Kath Albury

Sexting, consent and young people's ethics: Beyond Megan's Story

This article contrasts the Megans Story campaign, a recent Australian media and policy response to sexting (the act of taking and transmitting naked or semi-naked pictures via mobile phones) with interview responses drawn from an Australian study that has asked young people about mobiles and sexting. It considers local and international responses to sexting as ‘child pornography,’ raising questions about the adequacy and appropriateness of criminalizing young peoples sexual self-representation and communication. Based on young peoples responses to sexting, the authors argue that there is an emerging ethics around the issue of consent being developed by young people. However, considerations of consent cannot be accounted for by the laws as they are presently framed, as under-18-year-olds currently are not allowed to consent to any form of sexting. This disconnection between the law and uses of technology by consenting teenagers generates problems both for policy, education and legal systems. This paper suggests a response that would recognize the seriousness of incidents of bullying, harassment or abuse, and would also take into account the meaning that sexting has for young people in specific contexts and cultures.

Porn and sex education, porn as sex education

Both popular and academic discussions of pornography have explored the question of sexually explicit texts as pedagogy. While many commentators and scholars have acknowledged the educational qualities of pornography, there is no universal consensus as to what porn teaches its consumers and how it works as an educator. Pornography is increasingly itself the subject of educational texts, with ‘porn literacy’ being debated as a potential addition to the secondary state school curriculum in the United Kingdom and Australia. This article presents an overview of the field of ‘porn as pedagogy’ and pedagogy about porn. It is modest in scope, relying primarily on recent research and media reportage from Australasia, North America and the United Kingdom. These Anglophone countries have significant similarities in respect to the ways pornography is framed as a moral and/or political issue within public debate (although there are also notable differences). For this reason, the overview that follows does not seek to ...

Healthy Sexual Development: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Research

ABSTRACT A group of Australian researchers from a range of disciplines involved in studying childrens sexual development developed a framework for researching healthy sexual development that was acceptable to all disciplines involved. The 15 domains identified were: freedom from unwanted activity; an understanding of consent; education about biological aspects; understanding of safety; relationship skills; agency; lifelong learning; resilience; open communication; sexual development should not be “aggressive, coercive or joyless;” self-acceptance; awareness and acceptance that sex is pleasurable; understanding of parental and societal values; awareness of public/private boundaries; and being competent in mediated sexuality.

Too Much? Too Young? The Sexualisation of Children Debate in Australia

This article considers the origins and focus of current Australian debates around the alleged ‘sexualisation’ of children and young people. It explores the popular discourses around youth and sexuality and unpacks the assumptions and contradictions that underwrite them, by addressing the terms of reference of the Australian Senates 2008 Sexualisation of Children in the Contemporary Media Inquiry. The article concludes by outlining some proposed public policy solutions to addressing current community concerns that children and teenagers are being inappropriately sexualised.

Reading Porn Reparatively

Feminist thinking on pornography since the early 1980s has tended to polarize into ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ camps. Within both camps, there is a tendency to rely on moral frameworks that rely on either/or understandings of what pornography is, and what it does. This article draws on Michel Foucault’s theory of ethics to offer, in Eve Sedgwick’s terms, a reparative yet still critical model for feminist porn studies.

Young people, media and sexual learning: rethinking representation

This paper outlines the ways in which media and cultural studies methodologies have been engaged with in order to conduct an investigation into the interplay between media and sexual learning in an Australian context. It brings ‘media practice’, ‘listening’ theory and ‘reparative reading’ together with interviews with Australian sexuality educators in order to consider how theoretical understandings of medias role in sexual learning might be productively reframed.

Playing by the rules : researching, teaching and learning sexual ethics with young men in the Australian National Rugby League

In 2004, the Australian National Rugby League (NRL) commissioned the Playing By The Rules research project in response to allegations of sexual assault by members of a professional rugby league team. This article offers an overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches adopted by the team, and the subsequent workplace education programmes designed to promote ethical sexual behaviour and attitudes within NRL culture. The researchers reflect on contemporary thinking in the relatively new field of violence prevention education aimed at young men, and consider new critical approaches to the intersection of masculinities and sexual learning.

Just because it’s public doesn’t mean it’s any of your business: Adults’ and children’s sexual rights in digitally mediated spaces

This article engages with media responses to the 2015 Ashley Madison hack (which largely exposed the sexual details of adult heterosexual men) and the 2014 ‘Fappening’ hack (which exposed private sexual images of adult female celebrities). It draws on Petchesky’s concept of positive sexual rights and Warner’s framework of sexual ethics to reflect on the ways current educational and policy responses to ‘teen sexting’ (or sharing nude/semi-nude pictures) might change if young people’s sexual rights were recognized as being similar (if not the same) to those of the adult victims of the 2014 and 2015 hacks.

Identity plus? Bi-curiosity, sexual adventurism and the boundaries of ‘straight’ sexual practices and identities

This article reflects on interview and survey data from a study of non-gay-and-lesbian-identified sex-partiers in New South Wales, Australia, to consider the ways that participants in ‘alternative’ sex sub-cultures (such as BDSM/fetish and swinging) challenge conventional understandings of heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual identity. It seeks to unpack the various meanings that ‘sexual identity’ might hold for those who are both strongly heterosexual and strongly same-sex-attracted. Drawing on queer theorists such as Sara Ahmed (2006) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990, 1994) and Margaret Robinson’s (2013) framework of ‘strategic identity’, it considers the ways that research participants who express strong, simultaneous affiliations with heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual identities might (productively) trouble academic research and sexual health policy frameworks.

Safe on My Phone? Same-Sex Attracted Young People’s Negotiations of Intimacy, Visibility, and Risk on Digital Hook-Up Apps

This article draws on focus group interviews with same-sex attracted Australian men and women aged 18-29, to reflect on their accounts of the perceived risks and opportunities offered by hook-up apps such as Grindr, Blendr, and Hornet. Until recently, scholarly accounts of same-sex attracted men hooking up online have primarily focused on measuring the safety of sexual encounters in relation to HIV and “risky” sexual practices. This article extends previous health-related studies by considering the ways that the exchange of sexually explicit digital self-portraits (or selfies) feature within digital sexual negotiations and also exploring same-sex attracted women’s perceptions of safety and risk in relation to dating and hook-up apps and websites. It draws on recent scholarship on Grindr and other geo-locative hook-up apps to explore the material role that mobile phones and apps play in establishing a sense of safety, intimacy, and/or risk within flirtations and sexual interactions and the ways that young people’s “off-label” (or non-sexual) uses of hook-up apps might facilitate (and diminish) their sense of queer identity and visibility.