N*** Videos Are the New S** Ed for Adults
Startups are using explicit footage to improve our understanding of our bodies
Lux Alptraum

Lux Alptraum

May 16, 2019·5 min read
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Credit: Jay’s Photo/Getty Images

FFor the past 15 years, Swedish filmmaker Erika Lust has devoted herself to the world of indie adult cinema, using her talents to create stunningly beautiful films that document a variety of intimate relationships and s***** experiences. Through her work, Lust has seen firsthand how ill-equipped many of us are to talk about s**, or even explore our own sexualities. And over the years she’s worked to help move the conversation forward.

In 2017, Lust and her husband launched The P*** Conversation, a site geared towards helping parents navigate conversations about adult entertainment with their kids. Now she’s using her platform to address the needs of adults. This spring, Lust unveiled The Lust Ed, a series of free videos created in partnership with s** experts and adult entertainers. The videos will offer viewers honest information about topics like squirting, mutual m***********, and navigating m*********** as a disabled person, supplementing those lessons with graphic depictions of the subject matter.

For Lust, this new video series is a way to fill the wide space between p********** and s** education, providing adults with something more exciting that conventional s** ed lectures, but less vulgar than h******* p***. She isn’t the first to explore this space. In August 2012, the self-proclaimed “real world s**” site MakeLoveNotPorn.tv launched with the promise of offering an antidote to p**********, one that would offer people the chance to expand their understanding of s***** pleasure by getting a peek into other people’s bedrooms. Three years later, OMGyes debuted a collection of videos in which women talk about — and then demonstrate, in graphic detail — the various v**** stimulation techniques that help them experience s***** pleasure.

Given that p*** is often treated as a menace to budding s******** — numerous state legislatures have passed bills asserting that p*** is “a public health crisis” — the idea of enhancing s** education with explicit content might seem backward. But research suggests that, rather than pushing us even deeper into our supposed “public health crisis,” s** education that refuses to shy away from the reality of s** actually helps to make us healthier and happier. Whether or not these projects are the future of s** education, they’re still an important tool in the fight to make our culture more sensible when it comes to s**.

Rather than perverting our minds and warping our libidos, exposure to s***** content can actually improve our understanding of our bodies and those of our partners.

In many ways, the move to make s** education more explicit just brings us in line with the education offered in other, more open, parts of the world. “The U.S., relative to other first world countries, has low explicitness in s** education,” says Nicole Prause, a scientist at the Liberos Center, a biotechnology company specializing in research on s***** psychophysiology. In the Netherlands, for instance, there are approved s** education videos that use fully naked adults to educate young people about anatomy — a strategy which, Prause remarks, would likely lead to jail time were someone to attempt it in the United States.

But the panic we feel about letting our s** education feature actual s**, and the resulting emphasis on censorship of s***** imagery, is incredibly overblown. Rather than perverting our minds and warping our libidos, exposure to s***** content can actually improve our understanding of our bodies and those of our partners, according to Prause — provided that we consume that content within an appropriate context.

“P********** is somewhat agnostic. It depends what you take from it,” Prause explains. “We know that adolescents that view more p********** have more accurate genital knowledge,” largely due to the fact that they’ve had the chance to observe a variety of g*******, up close and in action. Although p********** that features a limited and often cartoonish range of body types and s***** activities can be damaging by lowering viewers’ self-esteem by reinforcing the idea that there’s just one way to be s***, merely seeing naked bodies or s** itself does not have that effect.

In fact, pulling back the curtain and encouraging people to actually see and appreciate the diverse range of what bodies and s**, can look like, can have tremendously positive effects. Destigmatizing s***** content helps to increase feelings of body positivity, self-comfort, and s***** self-confidence. It helps sharpen understanding of what consent looks like and helps us better understand how to properly identify when our bodies are actually aroused and ready for s**.

“Hiding the rawness of s** behind a mask of euphemism only heightens the stigma surrounding it,” says Lust.

Prause notes that the research suggests she’s correct. “All the data are very consistent that [increasing the explicitness in American s** ed] would be a positive shift for a variety of outcomes,” says Prause.

OMGyes has seen firsthand the positive effect explicit s** education can have on viewers. In a recent study, scientists at Indiana University School of Medicine showed OMGyes to 1,000 people, ages 18–83. A full 94 percent of subjects said that after viewing OMGyes content, they could more confidently explain their s***** preferences in detail, while 95 percent said they had their understanding of pleasure expanded, and 81 percent said they discovered new ways to describe the kinds of things they liked.

And it’s the video aspect of these projects that seems to be particularly essential. In their own research, the OMGyes team has surveyed thousands of people about the tools they’ve found to be helpful when exploring and learning about s** pleasure. “[Fewer than] 10 percent of them actually found anything useful from reading,” says Rob Perkins, co-founder of OMGyes. Perkins compares reading about s***** techniques to trying to learn dance moves from a chart of foot positions: “There’s just such a difference between reading about these nuanced touches and doing them” — and getting a video demonstration can do wonders to help close the gap.

It remains to be seen whether such explicit projects will become a standard part of the s** education curriculum. But Lust believes that “if we can normalize explicit s** outside of p*** sites, and as a way of learning, then I think we can reach more people who haven’t had the s** education that they need.”
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