WATCH: Cindy Pom reports that sex therapists are urging for porn to be discussed in sex-ed classes to encourage a more critical view of porn versus real sex.
TORONTO – A website is trying to make sure people know that pornography is fiction by hosting user-submitted videos of real people having “real sex.”
The website was born out of a 2009 TED Talk given by Cindy Gallop. She argued in her talk that pornography had distorted the way young men view sex.
Her website, MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, is seeking to change that. The website accepts user-submitted videos of people having sex. Beall then reviews them and decides which are uploaded for registered members to see.
“We curate it to make sure that it’s of course consensual, that it’s contextualized, that it’s creative, that it’s sometimes ‘condom hot’ as we like to say. And just to make sure that it’s the sex that people have in their everyday lives,” she said.
“We think real world sex is the hottest sex there is.”
The website currently hosts about 150 videos and has more than 370,000 users, Beall said.
According to an infographic on Gizmodo.com, 12 per cent of all websites are porn and 40 million Americans are “regular visitors” to porn websites.
And according to the same infographic, the average age at which a person first sees porn online is 11.
A 2013 study from Cambridge University found compulsive consumers of pornography exhibited signs of a physical addiction.
Carol Ann Austin, a sex therapist and couples counsellor with KMA Therapy in Toronto, says one way to combat the negative effect of pornography is to talk about it critically.
“I think one of the things that is so important for us to remind ourselves about when we’re watching or consuming porn, is that this is just wonderful fiction,” she said.
“And we need to know that it’s fiction, like many other forms of media, it’s not a representation of what’s reality.”
She suggested porn could wrongly teach men and women what types of sexual acts are common or what people actually gain pleasure from.
She wants teachers and parents of high school aged children in Ontario to talk with children about pornography.
“We need to create discourse because when we talk about it, then we can watch it with a more critical eye and we can sort of say ok well maybe that’s fun to look at, but maybe that’s not exactly what reality might be.”
The Ministry of Education didn’t answer whether or not it would include a discussion of pornography in its upcoming revamping of the sexual education curriculum when asked by Global News Friday.
It did, however, send a statement which admitted the curriculum needs to be updated.
“The current Growth and Development section of Ontario’s Health and Physical Education curriculum has not been updated since 1998 – over 15 years ago. Many things have changed in our world since then including the introduction of ‘Snapchat’, Instagram and sexting. Students get instant access to information from unreliable and inaccurate sources which has a significant impact on how they perceive and understand healthy relationships.
“That is why we have committed to updating this component of the curriculum for release this Winter. The proposed curriculum will ensure that we provide our students with accurate information about healthy relationships and online safety.”
– With files from Cindy Pom
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