The purpose of porn, most people would agree, is to titillate. Its job is to arouse, to entertain – it's not usually thought of as an educational resource. Yet, faced with a dearth of practical and frank information around sex, increasing numbers of pornographers are taking up the mantle and producing explicit educational films.
The latest team of adult filmmakers to turn their hand to teaching are Berlin-based Sex School Hub, who say they want to bridge the gap between what we're taught about sex and our lived experience of it. Their platform, due to launch in March, will feature video demonstrations of everything from kissing to threesomes and spanking. Aimed at over-25s, they also cover sexual health and consent, and claim their years of experience having sex on camera makes them uniquely qualified to teach people how to do it in real life.
“As a pornographer inevitably the issue of sex education comes up,” said porn performer and Sex School cast member Lina Bembe. “You have to fully understand consent and sexual health, so there’s so much we can contribute.”
Sex School works with sex therapists to produce a script and storyboard for each film, but the demonstrations are largely improvised, a deliberate effort to dispel the myth that sex is always seamless and uncomplicated.
“We try to show the real conversations people have in these scenarios,” says Bembe. “In one scene I needed to pause and have some water. You'll also see us discussing barrier protections. We left in all that verbal communication and negotiation that normally gets edited out.
“When you work in porn you know the difference between the sex you have on screen – for your job – and real-life sex. We want to address the stereotypes, to talk about how porn is made, what is realistic and what is not.”
The site has one investor but will be largely dependent on subscriptions and paid views. Short clips discussing topics such as consent and sexual health will be available to stream for free but viewers will have to fork out for longer, explicit videos. They also hope to entice brands for sponsored content and paid partnerships.
Sex School’s Instagram account features dirty jokes and memes, as well as safe-for-work stills from their films and selfies of beautiful, semi-naked people hanging out together. “Every day we have people asking us sex questions, so we know we have an audience,” declares Bembe. In the UK 60 per cent of students say they already turn to porn to fill in gaps in their own sexual knowledge, according to a survey by the National Union of Students.
But pornographers taking on teaching is nothing new. Porn star Nina Hartley was positioning herself as a sex educator – leveraged by her nursing qualifications – back in the 80s. Even PornHub has had a go, launching its ‘Sexual Wellness Centre’ in 2017. While it’s tempting to write it off as simply another revenue stream, many pornographers say they were drawn to education out of a sense of moral duty.
Feminist pornographer Tristan Taormino has been producing instructive porn for over a decade. She believes that when it comes to education, it’s important to show as well as tell. “We learn a lot visually as human beings and there are not many opportunities to actually see people having sex,” she says. “That was a big part of my agenda. I wanted to show communication, explicit consent, lots of warm up.”
British performer Jason Domino set up Porn4PrEP after learning about the pre-exposure prophylaxis drug that reduces the risk of contracting HIV for people who are at a very high risk of contracting the virus – for instance, people who are HIV-negative and in a sexual relationship with a HIV-positive partner. He made a free porn film with his HIV-positive colleague to address the stigma around HIV and demonstrate on-screen that PrEP worked. The film has attracted over 100,000 unique users and Domino has spoken at the UN about his work.
“Sex education is a human right,” he says. “If we’re going to take this subject this seriously, we need to understand how much value there is in porn.” However, he is quick to point out that the job of education lies with governments, not porn stars, a view echoed by his fellow pornographers.
“The lack of [sex and relationships education] is not our responsibility,” says Bembe. “Although inevitably many performers have an interest in it.”
Taormino agrees. “The majority of pornographers are just interested in making entertainment and that’s totally fine,” she says. “But I think pornographers are an untapped resource.”
In the UK, 75 per cent of the public think that the impact of porn should be at least mentioned in sex education lessons. Yet the latest government proposals contained only a passing reference to the "relevant legal provisions" surrounding porn and were derided as “squeamish” by women’s groups for their references to “self-control”. Although sex and relationships education [SRE] is compulsory in UK secondary schools, academies and free schools are exempt and faith schools may omit anything not in keeping with their beliefs.
Over the next year, the government also plans to bring in age verification checks for online pornographic content in a bid to prevent under-18s from accessing porn, something both educators and pornographers have criticised.
Read more: Tumblr's porn ban is another internet blackout for sex workers
“What teenagers will do instead is use VPNs, or they’ll watch porn on the dark web where it’s completely unregulated,” says Domino. “The fact is, boys between 11 and 17 are going to be masturbating and they’re going to be going through puberty and we can either support them or we can ignore it.”
If sex education will not include porn, the argument seems to be, then porn must include sex education. Still, not everyone is convinced that porn is the right medium for education or that porn stars are the right people to provide it.
Ruby Stevenson, who works for sexual health charity Brook, says that while pornographers can bring valuable insight and experience, they need to be properly equipped to deliver it. “The wider variety of professional backgrounds there are, the richer sex education will be. However, anyone interested in being a sex educator has a responsibility to ensure they receive training so they'll make impartial and appropriate educators.”
Justin Hancock runs youth sex education website BISH and has been delivering SRE to young people and adults for more than 20 years. He says: “The limitation of the video is that it’s very didactic. A five-minute video on consent is just not that useful. You need to equip people with tools rather than telling them what to do.”
While both Stevenson and Hancock applaud the idea of instructive porn, they remain sceptical about its ability to replace or replicate comprehensive sex education. “Films like this provide food for thought about pleasure and desire,” says Stevenson. “But the foundational knowledge needs to come from resources designed specifically for educational purposes.”
This article is part of our in-depth series investigating how technology is changing love, sex and relationships.
From keeping an intimate secret from the internet to the battle to destroy super gonorrhoea, we'll explore the technologies and ideas changing how we all live and love – for better or worse.
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– Inside the strange world of China's romantic video games
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
