Sex Education

The result? “Females showed an increase in safe sex intentions after exposure to the dramatic program, but not the nonnarrative program.” It seems basic human empathy is largely responsible: The women who identified with the “O.C.” characters reported feeling more vulnerable to an unplanned pregnancy even weeks later and thus were more likely to plan to protect themselves. “Many of the women participants were able to put themselves in the place of the characters and sense they could end up in a similar situation if they weren’t careful,” Emily Moyer-Gusé, coauthor of the study, said in a press release. 

There’s no surprise here. Stories can be incredibly powerful in shaping human behavior — think of religious parables and fairy tales. But it hardly has to be in the literary canon to be influential: I’ve written before about how soap operas starring modern, independent women have been associated with an increase in egalitarian attitudes in remote Indian villages. It’s easy to forget amid the onslaught of “Real Housewives” spinoffs and “Jersey Shore” marathons, but entertainment can be positively educational.

There is a rather surprising part of the study, however: The news program had no noticeable effect on young men and the “O.C.” episode actually “decreased male participants’ safe sex intentions.” Moyer-Gusé guesses this was a factor of women finding “The O.C.” more entertaining and relatable, and that men could be similarly influenced by a show that better spoke to them. Still, I find it shocking that a show dramatizing the stresses of teen pregnancy would actually discourage them from planning to have safe sex; it’s an unnerving reminder that influence isn’t always positive.

I would love to see a similar study involving reality TV shows like MTV’s “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom.” You would think young viewers would identify with the shows’ stars, seeing as they’re real-life teenagers. And, while I’m dreaming up work for other people to do: I’d also like to see a study of the extreme scare tactics employed by anti-teen pregnancy PSAs like the one I wrote about last month, and whether they’re undermined by their overt moralizing.

Too many books in this genre promise certain drive-your-man-wild tricks, or they take a side in the politicized debate over hookup culture. Friedman instead has one thing on her agenda: Getting girls to explore and embrace their own authentic sexual identities without shame, fear or guilt. Instead of arguing for empowerment through one-night stands or, conversely, abstinence, she leaves it up to young women to decide what it is that’s best for them. But she also offers guidance along the way, urging them to critically examine the social pressures and media messages that have shaped their understandings of sexiness, sexual fulfillment and love.

The book is filled with writing exercises that prompt readers to reflect on everything from body image to sexual assault. It’s essentially a guide to writing one’s own personal sexual manifesto. This is a rare thing in a culture filled with generic, passive models of female sexuality – from pop offerings like the Pussycat Dolls to hardcore porn stars. A heartbreaking example of just how sorely this is needed came last week when the “sex tape” of a 14-year-old girl in Baltimore, Md., went viral — her boyfriend allegedly threatened to leave her unless she filmed it.

I spoke to Friedman by phone about her own sexual mission statement, how to help women protect themselves without “blaming the victim” and why she’s still struggling with criticisms of Slut Walk.

In the book you recommend that women write a sexual mission statement. What’s yours?

Wow, well I don’t have it in front of me verbatim, but it’s basically to maximize pleasure and connection and minimize harm and risk. I mean, there’s like an asterisk on every word there, but, yeah, my sexual mission statement is that sex is a wonderful and marvelous thing and the more we can do to pull away the risks and bad things and maximize the good stuff, the better.

You write in the book that you’ve learned that being wanted isn’t the same as wanting. I’ve often heard female desire described as the want to be wanted. Obviously that’s too simplistic, but I wonder if there is some element of biological truth that actually stands separate from the whole mess of socialization and cultural messaging.

I think it’s impossible to suggest that we can separate nature from nurture when it comes to sexuality. So I don’t think that question is knowable and I don’t think it’s useful, because each individual person is gong to fall somewhere else on the spectrum. The variation among individuals within the gender is always going to be much wider than the variation between genders. So I don’t think coming to any conclusions about something that’s biologically true for all women about sex is useful.

It’s awfully hard to know where the cultural messaging starts and where the “real you” begins.

Well, like I said in the book, it’s actually impossible to know that. There is no real you that’s separate from all the ways that we as individuals have been influenced as we’ve grown up and gone through the world. The idea of some sort of sexual blank slate that you can get back down to and start from is a really harmful idea, because it’s impossible to achieve.

The idea is to figure out what are the ways you have been influenced, which one of those influences are bringing you pleasure and happiness, and which one of those are hurting you or keeping you from experiencing pleasure and connection.

I know so many young women who identify as feminist and feel very conflicted about some of what really does do it for them because they feel like it’s politically incorrect.

That makes me so sad! No one speaks for feminism writ large, but my feminism says that any one sex act is no more empowering than the next. There’s nothing inherently degrading about any sex act. It’s all about how both people involved are approaching it. On the flip side, there’s nothing inherently empowering about any sex act. I think people sometimes misunderstand my work and think I’m advocating that everyone go out and have casual sex, as though that would be empowering for everyone. What I want is to help women create a sexuality for themselves that is centered around what works for them.

This discussion about active and passive female desire makes me think of Ariel Levy’s “Female Chauvinist Pigs.” I wonder, how do we give young women feedback on the sorts of “Girls Gone Wild” antics that she writes about and express that there may be truer, more authentic and more rewarding forms of sexual expression without casting value judgments or invalidating their process of experimentation?

The last part of that question is the most important, I think, which is about experimentation. It’s a really great question, and it’s one of the core questions that the book is trying to answer. The reality is that we have to trust women, we even have to trust young women. Instead of telling women, “This is a productive way to express your sexuality and this is a degrading way to express your sexuality,” we have to equip women with the tools to assess risk and reward, and then let women make their own choices.

At the same time, you might believe this is really doing it for you right now, then learn more about yourself as you go, and then you’re forever on a “Girls Gone Wild” film, or what have you, and you’ve signed all your rights away without understanding them, and you only were paid with a T-shirt. That’s why I always think the focus should be on the people exploiting female sexuality, and sexualizing women. We shouldn’t tell young women, “You only think you want that, but we know better.” Who knows? Maybe we’re right when we think that, maybe we’re wrong about this particular young woman. What we want to do is work toward a world where she’s protected from exploitation while she experiments. That’s why I blame Joe Francis, and not the young women who participate. Which is where Ariel Levy and I part ways.

As such a strong supporter of Slut Walk, what did you make of criticisms of it?

It seems there are two different schools of criticism, one that is pretty legitimate and that I’m seriously still grappling with, which is about the ways in which the origins of the walk and the ways that its been put into practice can be exclusionary to women of color. That’s a complicated and serious issue that I don’t have an answer to.

At the end of the day, though, it got a lot of great coverage. I spoke at the Boston Slut Walk and was interviewed and what did I see? I saw the Boston Herald, a notoriously conservative newspaper, Yahoo News and Time magazine publishing all these pieces that really understood what was happening. They said, “These women are marching like this because they don’t want to be blamed for rape, regardless of what they’re wearing.” I feel like if the Boston Herald got the message, then the message was not that unclear.

Speaking of victim-blaming, it seems difficult to dispense advice on how women can be safe while also not giving the impression that it’s all women’s responsibility. How do you strike that balance?

It comes back to that issue of teaching women how to assess risk for themselves, instead of setting up rules based on mythology like “don’t walk around wearing skirts.” There’s no evidence whatsoever that what a woman is wearing increases or decreases her chances of being assaulted. What we know from actual research is that sexual predators pick victims that seem like they won’t fight back. It’s not about them being turned on. So I think all of that advice often comes from people who are well-meaning but it’s just not factually supported. So I think we need to give women advice on how to find real information.

Let’s talk about your essay “My Sluthood, Myself.” One thing that really resonated powerfully for me is your emphasis on the importance of getting support from other women. Why is that so important and why is that support so hard to come by?

It’s hard to come by because we are taught to divide and conquer and we’re taught that out of fear, right? We’re taught that if we’re “good girls,” bad things won’t happen to us. So we have developed a social structure in which we distance ourselves from bad girls. It gives a false feeling of being safer. That insidious fear based on falsehood is very dangerous. In the book, over and over again, I talk about the terrible trio which are shame, blame and fear. They’re a tool used not only to keep us separated from our own sexuality and our own sexual pleasure but also from each other.

With little concern for the tame, academic tone of the conference, she began calling out pornographic myths — like that all women enjoy being on the receiving end of the adult industry’s celebrated “money shot.” “There’s an entire generation growing up that believes what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex,” she said, adding that this miseducation is only exacerbated by our “puritanical double-standards culture where people believe that a teen abstinence campaign will actually work, where parents are too embarrassed to have conversations about sex with their children and where educational institutions are terrified of being politically incorrect if they pick up those conversations.”

This week, the topic of porn’s impact was raised again in response to a survey reporting that young Italian men reported performance problems related to excessive porn viewing. [Ed. note: Some have called the survey's merit into question. See NSFW analysis here.] So, I decided to give Gallop a call — at her all-black Manhattan “bachelorette pad,” which was formerly the men’s locker room at the historic YMCA — to talk about smut-induced erectile dysfunction, the sex talks parents should be having with their kids and what she really means by “make love not porn.”

What are your thoughts about this survey’s claims about porn’s effect on young men?

When I talk about “Make Love Not Porn,” I always have to explain that the impact of porn as default, stand-in sex education is actually much more fundamental and insidiously ingrained than a lot of people have ever thought. So, in that context, this report doesn’t surprise me at all, because I observe in my own personal experience a number of things playing out that are very much in line with what the report talks about.

Can you elaborate a bit for those who haven’t seen your TED talk or read the e-book version of it?

I’m 51, I’m old enough to remember back in the day when the guys I slept with were extremely keen that I came, that I came first, that I came at least once, if not several times. These days, I don’t come and it’s not even remarked upon. Bear in mind that I date utterly lovely younger men – but this is simply what has been imprinted on them. Because 99.9 percent of all mainstream porn is made by men for men, the entire raison d’être of every single mainstream porn film is to get the man off. As a result, an entire generation of guys and girls is growing up believing that the be-all and end-all of sex is to get the man off.

It always amuses me when people talk about “watching porn” as if it’s like watching any other form of entertainment — because no one’s “watching” porn, they’re wanking. If you are watching several hours of porn per day and night and you are wanking consistently all the way through that, then men can get so sensitized to the way that they bring themselves off that they can no longer [come with a woman]. This is something that I’d observed myself and had corroborated by Dr. Ian Kerner, who runs the website “Good In Bed.” He calls this “idiosyncratic masturbatory syndrome” — a number of his patients struggle with the fact that they can’t come through normal intercourse.

It’s funny that porn is geared toward men, it’s made for them, and yet it can have this negative impact on them.

Yes, let me also say, “Make Love Not Porn” is a gender-equal proposition, because what is being imprinted on men is also being imprinted on women. I talk to 20-something guys who say to me, “My girlfriends are doing everything they see in porn and it’s getting in the way of the real connection.” Girls go into the experience having no idea how to really get fulfillment for themselves, having an enormously difficult time articulating that and believing that their focus has to be to get the man off otherwise they’re not good in bed.

The reason I say that what I’m combating is not porn but a lack of dialogue around it is because if you boiled my entire message down to one thing it would be purely and simply: Talk about it. We all get enormously vulnerable when we get naked. Sexual egos are very fragile and people find it bizarrely difficult to talk about sex with the people they’re having it with while they’re actually having it — because you’re terrified of hurting another person’s feelings or derailing the entire episode. At the same time, you do want to please your partner, so you seize the cues from anyplace you can and if the only cues you have are from porn, then those are the ones you’ll take.

Somewhere I read that you consider yourself not anti-porn but anti-bad porn. Is that right?

Well, I’m pro-porn generally. I don’t judge what is good and bad porn. The issue I’m tackling is not porn, it’s the complete lack of an open, healthy dialogue in our society around sex and porn. Most parents are way too embarrassed to teach their children about sex. Now, back in the day that meant having a conversation about the birds and the bees, about the sheer logistics of what happens. Today, the conversation a parent should have with their children is even less likely to happen, because today the conversation would have to be: “So, darling, I know you’re already online and I know you’ve probably already accessed a whole bunch of Internet porn sites. What I need to say to you is that, actually, a lot of women don’t like being choked and spat on and tied up and gang banged.” No parent is ever going to have that conversation. The need to create an open healthy dialogue around this is even greater now.

This makes me think of the attempts, especially in the U.K., to protect children from pornography (which I’ve written about here). It’s funny, we’re not very willing to talk about sex, but we’re also attempting to censor this default resource for information on sex.

It’s such a wrongheaded move, Tracy, because the answer is not censorship. I completely concur that children should not be seeing these things, but anyone who sets out to try and protect children, block them and censor porn is on a hiding to nothing. The biological chemistry of human sexual desire has outlived all attempts to censor and repress it and always will. If anybody really wants to, the way to address this is to be open and healthy and talk about it — with children, with adults and in the media generally.

We’re seeped in porn and yet we’re not willing to talk about it. How do we begin that conversation?

Well, clearly, what I’m planning on doing is absolutely designed to stimulate that in a very interesting way. I believe in order at all to be effective you have to make the dialogue around this socially acceptable and socially sharable. I believe you have to take all of the dynamics that are out there in social media and apply them to sex, and that’s what I’m planning to do. Everything we’re talking about and everything this latest survey reports on is so endemic that we really have to tackle it in ways that are designed to be equally endemic within popular culture.

With “Make Love Not Porn,” I’m tackling the single biggest impact technology is currently having on the most fundamental aspect of human behavior, which is our sexuality. It actually informs everything about how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about other people, our relationships, our lives and our happiness.

So, I decided to call upon some experts in the fields of sex research and education to help devise a multiple-choice exam for grown-ups, one that incorporates the key knowledge they find most lacking in the real world — but without being a total snooze. After all, you’re busy adults, and some of you no doubt find it difficult enough to make time for actual sex. I hope this will be less a realization of your lingering college exam nightmares than a fun challenge and, by gosh, a learning experience.

Before we begin, allow me to introduce you to my co-quizmistress, Debby Herbenick. She’s a sex educator at the Kinsey Institute and associate director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion, and she was generous enough to let me pilfer questions from her books “Because It Feels Good” and the upcoming “Read My Lips: A Complete Guide to the Vagina and Vulva.” Carol Queen, Good Vibrations’ staff sexologist, and Heather Corinna, creator of the teen sex advice website Scarleteen, also offered some input from the sex-ed trenches. Thank you’s all around.

Now, (stylus) pencils out!

1) A paraphilia is:

a. A fetish for parachuting
b. An incurable sexually transmitted infection
c. A clinical category of sexual disorders
d. A word I just made up to sound smart

2) Abstinence-only education:

a. Delays first intercourse
b. Reduces rates of teen pregnancy
c. Reduces rates of STIs
d. All of the above
e. None of the above — and yet Congress has spent over $1.5 billion on it

3) What is the average duration of heterosexual intercourse?

a. Less than a minute
b. 13 minutes
c. 8 minutes
d. 25 minutes

4) Roughly how many women can orgasm from vaginal penetration alone?

a. 10 percent
b. 20 percent
c. 60 percent
d. All of them, they just haven’t met Mr. Right

5) Non-human animals have been observed doing all of the following EXCEPT:

a. Group sex
b. Same-sex sexual behavior
c. Making dildo-like objects
d. Oral sex
e. “Except” nothing — they’ve done all of the above and then some. Uncivilized animals.

6) What infection is NOT included in most STI screenings?

a. Chlamydia
b. Gonorrhea
c. Herpes
d. HIV

7) How many men have faked orgasm?

a. 10 percent
b. 25 percent
c. 40 percent
d. None — dudes can’t fake it and don’t have to

A woman may experience orgasm as a result of sensory information from which of the following nerves:

a. Pudendal nerve
b. Pelvic nerve
c. Hypogastric nerve
d. Vagus nerve
e. All of the above

9) Which is generally the most pleasure-prone part of a man’s penis?

a. The underside of the glans
b. The top side of the penile shaft
c. The head
d. It’s all the same

10) Which of the following is true about marital satisfaction?

a. It generally decreases after you have a baby together
b. It all goes to hell after the baby’s born
c. It is usually not affected after a couple has a baby together

11) What percent of married adults are largely satisfied with their sexual partner?

a. 54 percent
b. 64 percent
c. 94 percent
d. 0 percent. Married couples don’t have sex

12) Which of the following can reduce the effectiveness of oral contraceptives?

a. Female orgasms
b. Antibiotics
c. Antidepressants
d. All of the above

13) Stop reading, Mom. Approximately what percent of heterosexual women and men in the U.S. have had anal sex?

a. 10 percent
b. 15 percent
c. Trick question! Only gay men have anal sex
d. 25 percent

14) How long does it usually take for symptoms of HIV to appear?

a. Two weeks
b. Six months
c. Two years
d. Over a decade

15) How many women and men feel preoccupied with their sexual performance?

a. 5 percent of women, 10 percent of men
b. 15 percent of women, 15 percent of men
c. 30 percent of women, 50 percent of men
d. 0 percent of women (all they have to do is lie there), 0 percent of men (what’s there to worry about?)

16) A person who has oral herpes (cold sores) can pass the herpes virus to a partner while performing oral sex on them.

a. True
b. False

17) Among young, healthy men who have difficulties getting or keeping an erection, the cause is most often related to:

a. Erectile dysfunction
b. Performance anxiety
c. Peyronie’s disease
d. Phimosis

18) Approximately what percent of couples have experienced sexual problems?

a. 10 to 20 percent
b. 32 to 40 percent
c. 57 to 70 percent
d. 78 to 95 percent

19) Which of the following lubricants can be used safely with latex condoms:

a. Silicone-based lubricants
b. Water-based lubricants
c. Oil-based lubricants
d. All of the above
e. A and B only

20) How many U.S. states grant same-sex marriage licenses?

a. 6
b. 4
c. 10
d. None

21) What is a “gender identity”?

a. It dictates whom a person is sexually attracted to
b. It is a person’s inner sense of maleness and/or femaleness
c. It is your biological sex
d. All of the above

22) Roughly how many men and women have never masturbated?

a. 2 percent of men and 25 percent of women
b. 10 percent of men and 20 percent of women
c. 1 percent of men and 15 percent of women
d. 5 percent of men and 11 percent of women

23) Which is the fastest-growing group of people with HIV in the U.S.?

a. Homosexuals
b. Men who have sex with men
c. African-American women
d. Gay Caucasian men

24) What is the most-visited porn site on the Internet?

a. LiveJasmin.com
b. YouPorn.com
c. XTube.com
d. Spankwire.com

25) Which acts as an abortifacient?

a. Plan B
b. RU-486
c. IUDs
d. All of the above

26) The HPV vaccine can reduce the risk of:

a. Genital warts
b. Cervical cancer
c. Anal cancer
d. All of the above

27) A woman’s virginity can be proven by:

a. An intact hymen
b. Bleeding during first intercourse
c. Both A and B
d. Nothing — it can’t be proven with physical evidence

Pencils down! Now, for the answer key:

1) c; 2) e; 3) c; 4) b; 5) e; 6) c; 7) b; e; 9) a; 10) a; 11) c; 12) b; 13) a; 14) d; 15) c; 16) a; 17) b; 18) d; 19) e; 20) a; 21) b; 22) d; 23) c; 24) a; 25) b; 26) d; 27) d

If you scored between:

18 and 27, you go to the head of the class. Email me and I just might send you a Certificate of Sexual Proficiency.

8 and 17, you’re probably Canadian.

Zero and seven, you likely landed on this page by Googling “free porn” — sorry to disappoint. (See: The answers to Question 24 above.)

The “unsettling” and “graphic” content? The dollies had genitals. Seriously, that was it. In both cases, children were being taught about the age-appropriate topics of basic human anatomy, where babies come from and healthy physical boundaries. I will admit that the images and video made my jaw drop — not out of horror but rather because they are so darned cute. Kids’ natural curiosity and wonderment is an awesome thing to behold — and it should come as something of a lesson, or at least a refreshing reminder, to adults. In that spirit of whimsy and giggly curiosity, we’ve collected images of sex ed toys from around the world — from Switzerland’s dismembered private part plushes to America’s infamous vulva puppet.

View the slide show