Podcast: Can porn ever replace sex ed?
Sex Coach Jenn Mason explains what’s missing in porn and sex ed
Podcast by Luisa Loi
Luisa Loi: Welcome to Klipsun Out Loud, podcasts from Western Washington University’s award-winning student magazine, Klipsun. This edition’s theme is Candid. I’m your host Luisa Loi, and today’s topic is sex education and porn literacy.
Luisa: Jenn Mason is a sex coach and educator who owns Wink Wink, a “non-creepy” and inclusive sex shop in downtown Bellingham.
Luisa: Mason grew up in the 90s, a time when conversations about sex were fewer than today.
Luisa: Purity culture is an Evangelical movement born in the 1990s that promoted the idea that girls and women have to be modest, sexually pure and subservient to their fathers and future husbands. These teachings have harmed women in many ways, from controlling their bodies and suppressing their desires to perpetuating rape culture.
Luisa: While her family was not a part of it, Mason believes Purity Culture had some influence on her sex education in school and on the general conversations about sex at the time.
Jenn Mason: The sex education that I had was very minimal. It was largely scare tactics, you know, ‘You’re gonna get STIs and die, and sex is terrible.’ And, and that was pretty much it.
Luisa: Mason believes conversations about sex in schools and our daily conversations have changed a lot since then, but there is room for improvement.
Luisa: According to the latest report of the Sexual Information and Education Council of the United States in 2021, sex education is mandatory in 33 states,including Washington. In 2020, Washington passed Senate Bill 5395, which requires all public schools to provide age appropriate and comprehensive sex education by the 2022–23 academic year.
Luisa: So, what will it look like? Kids in kindergarten through third grade will learn about feelings and getting along with others. Fourth and fifth graders will learn about consent and boundaries, bullying or sexual violence prevention, healthy relationships, HIV and STD prevention, and human development. Students in middle and high school will learn about healthy behaviors and prevention in addition to the concepts they’ve been taught in previous years.
Luisa: Although Washington is among 17 states that require sex education to be medically accurate, we’re also among 34 states that require schools to emphasize abstinence in our sex education programs. Not as a continuation of purity culture though. Washington law in fact states that “abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain means for the prevention of the spread or contraction of the AIDS virus through sexual contact.”
Luisa: Today the sex positive movement is taking over purity culture, replacing shame and repression with pleasure and sexual freedom while promoting consent, physical and mental wellbeing, and healthy relationships.
Mason: For me, healthy sex positivity is a container where everybody’s sexuality can be affirmed and accepted it prioritizes communication and understands that consent is a minimum. I think that mistake that we’re making in mainstream culture, when we talk about sex is putting consent as like, is defining healthy sex as consensual sex and that’s it.
Luisa: Mason believes sex positivity can sometimes ignore different experiences and struggles, such as belonging to different cultural groups, or having a disability.
Luisa: It also needs to create an environment where victims of sexual trauma can heal and create a healthy relationship with sex.
Mason: I think that sometimes sex positivity at worst can, can be too simple, and can assume that we all come to the table without barriers.
Luisa: Mason said sex education also needs to abandon its exclusively white, CIS, hetero and abled agenda that focuses on reproduction and building a heteronormative family.
Mason: The most common question overall that we get within the shop and within coaching is “Am I normal?”
Mason: In sex, the only normal is variation. The only normal is that people do all kinds of different things and that your body wants all kinds of different things at different times and across your lifespan. And so I think that that is really at the root of most people’s questions. ‘Is what I want okay?’
Mason: In my ideal world, it would be coming from a pleasure perspective. It would be really centering queer folks in sex education, because when we send to our queer folks, we do a better job at sex education for everybody, we need to be talking about disability, and we need to be including people with physical disabilities and developmental disabilities in sex education, and delivering sex education for them in ways that makes sense.
Luisa: Mason also believes sex education should include conversations about pornography so kids can understand what they’re watching and make ethical decisions.
Mason: Pornography is a huge part of many young people’s lives and something that most young people will be exposed to.
Luisa: For many people, pornography can be the only form of sex education they have access to. While Mason acknowledges that porn doesn’t necessarily ruin the viewer’s mental health and relationships, it can sometimes lead to misconceptions surrounding sex and pleasure.
Mason: You learn a lot of things about sex that are, you know, inaccurate, because you’re basing it off of people who are acting or who are creating a film for other people’s consumption and not for having sex that maybe they find to be enjoyable.
Luisa: When they’re watching maybe consensual non consent in sex, or in pornography, you don’t really see the discussions beforehand about what’s going to happen and what are people okay with, and what are they not okay with. And we forget that, you know, porn performers like they have contracts, they it’s, it’s specifically talked about exactly what’s going to happen in the film. Well, we don’t see that part.
Mason: But people take that into their own sex lives and assume ‘Oh, I can just do that to my partner, that’s what it looks like is I can just spontaneously try whatever I’d like to with them.’ And that’s not healthy at best, and sexual assault at worst.
Luisa: While she noticed an increase of queer representation in mainstream porn, Mason thinks it’s still an exploitative industry designed for the hetero male gaze.
Mason: It can be particularly done for someone else’s enjoyment rather than for the enjoyment of the people who are a part of it.
Luisa: Mason recalled some customers who were queer and had no idea of how to have sex with their partners until they watched porn, either because queer sex was excluded from their sec education or because didn’t know other queer people who could share their experiences.
Luisa: Pornography has also impacts on people’s self image, as Mason said the actors are selected for their physical attributes.
Mason: And then when you add in the extra vulnerable element of sex, I think that it can be particularly affecting in terms of us feeling like, you know, ‘No one’s gonna want to see my body’ or ‘Something’s wrong with my body, because I don’t look like this performer.’ And even beyond what our bodies look like, we see porn performers, with their bodies performing in certain ways, and can assume that our bodies need to perform in those ways also.
Mason: I think that people should know that porn is a form of entertainment and not a form of education.
Luisa: That’s it for this edition of Klipsun Out Loud, podcasts from Western Washington University’s student magazine, Klipsun. Thanks for listening!