Using pornography for sex education: It's not an outrageous idea

“Sex educators and policymakers have to think about if and how they can use the power of porn to reach audiences with comprehensive sex education and/or how responsible porn promoting respectful, equal and pleasurable roles for all genders could be produced.”

This policy advice is from a paper titled Is Porn the New Sex Education published in November by researchers Pauline Oosterhoff, Luke Gilder and Catherine Mueller of the Institute of Development Studies in the United Kingdom.

With the rise of the internet over the past couple of decades, adolescents have been using commercial pornography to learn about sex. In India, as in many other developing nations, most adolescents do not get any formal sex education and learn about sex almost entirely through porn.

What the Institute of Development Studies researchers are proposing is to use the wide reach in influence of pornography – any printed or visual material containing explicit discription or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate sexual excitement – to actually teach adolescents and young adults about sex and safe sex.

The proposal raises all sorts of red flags, the biggest one being that popular commercial pornography is often made for the pleasure of men, and is sometimes violent and derogatory to women.

Oosterhoff, Gilder and Mueller propose that policymakers engage with pornography creators and distributors and to make pornography a tool for comprehensive sex education.

This would mean collaborating with commercial pornography makers to to disseminate age-appropriate, scientifically accurate information about human development, anatomy, contraception, childbirth, and sexually transmitted diseases including HIV with a rights-based and gender-focused approach – the elements of comprehensive sexuality education as defined by the United Nations Population Fund.

The issues related internet pornography, which is now part of mainstream culture, cannot be skirted and have be taken into consideration while talking about sex, the researchers said.

No sex talk, please

In India, most adolescents have no exposure to sexuality education and hardly anyone is trying to right that wrong. In India, a former health minister recently proposed replacing sex education with yoga.

As per the third round of the National Family Health Survey conducted between 2005 and 2006, only 19% of girls and 35% of boys between the ages of 15 and 24 knew about HIV and AIDS. Only a little more than 10% of adolescents knew knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases. Yet, in 2007, the Adolescence Education Programme that covers sexuality education was banned in 12 states including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh.

As Oosterhoff explains in the Guardian, sexuality education helps promote sexual and reproductive health, and in turn help reduce maternal and child mortality, and rates of sexually transmitted diseases. The lack of political interest in improving comprehensive sexual health is a major reason why poor countries are failing to significantly reduce maternal mortality,” she writes.

“In a country where there is a culture of silence surrounding sex, young people have to get their information from somewhere or the other,” said Bishakha Datta, founder of non-profit organisation Point of View that works on issues relating to the internet and sexuality. Datta pointed out that that porn existed even before the internet when young people had learned about sex through images, text and videos.

Pleasure and popularity

The Love Matters website that provides evidence-based sex education claims to attract one million users. However, there is no doubt that commercial pornography sites are far more popular. PornHub, a popular commercial pornography site, has 1.3 billion visits per month, which is about 650 times more visits than the 2 million visits per month to the global top ranked sex education site www.scarletteen.com.

Even with the existence of such sex information websites, por websites still seem to be the go to space for information.“Young people – especially boys – want to know what to do and how to do it, and are ashamed to ask that as the assumption is there that boys (and men) should or do already know,” said Müller. “So, they turn to pornography which literally shows ‘what and how it’s done’.”

And then pornography offers pleasure even to the information seekers. Oosterhoff and her colleagues found that the internet search keywords used to look for information on sex and pornography are barely distinguishable. The researchers also analysed often used keywords on the sites Love Matters and Porn Hub and found out that some users searching for porn end up on sex education websites.

“We know a relationship between the two [porn and sex education sites] exists, it’s only logical that it would be reciprocal,” said Gilder.

That’s why pleasure and sex education should not be delinked, said Vithika Yadav, head of the Love Matters website in India. “When we talk of sex education, pleasure is not being embraced,” she said.

Before the launch of Love Matters India in 2011, the organisation conducted research, based on which they decided to make their website conversational, and what she calls a “pleasure affirmative space.”

“We use pleasure as a welcome mat to talking about sex and challenging gender norms,” said Yadav.

Talking and teaching porn

So, once you tap into the reach of pornography to teach sex, how do you assure gender sensitivity in sex education. It is not just squeamishness, that might make policymakers reluctant to touch porn but the very real worry that pornography is very often misogynistic.

Many people studying pornography, its trends and effects say that it is best to have a comprehensive sexuality education that also includes discussion on porn, especially the sexism in it. Sex education curriculum, that does not include pornography is not a sex education and fails its safeguarding duty, argues Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett argued in this the Guardian.

It may not be so much of a stretch to go from openly discussion porn to using it to teach.

“The porn industry is very diverse,” said Oosterhoff. “It includes feminist porn producers who aim to produce porn that is gender-sensitive, inclusive and safe. Policy makers could work with these progressive porn producers on sex education, for example.”

Such attempts have been made in the past.

An article by Katy Albury from University of New South Wales, Australia in the journal Porn Studies, speaks of attempts made by filmmakers in the sphere of “educational pornography”. She writes about some producers of commercial pornography in the US have produced “couples” videos that specifically offer sexually explicit instruction, or incorporated safer-sex strategies including use of condoms.

In the UK, producer Anna Span has collaborated with health-promotion organisation The Pleasure Project to produce heterosexual porn featuring condoms.

In India, however, policymakers have to start from the basics of sex education. “Currently parents don’t want to talk about it nor teachers,” said Datta. “It is a situation where porn is the only source. We need more sources for sex education, not just porn.”