Pornography and the politics of consent: implications for sex education

Contemporary debates about consent have increasingly shaped legal, public, and educational discourses surrounding sex, sexual violence, and sexual ethics. Against this backdrop, online audiovisual pornography is frequently positioned as a driver of sexual violence and criticised for shaping problematic understandings of consent, contributing to a resurgence of anti-porn conservatism. In some countries, there have been growing calls for pornography to depict consent as explicit, visible, and pedagogically legible. Such demands often rest on an expectation that pornography should function as a form of sexual education, despite its primary purpose as entertainment media. This article argues for more nuanced engagements with the relationship between representations of consent in pornography that are unencumbered by moral panics, simplistic text-effect arguments, and reductive expectations that pornography should represent genuine consent. This article instead argues for sexual education and porn literacies that can better address porn viewers understanding and negotiation of consent in pornography. The article cautions against overly neat representations of consent that come from regulatory approaches intent on constraining, if not potentially eliminating, pornography.