This article is written in a cutesy style that obscures the subject and prods us to become outraged before we can even understand what exactly this class was. As you can tell from the title, the emphasis is on how the students and their parents reacted to something that they had trouble understanding. It's pretty irritating to read the news in the form of trying to understand something through the lens of other people's incomprehension and outrage.
We do learn in the third paragraph that the students were juniors — that is, they were 16 and 17 year olds. Presumably, they've all seen plenty of pornography and have either engaged in sexual intercourse already or encounter a great deal of pressure to do so. It seems to me that "pornography literacy" is a good educational topic for this group. Kids can get a lot of distorted notions from pornography, and pornography can turn them away from real relationships or make them harmful or dangerous within relationships.
I'm imagining an idealized class on this subject, and it seems easily defensible. But what did this particular teacher — Justine Ang Fonte — teach?
[The class included] how porn takes care of “three big male vulnerabilities”; statistics on the “orgasm gap” showing straight women have far fewer orgasms with their partners than gay men or women; and photos of partially-nude women, some in bondage, to analyze “what is porn and what is art.”
I'm going to guess that some of the slides showed nudes in what was conventionally "high art" — Gustave Klimt, perhaps. The high/low distinction is one of the great intellectual topics. It's impressive if you can get 16 and 17 year olds to think about it seriously. I have no idea how well that topic was presented, of course. I'm just saying this list of topics isn't outraging me.
Fonte’s presentation, some of which was seen by The Post, included a list of the most searched pornographic terms of 2019, including “creampie,” “anal,” “gangbang,” “stepmom” and more. One slide cited various porn genres such as “incest-themed,” consensual or “vanilla,” “barely legal,” and “kink and BDSM” (which included “waterboard electro” torture porn as an example).
“We were all like, ‘What?'” a female student said. “Everyone was texting each other, ‘What the hell is this? It’s so stupid.'"
That sounds like a 16-year-old at school: "What? What the hell is this? It’s so stupid." Whether it's actually stupid is another matter. I would guess that the teacher's idea was that human nature combined with an internet search engine takes you in a dark, sad direction and not where one might find love and happiness.
One part of the porn presentation involved something called the “marketability of Only Fans,” the hot new app used mostly for sex work. One slide included a photo of a pretty young woman who appeared to be promoting OnlyFans-type work. “I identify as non-binary,” she is quoted as saying, “but because that hasn’t hit the general consciousness of the adult industry, I say ‘girl,’ because that’s what people who want to buy my content will be looking for.”...
Again, I have to guess what the teacher was attempting to do with this material. The obvious answer is to help young people see how awful it is to take your life in this direction — how awful and how easy. Do the readers of the NY York Post understand how many very young women are engaging in this kind of activity?
[One] parent of a middle-schooler at the pre-K-12th-grade school said, “It’s outrageous that the school is introducing pornography into a mainstream classroom and starting to indoctrinate kids. The goal of this is to disrupt families...."
Junior year is not middle school, so why is this comment in the article? The parent seems to be swinging wildly: The goal of this is to disrupt families. How? Isn't it the pornography and the Only Fans app that are disrupting positive human relationships? What's the point of pretending pornography and sex-work apps are not right there for all those teenagers to see and use?
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3 comments:
tds writes:
To avoid time-consuming speculation I went right to the source (justinefonte.com) and let Justine speak for herself.
she/they pronouns
"... am a child of colonization, student of decolonization, and have reveled in disrupting health education for 10 years"
"...Framing my pedagogy through the lens of Kimberlé Crenshaw's teachings on intersectionality..."
"...learning how to indigenize the lands I am on (Cupertino-born, Manhattan-based)..."
"...When I'm building with schools, I develop health programs that are intersectional, anti-racist, sex-positive, multidisciplinary, stigma-busting, and relevant...."
quotes from the page:
"I am the dream my ancestors dreamed would free them." -The Journey of a Brown Girl
"Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter." -African Proverb
Not speaking for others, but I'd keep her away from my kids.
Please mention me as 'tds' if it's anything worth quoting, so that I won't get canceled.
All of the speculation in my post includes that background, which is also in the NY Post article. I didn't put any of that in my post because it didn't connect in any way to the sexuality topic. There is nothing in the NY Post article that indicates there was any racial ideology in the sexuality class.
Jimmy W writes:
"The obvious answer is to help young people see how awful it is to take your life in this direction — how awful and how easy."
There is also the inconvenient truth in the economics of OnlyFans and Pornography, if only Justine and the rest were ready to talk about it.
One estimate says that young white and asian thin women can earn between $500 to $100 per hour, or more, in pornography and other sex work. Other races, body types, and sexes earn less, some much less. That is the inherent economic truth in the sexual marketplace.
That there is such a big earnings gap between sex work and regular work, for young women, is of course an indicator for possible sex discrimination in the regular workplace. But it is also a likely consequence of the commodification of sex.
Perhaps the parents want to shield their children from that economic reality of our Sex-Commodified world. Which can certainly seem like an omnipresent tyranny at times. What IS the point of family in this sex-commodified world.
Nancy writes: "Not all 16 year olds have been exposed to pornography or are sexually active. I would be horrified if my daughter were compelled to see and hear such materials in school. There needs to be a parental opt out."
I agree that this should have been optional (and the article does say there was no opt out).
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