Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors says

I’ve written before that pornography is not necessarily a good form of sex ed. Depends on the porn, in theory.  To me, this much is clear: when porn embraces abuse, degradation, humiliation, torture, that’s not sex ed.  

Consider the question’s flip side: is sex ed a “good” form of pornography? Depends on the sex-ed, I suppose.  I’m reserving judgment for now, but I appreciate the well-done Cherry TV website (subtitle: “Juicy Talk for Women”) for its lively, informative discussions.  It’s far less how-to-please-your-man than Cosmo, and infinitely more interesting than those sex ed films I remember from the 1970s.

She said it here.

See also Holly of The Pervocracy’s discussion of biology texts vs romantic porn in Anything’s wankable when you’re 13. And like Holly I too was far more aroused by the at least nominally (and usually actually) medical/psychological/anthropological references I found on a high shelf than by intentionally pornographic materials I also found such as books of Beardsley prints and the Victorian “The Pearl.”

Which, when you think about it, makes a ton of sense. Porn has a tendency to exaggerate regular sex. Sex-ed manuals have a tendency to show you how to have sex in the first place! Mainstream/industrial porn remains reluctant to leave its Victorian-era roots of guilt, transgression, and resentment. Sex-ed has a tendency to assume sex is healthy, normal, and most important, not so scarce it’s more likely to happen with a stranger on an elevator than with a partner at home. :-)

And finally? Before I had sex with anyone I cheerfully masturbated through the occasional Victorian novel by “anonymous” but I wore out the pages… and myself… on academic works like Masters and Johnson, pop-sexology books like The Sensuous Couple, and the original and then-totally-groundbreaking The Joy of Sex.

As Holly put it

“Among both sexes, the excitement phase results in an increase in heart rate (tachycardia), an increase in breathing rate, and a rise in blood pressure. An erection of the nipples, especially upon direct stimulation, will occur in nearly all females and approximately 60% of males.”

Mmmm

“During the plateau phase, the male urinary bladder closes (so as to prevent urine from mixing with semen, and guard against retrograde ejaculation) and muscles at the base of the penis begin a steady rhythmic contraction. Males may start to secrete seminal fluid and the testicles rise closer to the body.”

OH BABY OH WOW

“Orgasm is the conclusion of the plateau phase of the sexual response cycle, and is experienced by both males and females. It is accompanied by quick cycles of muscle contraction in the lower pelvic muscles, which surround both the anus and the primary sexual organs. Women also experience uterine and vaginal contractions. “

OH YEAH OH YEAH OHMYGODOHMYGODDDD

Yeah.

Ditto that yeah.

But ditto also when she says

The upshot is that I accidentally became very well educated on sexual anatomy and physiology at a very young age. Not just the obvious parts; being a very thorough reader and rereading the same three pages for months, I learned all the little internal bits with Latin names as well.

Cherry.tv, by the way, really is a cool resource — one that should have been in my blogroll for months (it’s there now.) Its video-style panel-discussion format of mostly young, mostly professional and academic women is perfectly straightforward education today, but attempting anything like that the year the now utterly fusty old Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex came out would have landed all of them in jail on obscenity charges. (Goodness! They don’t just admit having clitorises or knowing about penises, they admit touching them!)