Australian professor advocates for porn for teens

Australian professor and pornography advocate Alan McKee penned a recent blog post about the best porn for young people. In his Sex School article called "What kinds of pornography are healthy for young people?" McKee posits that it behooves adults to give adolescents access to the best porn to answer their questions.

McKee writes that "with the increasing availability and range of pornography available, it’s important that we do everything we can to help young people become porn literate and identify the pornography that’s going to help them grow up as healthy, happy sexual adults."

"I worked with colleagues from the Faculty of Health at the University of Technology Sydney," he writes, "to ask a group of experts around the world what makes for healthy pornography for young people. We spoke to people from a range of backgrounds: sex educators, pornography researchers, pornography producers, adolescent development experts and sexual health experts, for a total of thirty experts. We asked them what criteria they would use to decide what counts as healthy porn..."

UNICEF reports that "Pornographic content can harm children. Exposure to pornography at a young age may lead to poor mental health, sexism and objectification, sexual violence, and other negative outcomes.  Among other risks, when children view pornography that portrays abusive and misogynistic acts, they may come to view such behaviour as normal and acceptable."

McKee is a professor of Digital and Social Media in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at University of Technology Sydney, Australia, where he has "published on healthy sexual development, and entertainment education for healthy sexuality."

The experts suggest that there are six key elements for good porn for young people. First, they suggest that lots and lots of "sexual practices and pleasures" should be on display in the porn shown to young people, and that those who are exploited in the videos are of a range of body types, races and ethnicities.

The porn, the experts say, should show the "negotiation of consent on screen," including the "explicit statement of sexual desires" by those being exploited in the videos. The experts attempt to avoid exploitation by knowing that the conditions under which the sexually explicit content was made are "safe" and have "fair pay."

Birth control and materials for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases should also be visible in the exploitative, sexually explicit material shown to adolescents to teach them about sex.

Several porn sites are linked that adults can show to adolescents to usher them into the wide world of pornographic content.

In another post, McKee claims that reports that "porn is bad for you" may be overblown because after a four-year research project, his team found that it was inconclusive. Their study, however, was of articles about porn, as opposed to conducting a study of either those who are exploited on video or those who are exploited as consumers of the content.

"Our team recently completed a four-year project reviewing hundreds of academic articles on the effects of pornography to find out the truth. The answer might surprise you. In short – we don’t know. The evidence is partial and contradictory," he writes. In conclusion, he writes that more research needs to be undertaken to ask questions that those who wrote the articles they studied didn't.

He takes issue with the articles that were part of the study because, as he says, they don't address "healthy sexual development." Instead, these articles studied asked is porn consumers were more or less likely to stay in monogamous relationships, or more or less likely to get involved in rough sex. For McKee, the real question as regards "healthy sexual development" is about "sexual communication, sexual pleasure, ability to practice sexual consent, acceptance of your sexual identity, and so forth."

McKee is also a proponent of the medical gender transition of children.