It’s Sexual Health Week this week and the focus here in the UK is on porn and how we can teach young people about it. Listen to us chat about whether porn is actually the sexual health issue that people often say it is and what the alternatives are.
Despite what you may have heard or may think, most young people do not watch porn. In fact, most young people report not having seen a sexual image. The EU Kids Online project found that 25% of 15-16 year olds had seen a sexual image (and that the majority of those were not hardcore pornography, as they were mostly seen on television).
The media has often been seen as a threat to the well being of young people. Porn is just the latest of a series of types of media that were thought to have a corrupting influence: Penny Dreadfuls, comic books in the 40s and 50s and, the video nasties of the 80s and 90s.
Even when young people do see sexual images they haven’t been shown to cause an effect in the ways that many people think. As with all media there isn’t a simple ‘effect’ on someone who engages with it. The viewer of the media brings to it all of their values, knowledge, thoughts, desires and ideas and so is able to critique it. It’s an active and on-going process. There’s more about the research on this over at The Sexualization Report, which is a project that MJ was involved in.
Porn is more of an issue for relationships and sex education than it is for young people. For years sex education has been too little, too late and too biological. The availability of porn (even if it’s not actually availed upon) demonstrates how far short the current offerings of most RSE comes.
We think that there are bigger topics that could be covered in RSE. For example the issue of gender and sexual diversity, where young people are feeling so vulnerable and under-supported that they may harm themselves or take their own lives. We could also teach about treating ourselves and others kindly for instance. Or we could cover consent in a much more in-depth and nuanced way – given that 1 in 10 women report having had sex against their will (and 1 in 71 men).
Thankfully, there is such a thing that we have been involved in, alongside Alice Hoyle, which is the DO… project (you may have heard us talking about this on previous podcasts). Which is all available for free now DO…
If you’re a fan of our inclusive approach in Enjoy Sex, where we tried to make every page include every (adult) person, then you will notice that we have tried to do a similar thing with the DO… lesson plans. We think that teaching the more fundamental topics of consent, relationships, power and how we feel about ourselves then this will work for young people who don’t look at porn as well as those that do.
© Meg-John Barker and Justin Hancock, 2017