Give & Get: Porn Literacy at Tate Modern

At one point I was asked to be part of a weekend at Tate Modern called Bedfellows: Sex Re-Education — a residency at Tate Exchange built around the idea that the way we teach sex and relationships needs a serious rethink. Bedfellows is the artist trio Chloe Cooper, Phoebe Davies and Jenny Moore, and the whole programme was their project. I came in to run one strand of it: a workshop called Give & Get: Porn Literacy.

We ran it twice. Once with young people. Once, a while later, with adults. Same structure, very different rooms.

What porn literacy actually is

Porn literacy isn't a campaign for or against pornography. It's a set of skills for looking critically at sexual imagery — the same way media literacy is a set of skills for looking critically at an advert or a news story. Who made this. Who's it aimed at. What's it selling. What's it leaving out. What would it be like if you took it as instructions for real life.

That sounds obvious written down. It isn't how most people first encounter pornography. Most people encounter it accidentally, usually young, usually with no framework at all. And then they just absorb it, because that's what humans do with images.

Giving people a framework, late but genuinely, turns out to be useful at basically any age.

The young people's session

With the young people, there was the thing you'd expect — a slightly nervy energy at the start, some deflection through humour, some very sharp observations once the room warmed up. What surprised me, and it always does, was how much they already had to say. They weren't a blank audience being educated; they were people who'd already been watching this stuff for years and had a lot of thoughts they'd never been invited to articulate. Giving it a name — "porn literacy" — and treating it as a real topic with real tools seemed to land as a kind of relief.

The questions that came up weren't mostly about the graphic content. They were about bodies, performance, whether what they were seeing was what sex was supposed to look like, and whether they were supposed to be reproducing it. That's the bit schools most often miss.

The adults' session

The adult room was different in ways I didn't fully predict. The laughter was less defensive. People were more willing to talk about their own history with porn — when they first saw it, what they'd internalised, what they wished someone had said to them at the time. Several parents in the group wanted the workshop partly for themselves and partly for the conversation they were trying to work out how to have at home.

The content didn't really need dialling up. Critical thinking doesn't scale by age; the vocabulary scales, the underlying questions don't. If anything, the adult session was a useful reminder that a lot of the people now responsible for educating young people about this grew up without any porn literacy of their own, and are genuinely uncertain about what to pass on.

What the two sessions told me

Running the same workshop twice, with two audiences almost two decades apart in age, made one thing obvious. The conversation we need about sexualised media isn't a young-people conversation with an adult conversation bolted on. It's one conversation that all of us have mostly had on our own.

The Bedfellows programme as a whole was a case for doing this work outside school walls, in spaces that are already public, already cultural, already used to being places where people think hard about images. A gallery turned out to be a pretty good setting for it. There's something about being in a room designed for looking that makes people better at talking about looking.

If your school, gallery, or organisation is thinking about how to do porn literacy properly — not a moral panic session, not a reassurance session, a real one — get in touch.