Everyday Hero: Porn Site Steps Up After Utah Refuses to Teach Real Sex Ed in Schools
(PongsakornJun/iStockPhoto)
Utah is committed to abstinence-only sex education, despite mountains of evidence that abstinence-only education does not actually teach anything about sex education. Abstinence-only sex education has done nothing to curb teen pregnancy rates or STD rates in Utah, and everybody knows it, even the politicians.
“Things are broken,” said state representative Eric Hutchings, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
“Let’s not put our heads in the sand and think we don’t have a problem,” said representative Francis Gibson.
Both of the above gentlemen voted against a bill that would have given parents the option to have their kids receive an actual comprehensive sex education. The law wouldn’t even have mandated sex ed! It just would have given parents the option of having their children get sex education classes that address the fact that contraception exists. But the legislature voted 12-2–along party lines, of course–to continue to only allow abstinence-only sex education, and to bar sex education teachers from mentioning contraception, homosexuality, or premarital sex.
“I’m just not ready to go there yet,” Hutchings said.
So there’s a problem, and things are broken, but you’re “not ready” to try to fix them? Thanks for nothing, representative Hutchings.
If Hutchings and Gibson and their cohort in the legislature won’t do anything to teach Utahns about sex, porn site xHamster has decided to take up that mantle itself. Now anybody in Utah who tries to access xHamster’s site is taken to a special landing page alerting them to the fact that Utahns consume more porn than any other state, but also have among the lowest levels of sexual education. (That data reportedly comes from 2009, and more recent figures are not available.) It also takes them to xHamster’s sex education site, The Box, which answers people’s questions about sex and provides information about STIs, contraception, anatomy, and reproductive health.
xHamster writes that porn is great, but it is not sex education.
“While we love porn, we don’t think it should be relied on for sex ed any more than Star Wars is a substitute for science,” they said.
Last year Utah passed a unanimous measure declaring porn to be “a public health crisis,” even though people watching adult movies is not nearly so much of public health crisis as, say, sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancies among teenagers.
