Sex education is key to civilised sex.

No, pornography is not responsible for sexual violence.

Pornography is no visionary, it doesn’t create behaviour, it reflects our behaviour. It did not invent anything: rape or anything violent you see in porn, it already existed and on much larger and once, sadly acceptable scales, actually. Pornography just make it visible because it turns out we love watching it, on screens or in reality.

What’s responsible for the on-going violence, despite our being “civilised”, is the lack of relevant and viable alternative when it comes to sex education for everyone. Not just children but adults who are looking for answers, to change their ways or understand their desire and the ones of others.

“Civilised” goes with “educated” but we are not taught about sex, so we remain savages left to our urges. Then we wonder why we have problems.

Sex is something all of us above the age of 15 have either seen or done at least once in our lives. Whether it’s legal from 15, 16, 18 or 21, it is an essential part of our lives and the survival of mankind. However, we leave the future generations completely in the dark as to what this entails because eew and evil, all the while telling them they should be really good at it because that’s the only one to have children and secure our survival. Good luck with that jump, kids!

We all know this is a major upheaval in our lives, one that will change everything forever, but again, no preparation whatsoever: you’ll see what it happens. Why? Because of the religious and the prude, to begin with.

The religious believe this is a sin adults are committing against their will, spurred by the devil so it is unthinkable to even mention it to children to the point of using the birds and the bees or baby-delivering stalks. No one has ever seen God but we should talk about it day and night, everyone will experiment with sex but one shall not dare speak of it.

And the prude, they were so shocked by the realities of it that they have come to see it as something fundamentally disgusting and brutal. So they demand their children be as unprepared as they were in the name of protecting them. They think they have been soiled, degraded by this act and don’t want their children to suffer the same fate. They see sex education as some kind of paedophilic move that will forever stain the purity of their children.

In the void created by the adults they have to trust to prepare them for the future, the children then turn to pornography. It’s wildly available, has always been, will always be as long as we exist. They turn to porn because whatever adults do or don’t tell them, they do have urges, boys have erections and night spills, teenage girls are becoming women at fast rates with all it entails of desire, hormones and secretions.

But instead of looking at the reality for what it is and dealing with it, we have one side that demands porn disappear completely and the other side that understands pornography is here to stay so demands it change completely to become an educational tool. And while they play Don Quixote in the dark and against each other, things in the real world are rotting.

The one and only solution is for you to do your job and educate your children and no! That doesn’t mean sitting them in front of educational movies or showing them cross sections of male and female genitalia.* Exposition is not education. We don’t expect anyone to understand the ins and outs of WWII by simply watching Private Ryan or visit a bunker on a beach in Normandy.

We teach WWII, at length, because it has changed the world. Sex is changing our lives so it is time you teach them, you engage with them about the realities of sex. And if you feel unprepared, or unqualified, then leave the schools to answer the questions we all had and still have:

What is desire? Is it normal? Am I normal? How am I allowed to express it?
What do I do if it scares me or I feel overwhelmed?
What is consent? How you get it?
How do you communicate before, during and after sex? How do you know when to move forward, when to back down? How to learn where and when to stop?
If one cannot command desire and urge, how do you learn to rein in on these very powerful emotional and physical manifestations so they don’t become weapons against others and even myself?
In an act that is extremely intrusive by nature, therefore brutal in many ways, how do you keep respect for your partner?
What if you want more than one partner?
What’s the first time like? How do you improve?
How do you work together as a couple to develop your very own sexual chemistry? How do you make love and sex match? How long could it take?
How do enjoy sex when it is the source of many diseases and problems? How do you use protection?

Pornography will never teach any of that properly, so stop waving your threatening picks in front of its face. Only the adults around the children can teach them that through talking about what they learn by experience.

It is a rather sad state of affairs that we are becoming more accepting of polyamorous relationships and groupsex only because we are used to see them in porn, rather than because we have learnt that there is not only one way to love.

The truth is, you know pornography will not go away, nor do you want to really. You pretend to tilt at the windmills so you look the part because the question is:

What are you going to do if your children can’t rely on porn to learn what you refuse to teach them?

*When in secondary school in France, I was 14 and our sex education was a two hour session with some kind of Dolores Umbridge who put on a black and white video in the VCR before passing on prints of cross sections. We studied more in biology during the chapter on reproduction.

When she asked if we had any question, I, the silent type, raised my hand and asked if we would catch AIDS by giving a blowjob. I was sanctioned by the school with an official behaviour warning, a serious offense that stays in your school file forever and can affect your university prospects, and puts you on a list of students that will be expelled if anything else happens. Anything! Even a mere forgotten book.