The New Zealand government has launched an unorthodox ad campaign to educate adolescents about sex.
Released under the government’s ‘Keep It Real Online‘ initiative, the ad seeks to debunk the problematic, and often unrealistic, depictions of sex in porn videos. In the ad, pornstars Sue and Derek show up naked at a young viewer’s house to let his mother know of his online behavior, and educate him about the underlying issues with pornography.
A 2019 report by the New Zealand government, which examined the 200 most popular clips viewed on Pornhub in the past year, found that more than a third of these depicted non-consensual activities followed by fantasies about step-siblings or step-parents. Affectionate sex between partners made up only a quarter of these clips, and only three percent of the videos involved the usage of condoms.
This is especially concerning because young, impressionable people often treat porn as the first and primary tool to learn about sex. In fact, a 2017 survey presented at an APA Convention had found that the average age at which boys first saw porn was 13.37 — with the youngest exposure as early as five. “We found that the younger a man was when he first viewed pornography, the more likely he was to want power over women,” the researchers had concluded.
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In a 2017 interview with The Swaddle, Cindy Gallop, a sexual values advocate, and founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, had discussed the downsides of children learning their sexual values from porn, especially in a society, where sex is a taboo subject and sex education is rarely taught in schools — as such, they end up basing their sexual behavior on pornography.
This ad seeks to encourage parent-child discussions about consent and safety in the sexual realm so that children don’t end up relying simply on pornography to learn about sex. “Parents should feel confident when dealing with these issues… at the end of the day, they’re the best person to keep their child safe,” Hilary Ngan Kee, the spokesperson for the advertising agency Motion Sickness, which worked with the New Zealand government on the ad, said.
