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?

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

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

However, it is not clear that behaviours that are currently described as sex addiction (or pornography addiction) are actual health issues. Humanities researchers insist that these are moral issues; and some data from the social sciences support this contention.

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

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.

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

This ability is more commonly named in academic research as ‘media literacy’ or ‘porn literacy’

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.