DENMARK — With nearly 99 percent of Denmark’s teenage boys and 86 percent of teenage girls used to watching porn regularly, a local sexology professor at Aalborg University is calling on public schools to add porn to their official curriculum.
According to reports, the academic wants to show porn films so that students can learn to distinguish between real-life sex and the “unrealistic expectations” they get from watching hardcore.
“Instead of having sex education be boring and technical, where you roll a condom onto a cucumber, I’d rather have us educate our children to be critical consumers who see porn with a certain distance and reflection,” Christian Graugaard told DR, a local public broadcaster.
The professor said that if teens try to replicate what they see in porn films “it is a recipe for broken necks and disappointment.”
“Young people, like the rest of us, are part of a sexualized post-modern society, Graugaard said. “What I am proposing is that we reinvent sex education in the classroom. Rather than focusing on the technical disease-related or biological aspects of sex, we should also use this platform to discuss and show other phenomena, such as pornography, taught by trained teachers, so that young people can develop a critical approach to what they are seeing.
“We know that Nordic adolescents are quite capable of differentiating between pornography and the reality of sexual relationships, but at the same time we know a small minority do not have those skills, and to keep them out of trouble we need to reach out to them.”
Not surprisingly, the students Graugaard addressed welcomed the idea as porn is accepted in Denmark’s mainstream. The country lifted a ban on porn in 1967 and in 1969 became the first country to legalize adult content.
"I think you could get something out of it — for example the difference between real love between two people who have sex and hard porn and orgies from the U.S.," ninth grader Anders Kaagaard said.
According to DR, the request mirrors similar efforts underway in both the U.K. and Sweden. Last month, the U.K.'s Commons Education Committee called for compulsory sex and relationships education in all primary and secondary schools.
