Abstract
Despite its widespread use, pornography has been vilified as a symptom of personal and cultural depravity and as a cause of rape, aggression, devaluation of women, and marital dissolution. Yet in some cases there may be personal, relational, and social value to the use of sexually explicit material. In this paper, we briefly review the literature, summarizing both negative and neutral-to-positive findings, then describe specific uses of sexually explicit material in educational, clinical, and medical settings.