Thanks to America’s weird relationship with sex (“Sex sells!” “No, wait, sex is bad!”), comprehensive sex education is not available for most of America’s youth. As a result, our hypocritical sex-shaming society has made pornography the default introduction to sex for millions. Pornhub, one of the biggest purveyors of pornography online with almost 70 million visitors a day has taken note of that fact and launched a free online sex education project (please note before you click: the project itself is safe for work, but it’s still on pornhub.com...so clicker beware). The project, named the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center, features content on sexual health, relationships, and personalized Q & As from its director Dr. Laurie Betito, a clinical psychologist with over 30 years’ experience in sex therapy.
Considering pornography’s, uh, complicated relationship with sex and sexuality it is understandable that anyone would approach this development with a suspicious eye. Youth who use porn as their only form of sex ed have (surprise!) pretty unrealistic perceptions about what sex, bodies, and pleasure looks like. And thanks to the modern age’s high availability of free porn online and private mobile devices, we have to face that teens are able to view it more than ever. With almost 80% of sexually active teens aged 15-17 having sex for the first time with absolutely no formal sex education, we have to face the music. From TIME:
The average American young person spends over seven hours a day on media devices, often using multiple systems at once. Studies show that more than 75% of primetime TV programs contain sexual content, and the mention of sex on TV can occur up to eight to 10 times in a single hour. And that’s the soft stuff: A national sample study of 1,500 10 to 17-year-olds showed that about half of those that use the Internet had been exposed to online porn in the last year.
That’s why Pornhub’s move isn’t considered a completely bad thing by sexual health advocates. Woman-centered site SheKnows spoke with a few experts in related fields and some think it could be a springboard to including conversations about pleasure (in an age-appropriate way, of course) in comprehensive sex education.
Dr. Mimi Arbeit, a developmental psychologist and a sex educator, noted that while many teens and adults turn to the internet for sexual health information, often those who need or could benefit from sex ed don’t actively go searching for it or know where to look. In those cases, having a resource like the Sexual Wellness Center would be helpful so the information is available where people are already going.
“I like the idea of having the health stuff and the pleasure stuff next to each other,” Arbeit told SheKnows. “Some sex ed resources are all of the facts and none of the fun. People who turn to porn as part of the pursuit of sexual pleasure can now integrate that with getting information about condoms or getting relationship advice.”
So, yeah, this is far from a perfect set up. But Pornhub’s move is a direct response to America’s weird reluctance to face reality about sex and offer (age appropriate!) comprehensive sex education for everyone. We have wasted more than a BILLION dollars over 25 years on abstinence-only education (which has been proven useless in so many ways by so many studies that taxpayers might as well directly light their dollars on fire) — and the students subjected to it are more dependent on pornography as their education.
Comprehensive sex education that includes talk about consent and healthy relationships can be a cultural force that reduces the Donald Trump and Milo Yannopoulos’ of the world. Imagine if all of the Republicans had gotten proper sex ed — I bet we wouldn’t be debating over the merits of contraception and abortion coverage in 2017! At the very least I’d like to think we would have fewer rapists and that if anyone chose to violate the autonomy of another person, they would be shunned strongly enough to be blocked from ever becoming the President of the United States.