The future of sex education: Internet sex culture

Sex in the future will improve as we come to terms with unalterable biological facts about childhood sexuality, and unstoppable natural curiosity on the internet.

There is one more argument I didn’t get to when I discussed sex-positive sex ed in academic environments, and it’s a real knockout: we must teach children accurately about sex, because if we don’t do that proactively, then they will probably be taught by porn and that is way worse than sex-positive sex ed. If your first choice is that an eight-year-old not learn about sex at all, then you cannot possibly also believe that the same eight-year-old would be better served by Pornhub than by an accredited teacher in a public school. You may hate the choice, but you should choose a teacher over porn every single time, if forced to make the choice based strictly on cost-benefit analysis.

Here’s the stinger: it’s not entirely your choice. If we as a society don’t choose the teacher, then the eight-year-old will choose whatever’s handy. And that’s porn: porn is handy. Much handier than an encyclopedia, anyway. My special interest is human sexuality, but even I only read academic texts about sex because I want that detailed technical information. Once I had my head wrapped around the basics, I began spending way more time watching sex (or reading erotica) and having it than formally studying it.

Digital natives and “jagged profiles”

The first fighter jets were built to the “average” dimensions of a human, and so they fit nobody, because no single person is “average” across the board—we all have idiosyncrasies. It’s a fascinating story about affordances, but it’s not the focus now. When you take all the physical dimensions of a person—not simply their height and weight, but also breadth of shoulders, hip size, femur length, and so on—and look at them all in a “profile,” nobody’s profile goes straight across the middle of everything. There are no Joe Bauers; everyone has a “jagged profile.”

Jagged profiles are found in all sorts of places, because basically all of reality (with a few recent exceptions) was not made in a factory. This is why there is more variation within groups of people than between groups of people: men are taller on average than women, but not by very much compared to the entire range of either gender’s height. The same is true of any directly measurable trait, because the ranges of values are large and overlapping, and the averages are only slightly shifted from each other.

Digital natives, people who grew up with at-home internet and never knew life without a personal device, have jagged profiles for their literacy on a great many topics. When you have unfettered access to information, you can look up whatever you want, and our brains are always learning even if we’re not in school—it’s just a matter of what we’re learning. And as a behaviorist, I define “learning” as “changed behavior”—we learn how to do math by changing our behavior from answering problems incorrectly to correctly, we learn the mechanics of writing by changing the behaviors of letter formation, and so on. When we know better, we can do better.

We don’t make ‘em like we used to

When I started learning about sex in my childhood, I found that adults were real squeamish about discussing it with me. I turned to books, and had the discretion to hide my reading habits with innocuous camouflage materials—think comic book inside a math text, except the comic is an academic paper on the physiology of orgasm, and the math text is an encyclopedia of ancient world mythologies.

The first steady access to porn I got was on scrambled cable and my dad’s collection of VHS cassettes and Penthouse Forum magazines. Looking back, it was super tame and probably pretty healthy, as porn goes, but at the time it was the most exciting thing in the world! Years later, when we got at-home internet in my teens, I noticed a vast gulf between the mutual enjoyment and emotional bonding in my dad’s collection, and the exploitative brutality of porn sites competing with each other for precious eyeball time on the open internet. Even so, I repeatedly found myself engaging in addiction-like behaviors—and I’m only able to qualify them as “addiction-like” because I had also looked up enough about addiction to recognize the shape of it in my own behavior, so I had the opportunity to address those problem behaviors before they got out of control.

Digital natives generally have the same basic level of “loosely monitored” internet access that I had—even if their parents go full Net Nanny, unsecured devices will always somehow be available—but without the pre-gaming research from my childhood to contextualize those adolescent experiences, not to mention just-in-time advice from my dad like “Porn is to sex what Loony Tunes are to violence,” they’re a lot more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of porn.

Time to call in… the Jesuits?

Complicated as this gets, we can refocus by noticing that imperialist governments, drug pushers, and religious leaders all agree: you gotta hook ‘em while they’re young. The Jesuits famously said, “Give me the boy for his first seven years, and I will show you the man.” Formative years are formative; they lay the groundwork for life patterns that determine what “feels right” when we’re adults.

It’s one thing when the weirdo kid makes lewd comments, or brings a nudie mag to the playground, or propositions classmates out of nowhere. It’s another thing entirely when that kid says, “Look at this,” and shows you a screenful of things my editor will most certainly not let me describe in any detail at all. Sexual precocity can be caused by a great many precipitating factors, some innocuous and some horrifying, but everyone knew someone like that kid when they grew up. That kid has adapted to the role of a 21st-century provocateur, but we as a culture have not adapted to inoculate the rest of our children from such a chaotic influence.

That’s really the driving force here, to my mind: children are curious, some of them will be sexually precocious (for good reasons or bad), and our internet-capable pocket rectangles are upping the ante year after year. Therefore, we should inoculate our kids against the chaotic influence of their peers and the internet at large, by providing a clear and coherent idea of what we believe healthy sexuality should look like.

I used to teach like this!

The craziest thing is that I would actually be very open about my life with students back when I was working in schools (and not yet running educational workshops at orgies). But I had two rules I never broke: “I do not discuss my sexual experiences with students, and I do not discuss my drug experiences with students.” If students had scientific, medical, or ethical questions about sex and drugs, I would answer them directly, but always from first principles and by appealing to their own values, never by detailing my firsthand experiences.

I would sometimes get called to the main office over this policy, because some kid ran their mouth, or some parent had an objection. I was always able to explain myself to admin’s satisfaction, mainly with reference to those two rules. My admins loved that I would tackle difficult topics with students in an appropriate way, because I didn’t give them the allure of the taboo by forbidding those topics, I didn’t blow smoke trying to distract them, and I didn’t insult their savvy by lying to them. I was direct and developmentally appropriate, which can be a hard line to walk, but the line is there and it’s plenty firm to stand on.

This is the energy we need to bring, in order to create some kind of internet sex culture that is both safe for children and not unnecessarily restrictive for adults. We need to have something for kids to find when their natural curiosity is suddenly seized by pubertal hormone levels, or their precocious peers and the internet at large will be all they have to answer their questions. Lots of parents don’t want kids asking questions about sex at all, but those desires aren't based in reality and are extremely unlikely to materialize. Our challenge as a culture is to ignore the folks whose only acceptable option is “wishing the problem away,” and finding a way to act despite them, in order to save their children from the hazards of sexual ignorance in an internet-capable culture.