Early exposure to pornography can affect people strangely. In an interview this week in Politics Home, Labour MP Samantha Niblett recalled the first time she clapped eyes on the stuff. “I was 10… And I sometimes wonder, having seen it so young… whether that has shaped the person that I am today.” Reading about her newly launched sex education campaign for the nation — promoting masturbation for health improvement, bringing sex toys into parliament, encouraging fellow MPs to talk openly about orgasms — I’ll admit, I started to wonder about that too.
Niblett’s big idea is to herald in what she calls a “summer of sex”, instructing the general public in the art of having satisfying, mutually respectful erotic experiences. Perhaps assuming that the Right needs more help with this than the Left, she appears to be spinning her campaign towards Reform and Restore voters in particular: “it’s about taking control of our patriotism, about taking control of our Britishness, and not feeling ashamed”. Accordingly, she has named the project “Yes Sex Please, we are British”, which ironically sounds like something only a foreigner could have made up. In fact, though, it’s a riff on a Seventies sex farce featuring Ronnie Corbett — probably a little niche, even for Rupert Lowe fans.
The details of Niblett’s project sound unlikely to get the national pulse racing. Or as Aristotle percipiently noted in a different context, one swallow does not a summer make. She plans to team up with a fellow sex positivist — the equally improbably named Cindy Gallop — to replace the pornographic stereotypes in people’s heads with images of “real people” having sexual contact. In other words: don’t picture the slick thrustings of Pornhub, think Matt Hancock smooching in an office. Gallop is the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), a website where, according to its own hype, you can “watch real world sex videos in all their loving, hot, and messy humanness”. Niblett apparently enjoys visiting the site herself — “It’s a turn on, it helps you masturbate, helps you cum”, she elaborates to the reporter, somewhat unnecessarily — and says she is looking to facilitate engagement between its founder and government ministers.
Gallop, meanwhile, is a 66-year-old entrepreneur who recently told the Telegraph she is proud of the fact that she “regularly and recreationally” sleeps with younger men. It was apparently in the course of these amatory adventures that she had a Eureka moment, in the traditional sense. She started to notice that the young men with whom she was sleeping had various misconceptions about sex, based on hardcore porn consumption. And lo, the idea for MLNP was born.
In a spirit of inquiry, I signed up for the free version. I can’t say I enjoyed the experience much, though perhaps it was because the clips I was watching were only three seconds long — you have to pay to watch full videos, and I didn’t. Generally, the site looks like an updated Readers’ Wives section. If you like brutally natural lighting, concentrated facial expressions, low-energy writhing on well-worn Ikea furniture, and occasional grunts interspersed with the sounds of the Heathrow flightpath, this might well be the place for you.
Participants write their own blurbs to lure viewers in, and several seem to involve references to childcare: “This is just a short video we made while finding some time in the morning while the children were still asleep”; “We’re again using the time our toddler is napping to get as much of each other as possible”. Another theme is the outdoors: “Witness as Tausha’s body responds to Trevor’s touches. Hear her moans echo through the forest, listen to the birds respond to her primal tones”. I did as instructed and think I might have heard a startled woodpecker, though it was quite hard to tell.
Of course — as Niblett’s fellow MPs have been quick to point out — this is all a right Carry On, and a distraction from current political priorities: wars, looming food shortages, systemic state failures resulting in the murder of children. As Kemi Badenoch pithily put it in the Commons, “it gives a whole new meaning to fiddling while Rome burns”. Stung by the criticism, Niblett has apparently now changed her PR strategy, suggesting yesterday that the campaign is for the benefit of “old people” who “want to have sex”. Presumably Badenoch’s Spads are brainstorming double entendres about the triple lock as I write.
But what is also frustrating is that Niblett and Gallop identify a real problem, though the solution they propose is hilariously empty. It is obvious that porn use, among other modern malaises, is infecting sexual behavior to the detriment of both women and men, but the solution cannot be yet more porn — for this is indeed what MLNP provides, despite the disclaimer in its title. True, there are no webcams or teary-eyed women retching, an undoubted plus; but the mere absence of something awful scarcely counts as a valuable education.
“There are no webcams or teary-eyed women retching, an undoubted plus; but the mere absence of something awful scarcely counts as a valuable education.”
Part of the problem is that images of people enjoying one another say nothing very complicated. Not being made of words, images tend to be simple like that. Gallop grandiosely claims that each of the videos on her site “is an object lesson in consent, communication, good sexual values, good sexual behavior”. But that’s like saying that a photo of Kew Gardens is an object lesson in how to grow roses. In fact, though, what we are supposedly seeing demonstrated onscreen at MLNP — respect, mutuality, loving concern for the other, or whatever — is the end result of a process that is still a complete mystery to many.
Since the sex you have with others is a product of the wider relationship you have with them, a sex education worth its name would require making substantive moral judgments about good and bad relationships — and not just in the bedroom or on the picnic rug. Yet beyond the usual platitudes about consent and better communication, this is something both Niblett and Gallop are very unwilling to do; and it’s a reluctance shared with nearly everyone in the so-called “sex education” space. Niblett insists in her interview that she is not “saying that anybody else’s preferences are wrong”. And in a 2009 Ted talk, Gallop states: “this is absolutely not about judgment… this is not about good and bad”. She even professes herself a regular watcher of hardcore porn. Her big revelation is that for every possible sexual proclivity, there will be some that like it, and some that don’t; and if you don’t like something, it is OK to say so.
But secondary schools, women’s magazines, and soap operas have been harping on this basic point since at least the Eighties. Announcing it yet again is not going to change a thing. In fact, the average person who assents to a hated sexual practice knows perfectly well that a firm “no” is always available; but they don’t want to use it, and not necessarily because they are feeling open-minded. A rival explanation is that they can’t think of any persuasive consideration against the practice in question; and, in this regard, mainstream culture has done nothing to help. On the contrary, it has made nearly every kind of sexual behavior immune to serious critique, as long as accompanied by the transformational fairy dust of adult consent.
Saying that something is only bad if you don’t like it, but fine if you do, is a particularly unconvincing argument. It doesn’t even work well for wine tastings, let alone human relationships. It makes your likes or dislikes of certain things seem like they must be built on sand, and scarcely worth defending. Feelings of disgust become “preferences” rather than helpful reactions of ethical discernment. You lose the capacity to articulate what in other circumstances would be a perfectly natural thing to say: “No, I’m not bloody well doing that, because it expresses nothing but contempt for me; and you are a creep for even trying”.
A real sex education must be, partly, a moral education, and moral education involves judgment by definition; yet modern moralists have a kink for being non-judgmental, as their preferred phrasing goes. Accordingly, they treat sexual activity as utterly unlike any other sphere of human behavior: as bizarrely insulated from everyday attitudes like hatred and resentment, even when the actions undertaken are obviously hateful and resentful. In no other context could you slap someone hard in the face, choke them, pull them around on a lead, or intentionally cause them to retch, yet still claim later without embarrassment that you “respected” them hugely throughout.
Since only radical feminists and religious types seem willing to contest this absurd narrative, vacuous platitudes from the likes of Niblett and Gallop about “better communication”, “freeing people from shame” and, of course, “increasing consent” will likely continue unabated, circling vaguely around the real ethical dilemmas of sexual interaction but never actually engaging. In a 2019 interview, Gallop talked of plans to start a business called ConSensual: not, as you may have first feared, a sex education site aimed at Conservative Party members, but rather a “safe social sexting app, which both enables you to sext completely securely and improves your sexual communication in your relationship (I have this all planned out in the pipeline, I just need investors)”. Imagine a Cindy-avatar in kinky boots, cheerfully reminding you that if someone calls you a filthy, disgusting whore, that’s perfectly fine, as long as you happen to like it; but absolutely not if you don’t! Personally, though, I think I’ll just stick to WhatsApp, plus my usual practice of avoiding sexting people who clearly loathe me. And that’s a bit of sex education the world can have for free.
Kathleen Stock is contributing editor at UnHerd.
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