This essay explores the idea of porn literacy and in particular its manifestations in popular documentary formats aimed at youth audiences. While education on pornography is increasingly seen as a means to inoculate young people against the supposed ‘messages’ of pornography, those proposed interventions seemingly have no intentions to take up any research insights offered by the discipline of porn studies. What, then, is the purpose of an educative practice that declines to understand the nuanced contours of pornographic histories, production and content? This article begins with an exploration of an example of popular mainstream education offered by youth documentary and argues that porn literacy has little relevance without drawing on porn scholarship
