Last night, I watched Channel 4’s The Sex Education Show Vs Porn, a tirade against internet naughtiness, which, apparently is corrupting our kids and making them all want to have boob jobs and vaginoplastys.
Presented by Anna Richardson, a slightly fearsome brunette with more than a touch of Xena about her, the show is the front-end of an investigative campaign to get children away from porn and increase knowledge about what is referred to as ‘real’ bodies and ‘real’ sex. So far, the main action of the campaign seems to have been driving around in a large lorry with a picture of a little girl looking at smutty videos in a sex shop splashed across the side. ‘THIS WOULDN’T HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE. WHY DOES IT HAPPEN ONLINE?’ reads the catchline.
Oh, Ms Richardson. You mean well. Sex education in this country is obviously inadequate – we only need to refer back to The Sun‘s gleeful coverage of the Alfie Patten story to see how ignorant some kids are about sex, relationships and parenthood. Furthermore when Richardson confronts secondary school pupils about their attitudes to the opposite sex, it is clear that pornographic images (and general immaturity) do influence the sexual attitudes of young boys and girls (essentially via boys rather than through direct contact with the material), sometimes negatively.
However, the more the show carries on, the more apparent it is that the campaign is grossly ignorant of the issue in question, and the more everything resembles a bizarre, Brasseye-style spoof. Let’s start with the campaign poster. The girl in a porn shop – a powerful image, certainly, but one that derails the whole idea of the poster – how many pre-teen girls are you aware of that regularly come upon or search for porn on the internet? Exactly. Essentially it’s a phenomenon amongst men and teenage boys – a phenomenon that has only been examined with any kind of insight or understanding in Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake – which Anna Richardson could do with reading. I’m not saying it’s appropriate. I’m not saying it’s harmless. But I will say that, while little girls may be shocked and disgusted by porn they come across accidentally, it is the boys that hunt it down that develop negative attitudes towards sex. This much is obvious from the way the 16-year-olds talk. When asked why they get brazilian waxes, the girls say “because boys like it”, not ‘because I saw it in a porn movie.’
The poster is actually a minor point, it turns out, because there’s further overly sensational measures in the programme that mostly serve to illustrate how ignorant the creators are of the issues they are investigating. A laugh-out-loud moment comes when Richardson types ‘porn’ into google and sternly turns to the camera before saying “245 million hits”. She then is shocked to find she’s being taken to sites she ‘didn’t even click on’ (i.e. popups – use a blocker?) and nearly jumps out of her skin when a banner-ad disguised as a sexy instant message rises from the bottom of her screen. “Someone’s just sent me a message. A child could accidentally reply to that message!” – urm, no, Anna, they couldn’t, and a teenager would be wise enough not to bother with such obvious red herrings.
The show’s general message is a valuable one, and based in fact, but the whole thing struck me as over the top. Confronting schoolchildren with spotty boobs and stretch marks amply demonstrates that bodies come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. But surely the point should be that all these variations can also be attractive – a point that the sterile presentation of live naked models did not make. Telling kids that without surgery, no-one has perfect looking boobs is likely to produce the opposite effect to that intended. Plus, while airbrushed magazine covers, page 3 girls, hollywood movies and glossy American TV programmes still propogate these images of perfection (natural and enhance) that provide much of the visual stimulus in our day to day lives, the dogma that reality is imperfect comes across as false and pessimistic. Why settle with that when you can surf on over to Xtube [would it be hypocritical to link here?]?
See the Channel 4 Sexperience site here
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