let's talk about: sex education

Spending my formative teen years at an all girls, Catholic boarding school in leafy suburbia, you can probably imagine the extent of the sex education afforded to me. When we hit the lofty age of 15, the school realised they couldn’t put it off anymore. It was with a certain level of resentment that a plain tissue box with an ambiguous question mark scrawled onto the side appeared on the teacher’s desk in the science lab, and we were half-heartedly encouraged to place our burning questions about sex inside. In hindsight, the session was a disaster: in and amongst the questions concerning flavoured condoms and lube, the teacher mumbled through the mechanics of the act, faintly gesturing to the comically large diagram of a penis that sat, for one day only, pride of place at the front of the classroom. Naturally, we found the whole affair utterly hysterical; I’ve since realised, with horror, that this one class was the extent of my official education about sex. Talk of STD’s and condoms was shied away from, briskly brushed under the carpet so as to not upset what the school saw to be our staunchly conservative parents. Speaking about porn or sex toys was strictly taboo, even amongst the girls. Bananas were for eating in the refectory; God forbid they made a far more practical appearance in the science department.

It was within this context that I found myself catapulted into my first summer out of school, and then onto university, where I watched classmates I had known for seven years finally learn what all the fuss was about. This time of transition between school and uni was a challenge for me; I felt so strongly that school hadn’t equipped me or any of my cohort with the attitude towards sex that I have now. Sex, like smoking and drugs, was taught as something to be careful with, not celebrated. Mysticism swathed sex in a terrifying, but alluring way, and we had no concept of how to separate the fact from the fiction.  

I was incentivised to write this piece after attending a talk last Tuesday by the inimitable Cindy Gallop, an advertising pioneer turned activist entrepreneur, who was promoting her website, MakeLoveNotPorn.com. At heart, Gallop is a salesperson – she has a product that she is pushing, and theoretically speaking the product is an important one. Sex, she believes, has become defined by the mechanics of the act rather than the inherent messy beauty of the before, during and after. Her website is a platform on which to post videos of ‘real’ couples having ‘real’ sex in order to educate people on the realities of sexuality, as opposed to the porn websites currently on offer; indeed, in one video on the TedTalks website, Cindy comments that ‘learning about sex from porn is like learning how to drive from Fast and Furious.’ The purpose of the website is to highlight the importance of demystifying sex and making people, both young and old, aware of the problematic depictions of sex that we are bombarded with every day. 

She certainly makes a compelling case; I was immediately swept up by her fervour and energy. At its core, Cindy’s argument centred around the importance of opening a wider discussion about sex in order to make sex more enjoyable. Do what feels right, rather than what you think should feel right or what you think would pleasure the person you’re having sex with. It seems self-explanatory, right? 

However, as I thought more about the implications of such a platform, I began to question her interpretation of that original idea of demystifying sex. It is undeniable that sex education needs to be revolutionised; however, I can’t help but feel that there are other, more engaging ways of doing so than perpetuating the issues that sexual videos create. One of these issues is the inherent performative aspect in any sort of sexual video - in her quest to celebrate real sex between real couples, I myself asked Cindy the question of how the website goes about distinguishing between the performative and the ‘real’ when choosing videos. The moment a camera enters the bedroom is the moment at which the couple are made aware of the pervasive presence of an audience. Therefore, is another website full of videos of people having sex for an audience a viable answer to this issue of sexual transparency? Though Cindy prides herself on choosing videos that celebrate ‘real’ sex, how are we able to make the distinction between this ‘real’ brand of sex and a performative one that is played out on other, and arguably Cindy’s, websites? 

Interestingly, she wanted the website to be seen and used as any other social media platform – however, this concept is undeniably fraught with issues. Just as we pick the best pictures of us in order to cultivate a certain image of ourselves, so will these couples who upload their videos. How can you create something that is real when, at best, it can only resemble want we want to put across as our reality? Cindy’s desire to show sex as something that is organic and natural is immediately challenged by the vulnerability of any social media platform; the moment it becomes a platform that perpetuates social media presence, it is open to the vanities and careful cultivation of any other platform of its kind. 

Many of the students in the audience raised the issue of paying for the website. As it currently stands, a user has to pay $5 to access each video for up to three weeks. With platforms like Pornhub that are free to access and use, a website like MakeLoveNotPorn is, frankly, unsustainable. I don’t know how many times a student’s morals would readily prevail over their dwindling bank account. Undeniably, there are serious financial difficulties in setting up this kind of website, including a responsibility to the MakeLoveNotPorn-stars that upload these videos; however, if Cindy claims to want to grow this platform as an educative space for young people, she must engage with the demographic's issues as a whole. 

She finished her talk with a final flourish, asking students in the audience to contribute to the website by filming themselves having sex at various iconic locations in Oxford. Is this ‘real’ sex, the one Cindy alleges to champion? Or is she capitalising on the very factor she claims to be against? 

Normalising sex has never been more crucial, but Cindy’s website falls short of providing people with a viable alternative. This is not to say that I didn’t get anything from the talk; Cindy’s presentation was thought provoking and I agreed with many of the issues she raised. Let’s have an open, honest conversation about sex, one that is outside the current framework of sexual education. Creating another website on which people have sex is not going to revolutionise how we see sex. Throw the rule book out.