Porn for the kids
An item from the (very conservative) Federalist a week ago:
An exclusive New York City high school hired an educator to teach students about pornography, and it did not go over well with parents.
Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, an institution with a price tag of about $47,000 for the highest grade offered, held a sexuality workshop for all students in the junior class. Parents were not made aware of the training, and students were misinformed about the explicit content.
It seems to me there is a place in high schools for a certain kind of teaching about porn, though it would probably be futile. Porn-critical teaching could elucidate the ways porn endangers women, for instance by normalizing “choking” i.e. strangling, which keeps leading to news items about women who, surprisingly to all concerned, turn up dead as a result of “rough sex.” Remember that guy who lured a teenage girl to the top of Calton Hill in Edinburgh on a freezing January night, poured vodka down her, bit and strangled her, and then toddled off home leaving her to die of hypothermia? That’s porn, right there.
But, teenagers being what they are, the result of such education would probably be eye-rolling and a renewed determination to be kink-friendly. At any rate it’s not at all clear that that’s what this “sexuality workshop” was teaching.
One student told the New York Post he thought it was “just going to be about condoms or birth control.” On the contrary, the training was called “Pornography Literacy: An intersectional focus on mainstream porn.” It was taught by Justine Ang Fonte, the director of health and wellness at The Dalton School nearby.
Oh well thank god the focus is intersectional. Is it also inclusive? A worried nation wants to know.
The Federalist alas doesn’t make clear how the image is connected to the presentation. I haven’t been able to find out what exactly Justine Ang Fonte talked about.
The students were just irritated by it. They know about porn, duh.
After the Post published its report on Columbia Prep, head of the school William M. Donohue apologized to parents in an email, saying the “content and tone of the presentation did not represent our philosophy, which is to educate our students in ways that promote their personal development and overall health, as well as to express respect for them as individuals.”
Well what did they think it was going to be? Why are they bringing in external speakers when they don’t know what the content will be?
Fonte has a page of her “presentations” but it too is just titles and images but no real information. One title looks like the kind of thing I suggested – be safe type advice.
Get (Lit)erate on Porn
But a more recent title sounds less…adult.
Are You a Porn Genre or Are You Privileged?
It’s not apparent who she is or what her expertise is or what it is about her that convinces administrators she should show up at their schools to tell the students things.
It may just be me, but I don’t see “performing” various gross and barely consensual things privileges one above those in a racialized porn category (at the bottom of the ladder the rungs are very close together).
This has been a habit for schools, who often bring in speakers to “educate” the children on sex education, and the speakers teach girls that sex makes you a licked lollipop no one else will want to lick, or chewed bubblegum, and that you are a piece of candy for your husband to unwrap. Sounds like this might be the flip side of that coin.
Or that condom turned inside-out, or something.
Well, the screenshot is atrocious. Whoever produced it apparently knows nothing about porn or BDSM, if they’re conflating consent and “vanilla” sex, or BDSM with waterboarding and electrocution.
[…] may be because it was unclear, at least in the source I read, that the workshop was promoting critical thinking about porn. The title was Porn Literacy, which […]