Glosswitch says sex education should include teaching boys not to be sexist. That seems reasonable.
I am a mother of sons and the thought of them growing up within a culture of rampant male sexual entitlement terrifies me. Right now they are six and seven – still innocent, still able to see their female peers as fellow humans – but as adolescence approaches, I fear that a deluge of misogyny will engulf them as they encounter the adult world and so-called “normal” attitudes to sex.
I am very much in favour of them being granted access to as much accurate, open-minded sex education as possible. Nonetheless, I doubt such teaching will ever be effective as long as we are in denial about the real problem: the widespread, culturally sanctioned dehumanisation of women as the price for male sexual gratification.
There is no point in explaining consent to boys, as though it is some peculiarly complex social exchange. It isn’t. What confuses them is the fact that our pornified, misogynist culture treats female bodies as soulless objects. They witness this everywhere: on TV, in the news, online, on the streets, in the words of their peers and elders.
Isn’t that just being sex-positive?
[S]tudent unions and fem socs across the land will organise consent classes for male students while condemning all criticism of the sex industry as “whorephobic.” The inconsistency escapes them. They haven’t noticed that, as Dworkin pointed out thirty years ago, male-dominated right-wing moralists are no more bothered by the exploitation of women’s bodies than left-wing sexual libertarians. They’d much rather put their energy into policing women’s access to abortion than men’s access to torture porn, just as left-wing warriors for sexual justice would rather spend their time attacking anti-porn feminists instead of asking how, and why, men across the world learn to treat women as objects into which you insert other objects, again and again, perhaps until they die.
Let me tweak that a little: left-wing warriors for sexual justice would rather spend their time attacking anti-porn feminists and women who try to talk about how we think about gender.