It is always great to have a whole day to work with students, so I was really excited to go up to York and to the Archbishop’s Holgate School. We started with a whole year assembly on gender and gender identity. We talked about sexuality and gender… Read More »Gender and identity at Archbishop’s Holgate School, York
Like most adults in the UK my school sex education was rudimentary. By law, the science curriculum must cover puberty and reproduction and then in secondary school give information about HIV and sexually transmitted diseases. I was one of the lucky ones who had a dedicated sex and relationship education class with the brave Mrs Stickland who taught us 13 and 14 year-olds about sex, contraception and consent. Outside of the national curriculum, schools can offer as much or as little as they want but most choose not to and, scarily, 26% of secondary school pupils report getting no sex and relationship education (SRE) at all. Which leaves young people desperate to know more but unable to access reliable sources. A staggering 80% of young people get their sex education from elsewhere…their friends, TV and increasingly pornography.
So what is anyone doing about it? Well an old friend of mine, Sarah, and her husband Matt run a programme in schools in Bury St Edmunds called The Love Life Project. They have been running these workshops for years and I have been promising to come for just as long, so this summer I went back to school…
In terms of my faith, I fall somewhere near agnostic, though has never stopped Sarah and I being friends. I respect people with faith but as a feminist I have found some aspects of religion problematic for women’s rights. The role of the Catholic church in the HIV/AIDs epidemic in Africa, the picketing of abortion clinics by Christian groups and the emphasis by the religious on abstinence though its efficacy is widely questioned has left me wondering what role, if any, religion should have in sex education. So it’s fair to say I approached these two days with a little trepidation.
But my fears were totally unfounded. Sarah and Matt have designed the programme to have minimal faith content. They actively don’t proselytise and apart from discussing the non-religious benefits of abstinence there was no even vaguely Christian content. What their course does have is some great activities that got the young people talking and thinking about sex and relationships. What’s more, as a husband and wife team they come prepared to be totally honest about their love lives, giving examples to the young people of where they made mistakes and what they would do differently.
They warmed up with a discussion of the non-religious reasons for abstinence which got the young people thinking about all sorts of issues. They covered STI transmissions, consent (using this really cool description) and a frank discussion about porn. The truth is, no one is talking to young people about porn. Schools, for fear of seeming to endorse it, tend to ignore the subject totally. But when The LoveLife Project surveyed 13-14 years olds across the Bury St Edmunds they found that 90% of boys cited porn as the most influential factor in their sex education.
Journalist Tanya Gold addressed the thorny issue of porn and feminism in Stylist magazine last month, observing that “consensual sex, consensually on camera, for the pleasure of consensual viewers, should be in the same box as all other consensual sex acts”.
In mainstream porn, however, Gold ventures “violent misogyny is everywhere”. Her answer? Feminist porn.
I’ll get back to feminist porn later because what interested me most was not what she wrote as much as the readers’ comments.
Far from the troll-style hate comments you’d expect following an article by a woman (a feminist at that), her respondents identified some of the grey areas in porn that feminist debate may have overlooked.
Take amateur porn, for instance. Damien asked: “Are you completely over-looking that the most popular and fastest-growing style of porn is homemade? It’s two people expressing their own sexual desire however they see fit.”
Damien’s point is a good one – amateur porn is largely absent from discussions about porn and feminism. This homemade genre appears to offer what mainstream porn lacks: diversity, affection, respect and the odd female orgasm.
Real couples enjoying themselves is a rare thing in mainstream porn but amateur is choc full of it. Equally, though, many of these novice “productions” are inspired by Hollywood and are predominantly from the male point of view.
Read More »Feminism and porn, what’s missing from the debate?
