
The project draws together collaborators with particular interests in the relationships between pornography and sexual health to examine the empirical evidence base on forms of mediated sexuality, enabling better understanding of the kinds of interventions most useful to young people. Increasingly prominent in discussions of sexual health pornography is often portrayed as a public health issue, addictive, a factor in erectile dysfunction, loss of sexual desire, changes to brain functioning, as well as worries about wellbeing and ‘healthy’ relationships. Sex and relationship education will be compulsory in the UK from 2019, and pornography will be included but what form such ‘porn ed’ will take is not clear. Our project takes as its starting point a review of the disjuncture between dominant framings of pornography and the bodies of knowledge about pornography, health and sexuality emerging from critical forms of humanities and social sciences. In particular, as media become central to sexual practices, experiences, identities and lifestyles, we will investigate how these may be significant to sex education and sexual health interventions. These findings will contribute to networking and scoping activities which will lead to a larger funding application to develop educational resources which are deliverable, effective and useful.