I'll go back to the subject of education. I was one of the originators, with the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, of a website called SexualityandU.ca. We wished, if you will, to infect the Internet, which has some very horrific stuff, with some good stuff. This is a generation of Internet natives. We created SexualityandU.ca, and we advertised it widely, mostly on Valentine's Day. We were getting 450,000 unique visitors, for an average of 10 to 11 minutes, in English and in French, over a period of years. The site has recently been relaunched—it's now called SexandU.ca—under the auspices of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, to essentially provide relevant scripts for responsible action in teenagers, to strengthen the hand of teenagers who wish to abstain from sexual contact, and to promote safer sex, contraceptively protected sex, and, critically, consensual sex.
We have also done another project that, with apologies, is called Peggy's Porn Guide. One of my graduate students, who is very good at Internet animation, took film clips of several of the lies of pornography—that women always want to have sex or that they'll agree to do anything under any circumstance—and with an animated figure presented them to young men. The young men were asked to respond: Is this the way things really are, or is this a fantasy? Anybody who in any way believed the “lies” of some segments of pornography was sent to talk to Peggy, a buxom animated figure, who then did role reversal: for example, “How would you like to be coerced?”, etc.
I would favour adopting interactive technologies that have a very wide reach and can be done extremely well, at some cost, and then disseminated widely. It also, with apologies and respect, provides an end run. That is, I don't have to hope that a comfortable sex educator is in position in every school and in every county. I can actually monitor and upgrade the best sex education in this way. One of the things I would do is put the cup of tea on it. I think we need to develop this emphatically. There is very good research, by the way. Doug Kirby and others have done very good research on the effectiveness of sex education.
One of the things that has been going on, in addition to the unlimited access to whatever is on the Internet, is that, in Canada, there has been better sex education, which is one of the competing factors in a population-level estimate. When you think about the impact of Internet pornography, together with everything else that's going on, you do say to yourself, “Where's the beef?” If there were a significant impact on the development of norms that said it's okay to have sex early and with lots of partners, we would see a shift in that direction. We've actually seen a shift in the opposite direction.
It is okay to say that we've heard a lot, going in a number of directions, about the development of norms, what becomes normal, etc. At some point, it is also okay to say, “Where's the beef?“ Where is the dramatic change in the mores that are supposedly being conditioned? There are fragments of answers out there.