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NSFW Videos Are the New Sex Ed for Adults
Startups are using explicit footage to improve our understanding of our bodies
For 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 sexual experiences. Through her work, Lust has seen firsthand how ill-equipped many of us are to talk about sex, 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 Porn 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 sex experts and adult entertainers. The videos will offer viewers honest information about topics like squirting, mutual masturbation, and navigating masturbation 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 pornography and sex education, providing adults with something more exciting that conventional sex ed lectures, but less vulgar than hardcore porn. She isn’t the first to explore this space. In August 2012, the self-proclaimed “real world sex” site MakeLoveNotPorn.tv launched with the promise of offering an antidote to pornography, one that would offer people the chance to expand their understanding of sexual 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 vulva stimulation techniques that help them experience sexual pleasure.
Given that porn is often treated as a menace to budding sexuality — numerous state legislatures have passed bills asserting that porn is “a public health crisis” — the idea of enhancing sex education with explicit content might seem backward. But research suggests that, rather than pushing us even deeper into our supposed “public health crisis,” sex education that refuses to shy…
