Let's Talk About Sex (Education)
- Girrl Wrrld
- May 21, 2020
- 7 min read
Updated: Jun 15, 2020
“Where did you first learn about sex?”
For many adults, the answer to this question is unclear. They are unable to recall a process that accurately and safely explained the ins and outs (quite literally) of sex, relationships and puberty. Many instead remember piecing together scraps of information from a number of, often highly unreliable, sources. Their big brother, their best friend, that weird boy they sat next to in maths. Copies of Playboy passed around behind the bins at school, that movie they definitely weren’t meant to watch. Even in best case scenarios an awkward, brief and largely uninformative conversation with their parents. For almost no-one, the answer to that question is: school.
This is strange, even conceptually, because in all other areas we expect schools to form the basis of our knowledge and education. Slips in GCSE maths scores frequently make national headlines, failures to cover crucial historical events become subjects of topical discussion. So why, when studies show that over a fifth of pupils describe their sex education as bad, is it largely ignored? Apathy? Prudishness? Or a culture whereby adults raised outwith the internet age don’t understand the devastating consequences of not teaching our young people what sex should be?
Whether sex education was received too late, in far too little detail or not at all, most describe it as an embarrassing, inadequate experience. Whilst problematic in itself, this issue has taken on a new urgency in the 21st century. Children’s understanding of sex no longer comes from crude magazines and 18 rated films; it comes from internet porn. And if that thought doesn’t scare you, you are most definitely unaware of the realities of the porn industry today.
90% of the most mainstream porn contains violence against women. Gagging and choking are amongst the most common sexual acts across all popular pornographic content. Fetishization of pre-pubescent girls consistently makes the front pages of sites like ‘Pornhub’. And yet the average age that boys start viewing this content is eleven.
Eleven.
These are young boys on the brink of puberty, battling with newfound feelings of arousal that are so often mixed with shame, in a culture in which sex is so taboo. In what is arguably their most malleable state, boys are seeing content they will often find shocking, disturbing and upsetting. And yet, they are not being exposed to any alternatives. They are not being told that sex should be about consent, enjoyment and mutual pleasure. They are being told that, to fit into the toxic masculine culture in which they have grown-up, they must treat women as objects. Porn is telling boys to hit, control and hurt women. And no-one else is telling them otherwise.
So, if this is what we are telling boys, what are we telling girls? Unfortunately, the messages given on the other side of the gender-spectrum are even bleaker. The cultural hangover from an era where a women’s chastity defined her has melded with our increasingly hypersexualised modern society. Together, they have conceived sexual expectations encompassing the worst of both worlds. Women are expected to be perpetually ready for sex and yet simultaneously to take no pleasure from it.
The porn industry is far-from self-contained. In fact, it has seeped into all aspects of our daily-life. Gail Dines, in her TED-talk on our pornified culture, mentions the concept of the ‘reader inscribed in the text’; an idea that for every image there is an intended audience. One look at the sultry eyed, barely clothed women used in every single aspect of the media- from perfume adverts, to video games, to film posters- makes it very clear who this audience is: heterosexual men. These are women, heads thrown back as they use Dove shampoo, armpits and legs hairless as they survive the apocalypse and fight zombies in booty-shorts, who are present in every facet of daily life, and who are asking, quite blatantly, to be fucked.
Growing up, I was, like most other girls I knew, weaned on Disney movies and romantic comedies. Aside from the cringe-inducing sexist jokes littered through every ‘chick flick’, wider concern has been voiced about gender roles and the lack of strong female protagonists. What is less frequently discussed, however, are the ideas surrounding sex that the films, books and music aimed at young girls tend to portray. Because it is not just boys who are being conditioned into thinking violence and sex should be synonymous- the 4.7 million copies of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ that were sold are evidence enough this is not the case. The ‘Fifty Shades’ franchise in which a manipulative, borderline-abusive relationship is portrayed as being ‘sexy’ and, even more worryingly, ‘romantic’ is not an anomaly. From the teen-craze of the ‘Twilight’ saga, to the continued love for the classic ‘Wuthering Heights’, the literature written for, and largely by, women is consistently responsible for romanticising violence and abuse. Girls are taught that, for men, being possessive, controlling and violent are, in fact, signs of them being in love. And after years of being told- by the boybands who sing about little other than their bodies, the books that normalise BDSM-level sex, the boyfriends in movies who are possessive and mean- that this is how men act, they just want you, they can’t help it, it becomes near-impossible not to believe. Female passivity and submission have been increasingly sexualised, to the extent that consent has been almost eradicated from any portrayal of sex.
‘So what?’ you may be thinking. ‘We like sex, it’s in our biology, so to live in a culture that embraces that isn’t a bad thing. We’re sexually liberated- we’ve escaped the shame and punishment of the church-dominated eras before us and moved onto embracing sex into our culture and media. Some women like rough sex- they should have that choice. Men are always going to want to sleep with women, all that’s happened is we’ve accepted the facts.’
This rhetoric is not uncommon and demonstrates, quite frankly, a profound lack of research and thought into the issue at hand. Describing our society as ‘sexually liberated’ is like describing North Korea as a harmonic democracy. A quarter of women are domestically abused in their lifetime. To suggest that the increased access to violent porn has no link to this statistic is absurd. Surely it is far from coincidental that choking is one of the most common sexual acts across porn content yet is also the act from which domestically abused women are most at risk of death. In a culture littered with rape jokes, where the US President is a living endorsement of our ‘pussy-grabbing’ society, we should be terrified when more than a third of young people leave school having never been taught about consent. Through consistently inadequate sex education, the prudish attitudes of our educational institutions are failing our young girls and throwing them directly into a culture of rape, violence and domestic abuse.
Even aside from the worryingly violent sexual ideals perpetuated, we are far from a culture of sexual-liberation: generationally we are enjoying sex less. Our generation is having less sex than any reported before us. Unsurprisingly, the rise in mental health problems and desensitisation from excessive porn consumption are being flagged as two-key contributing factors. Increasingly, the stress and unrealistic expectations associated with sex are preventing people from enjoying it.
Performance anxiety and erectile dysfunction are increasingly common amongst young men, who feel obliged to fit the dominating masculine roles endorsed in porn. Pressure to orgasm and perform is mounting to a point whereby sex becomes stressful, unenjoyable and, in many cases, unattainable. For women, their own pleasure is completely removed from the picture. Shame around female masturbation, and lack of anatomical knowledge, show drastically less girls able to masturbate to orgasm than boys, integral to understanding the importance of their own enjoyment. No wonder the phrase ‘the orgasm gap’ has been coined in a culture that teaches men the goal of sex is to orgasm, whilst teaching women the goal of sex is for men to orgasm.
The anxieties perpetuated by porn are removing a key component of sex: the notion that it should be fun. For all the sleek shots and impressively large tits that porn can offer, it will consistently fail to align with reality which, whilst less glamourous, is not necessarily worse. Sex is going to be awkward and imperfect and funny, and erasing this deprives young people of one of the most enjoyable aspects of sex itself. Porn can continue to provide an unrealistic and yet enjoyable entertainment medium so long as we pair this with an accurate depiction of reality, and remove the misconception that porn exemplifies what sex should look like. Certainly, we are capable of making this distinction. Film consistently depicts unrealistic versions of reality, but our social narrative accepts them as an imagined artform, not meant to mirror real-life. Where porn falters is in our inability to view it in this light, through the taboo nature of the content, leaving young people instead feeling that porn portrays sex in a realistic manner.
We need to go a step further in our push for change. Most pressingly- consent and abuse need to be at the forefront of our discussions. But there are further problems with the negative, fear-based teaching of sex-ed that so many receive. With a focus on the biology of reproduction, followed by the dangers of engaging in sexual activity (unwanted pregnancies, STIs, rape etc.) we risk alienating our young people by not discussing what sex is predominantly about: pleasure. Research has debunked claims that sex-positive education encourages teenagers to have sex earlier; teenagers are always going to engage in sexual activities. But, as we have seen, their ideas of what these should look like are often hugely damaging. The job of schools is to ensure sex happens in the most safe, consensual and enjoyable way possible. If you have noticed a heteronormative narrative in this discussion it is largely because, not only is mainstream society perpetuating gender-roles that aren’t LGBTQ+ inclusive, but so long as schools teach sex as being about reproduction and not pleasure, there is no space for the community in the narrative. Society provides juxtaposing ideas of what sex should be to boys and girls, with no forum where these can combine and paint a mutual picture. This is where our schools can step-in as a middle-ground where contrasting sexual ideas can come together in an open, positive discussion forum. In making sex-education about safety, consent and, most importantly, pleasure, there is the opportunity to change attitudes. The porn-industry is catered towards public desire- change the demand and the industry is forced to change with it.
Obviously, as with all social attitudes, change will not happen overnight. However, this is not to say that to let yourself be overwhelmed into apathy is an acceptable response. We are currently, as a society, feeding an entire generation a false and damaging narrative about what sex should be and subsequently creating a culture of shame, violence and unnecessary anxieties. Social change requires every influencer- parents, friends, anyone with a voice- to speak out, challenge and educate. But the forum over which we have the most control is in our nation’s schools. We must collectively push for comprehensive, sex-positive and mandatory sex education nation-wide. Lessons from which, unlike in the current system, you cannot remove your child. We need to stop teaching young people that sex should be about pressure, porn and the patriarchy and focus on its core purpose: pleasure.
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