A British fashion journalist faced a storm of outrage Thursday after suggesting that children should be watching “entry-level” pornography.
“Someone needs to create porn for children,” Flora Gill, a contributor to GQ, The Sunday Times Style Magazine, and Grazia, posted on Twitter. She continued, “Hear me out. Young teens are already watching porn but they’re finding hard core, aggressive videos that give a terrible view of sex. They need entry level porn! A soft core site where everyone asks for consent and no one gets choked.”
When the comment brought immediate backlash, Gill clarified, “Children means under 18. I’m talking about 14/15/16-year-olds.”
She later tried to walk back the idea entirely, saying it “obviously wasn’t an actual solution, but it is a real problem. Everyone take a deep breath.”
As the furor grew, Gill deleted the first two tweets and pled with those sharing screenshots of her comment to stop. “Apropos of nothing I really think if someone quickly deletes a tweet, it shouldn’t be screenshotted and shared like… just let it die, you know? no? no one else agree?” she wrote.
But Gill is not the only member of the media who appears to believe some exposure to pornography can be good for kids. The New York Times recently defended a school counselor for teaching “porn literacy” and showing a video about masturbation to five- and six-year-olds.
In May, a counselor at an elite Manhattan private school showed first graders an animated discussion of masturbation. The cartoon the Dalton School students saw featured a very young boy saying, “Sometimes, I touch my penis, because it feels good.” In response, an underage girl says, “When I’m in my bath or Mom puts me to bed, I like to touch my vulva, too.”
That same counselor previously conducted “porn literacy” classes featuring hardcore topics for high school juniors and seniors at another exclusive Manhattan school. As The Daily Wire’s Mairead McArdle reported:
About 120 juniors, girls and boys, at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School were subjected to Fonte’s class, called “Pornography Literacy: An intersectional focus on mainstream porn,” which presented them with explicit material including slides.
Fonte’s class included material such as semi-nude women in bondage, porn genres including “incest-themed,” “barely legal,” and “kink and BDSM,” and the most searched pornography terms of 2019 including “creampie,” “anal,” and “gangbang.”
The New York Times defended the counselor, saying, “While parents may not want to believe that their teenagers are viewing pornography, many of them probably are, on purpose or by accident.” The story then went on to argue that such pornography education provides teens a way to “critically assess what they see on the screen” and “deconstruct implicit gender roles.”
The outlet promoted the report on social media by focusing on the parents’ response rather than the school’s actions. “Pornography literacy classes are supposed to teach students how to critically assess what they see on the screen,” the Times Twitter account posted. “But when a sex-positive educator taught her curriculum at two elite New York City schools recently, some parents were outraged.”