We Know About the Effects of Pornography After Fifty Years of Academic Research? (Focus on Global Gender and Sexuality)

what exactly is a happy, healthy sex life?

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 performance media’

Sexual performance included learning about position and sexual roles in certain positions; how adolescents should act during sexual activity with sexual partners; and how sex should feel.

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’

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).

The literature does not provide data about whether people who use pornography 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 sourc

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.

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 neuroscientists) reject the concept of pornography addiction (Ley et al., 2014, p. 96). The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Ment

media literacy fundamentally means understanding that ‘media are constructed, and construct reality’