Mulholland, Monique, Young People and Pornography

I t's in an episode of the United States of Tara, that T says: "Let's go buy revealing clothes that make us look insecure"-a line which simultaneously subverts adults' claims to know "the" meaning of teens' expressive practices and reveals adults' fears about the influences of porn on children.In Young People and Pornography: Negotiating Pornification, Mulholland examines the panic about "pornification"; the ways in which the explicit and the illicit are changing; and, how these changes are understood and negotiated by young people.Mulholland defines pornification as a trend whereby a pornographic aesthetic increasingly characterizes mainstream sex.Her central interest is the extent to which ideas about normal sexuality are constructed in relation to the changing nature of the illicit, and vice versa.Key research questions include: "Has the explicit actually become so familiar?What happens when the illicit attains a publicness?... Has porn become normalized?"(6).She ends the book with an exploration of young people's own perspectives on pornification.Mulholland's book is one of a growing set of monographs and edited collections examining the purported sexualization of culture, and its relationship to young people.As Mulholland notes, however, few works draw on empirical research with young people.To fill this gap, Mulholland canvases South Australian youth between the ages of 13-16, asking them to reflect on how they understand, and are negotiating, cultures of sexuality.This attention to the voices and perspectives of young people is as refreshing as it is necessary given the potentially transformative effect that young people can have on the larger culture.As Mulholland notes, what pornification means is provided via her mapping of anti-pornification activists' claims to knowledge-namely psycho-medical actors who cast young people as "innocent, 'developing,' and essentially asexual until reaching a predetermined age (74).How pornification means, however, can only be understood by "considering what is not spoken and which voices have little or no access to determining the parameters of the debate" (72)

Media studies · Negotiation · Pornography · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Psychology · Sex work and related issues · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology