On the other hand… here’s a a follow up on my previous, possibly overoptimistic post. Laura Woodhouse of reviewed a British TV program allegedly intended to contrast sex education and pornography and turns up… well a whole raft of issues. Some of which are not just wrong but (just from my privileged, future-dead-white-hippie-male perspective?) sick and wrong.

Last night’s first installment of Channel 4’s The Sex Education Show Vs Pornography focused on the way in which pornography affects young people’s attitudes towards and expectations of the female body…

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The programme’s findings were unsurprising: boys find big, fake, firm, round breasts most attractive; girls want big, fake, firm round breasts because ‘that’s what the boys want’. Boys preferred hairless genitals; girls felt pressurised to shave because they ‘want to make the boys happy’.

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Well, aside from showing them photos and real naked women and telling them that porn bodies are not natural (making the mistake of claiming that being slim with big boobs is unnatural – way to further alienate girls who get picked on for being just this shape), not much. She didn’t challenge the boys’ sense of entitlement to porn style bodies, simply laughing when a boy said that if he came across a girl with pubic hair he’d tell her to get rid of it. She didn’t actively tell the girls that it was perfectly OK not to shave all your pubes off, that they shouldn’t feel pressurised to conform to what boys want, and instead gave them advice on reducing shaveburn and ingrowing hairs and suggested that they shave ‘for themselves’ rather than for the boys. Considering the series is supposed to be challenging the ‘pornification’ of our culture, it seems rather ironic that the presenter is using the typical anti-feminist backlash tactic of convincing women to do things men want by persuading us we’re doing it for ourselves. Yes, some women do like to shave it all off, but this is hardly the most empowering or helpful advice for teenage girls.

In general, the programme stank of repressed British, seaside postcard style boob-enduced hilarity…

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[I]t completely failed when it came to actively recognising the clear sexism and gender divide here and challenging it: the main solution being put forward is simply to prevent kids having access to porn by persuading PC companies to install child block software on their products. I hope to see boys in particular actually being asked about how they feel men and women are presented in the porn they watch, but it looks like subsequent episodes are focusing mainly on the body, orgasms and performance.

She said it here.

I gotta say, while totally acknowledging my privileged-hippie standpoint it baffles me to no end that grownups would imagine telling girls how to avoid fucking razor burn instead of maybe that what boys want (or say they want… or even cluelessly imagine they want!) isn’t the only possible frame of reference in the universe.

I mean… there’s loss of power, sure, but there’s also surrender of power. And not to put too fine a point on it, in the case of letting 11-year-old boys (the average age, according to Woodhouse’s sources, that boys are getting their exposures to porn) have the power to dictate feminine standards is… is… what the fucking hell moron universe does anybody let an adolescent child, of any gender, establish beauty standards?

I mean… Shiva up the stovepipe, of course little boys are going to want women to have no pubic hair — boys don’t start getting pubic hair till they’re maybe 13! They don’t even go into puberty on average for two years after girls their age! It’s… it’s… Dick Cheney on stilts! Ask an 11-year-old boy… even a 13-year-old boy what he thinks girls ought to look like and he’s going to say they ought to have an exoskeleton and a compartment for their favorite Magic™ card decks and a spigot for grape soda! And not to get overwrought or anything but at least when I was growing up boys started playing with their father’s or grandpas old empty safety razors and pretending to shave from… pretty early on. And searching our faces, with generally increasing anxiety, through 5th, 6th, 7th, and sometimes later grades for the first hint that finally we can start… not to grow a beard or mustache but to begin shaving.

So of course we’re going to be totally, utterly, and (literally!) juvenile-y wiggy, conflicted, and just generally to-the-bone not the people to be cool-hunting what women ought to look like!

Not to put too fine a point on it but… I stumbled across my URL by accident, but I chose to use it when I started sex-blogging for absolutely intentional, purposeful reasons. Children are a lousy source of standards for human sexuality. If we designed cars to suit children’s driving habits they’d need big red rubber bumpers and windshield-wipers on the inside because when children drive they stick out their tongues and go “blpblpblpblplpblpblpt!”

But we stand by and let children… unsupervised boys (because I’m pretty sure that by-definition 11-year-old-boy porn-viewers, or 13-year-old, or 16-year-old, are not being supervised) or girls establish, let alone dictate, what’s supposed to be “normal” adult appearance.

And for adults to let this happen? Or just mope about it? Or, worse, enable it either by suggesting restricting access is sufficient (criminy!) or by offering (to girls, natch) “helpful” suggestions like how to avoid flipping razor burn, or by shrugging helplessly and saying “woah, even 11-year-old hot-wheels-decal Y chromosome-rays are just so Teh Powerful how can we fight it?” Or, worst of all, not getting in there and raising your fucking children by maybe, y’know, making sure their first (and second, third, tenth, and 87th) exposures to information about sexuality from sex education instead of porn… or peers… or possibly well-intentioned but otherwise ill-prepared magazine editors and television programmers.

Seriously! It’s obviously not benefitting boys. And it’s sure not empowering girls. It’s abdication in the worst possible, lest responsible, most thoroughly non-real-adult way possible.

Sheesh!

No, really, WTF, OMG, !=LOL sheesh! I… I… At this point I need a windshield wiper on my laptop screen!