UK Parliament’s ‘Summer of Sex’ Gets a Soft Launch by Labor MP
She’s got a vibrator and she’s not afraid to display it!
Samantha Niblett, a Member of Parliament (MP) for the UK’s labor party, has announced her intention to bring adult sex toys into House of Commons sessions, according to an article in The Sun. But before your mind explodes with an orgy-esque vision of 650 MPs banging a gong and getting it on, take a moment and breathe. Niblett’s announcement has nothing to do with throwing a public Parliament Pleasure Party and everything to do sparking conversations about sexual health and pleasure and promoting lifelong sex education for the common good.
Niblett is scheduled to debate on improving sex education this coming fall, and has already reached out to a number of respected sexperts, including Cindy Gallop, founder of the website MakeLoveNotPorn. On April 13, Gallop and Niblett launched the Summer of Sex campaign with the tagline, “Yes Sex Please, We’re British!” The tagline is a reference to an early 70’s British comedy.
Legal crackdowns and educational reforms
While Niblett, a lawmaker, is clearly most interested in sex-positive reforms through education, according to Politics Home/The House—celebrating “50 years as Parliament’s magazine”— the Labor government plans to “press ahead with a ban on certain types of online pornography, including so-called ‘barely legal’ content depicting adults role-playing as children and some forms of step incest pornography” and bans on nudification apps.
The juxtaposition of new laws aimed to curb private access to sexual content and Niblett’s call to improve sexual satisfaction through lifelong sex ed is an interesting one, though not necessarily opposed. Both aim to improve access to accurate sexual information and entertainment, and prevent harm from misleading or inappropriate material. The House article says Niblett’s mission is to “help people understand consent, prevent abuse and violence, and raise awareness of how childbirth, the menopause, stress and other health conditions can impact sexual satisfaction.”
Learning what people do and how they feel about it
Niblett’s pursuit of responsible sex-positivity apparently started—as with so many others—with a personal journey. Quoted in Politics Home/The House, she told of first seeing pornography at the age of ten, in a video and some magazines. She said, “I sometimes wonder, having seen it so young but without being able to talk about it, whether that has shaped the person that I am today” and admitted that her campaign will also be an education for herself.
Niblett also compared the experience of watching standard commercial adult entertainment versus the types of videos offered on Cindy Gallop’s site, which has the hashtag #RealWorldSex.
As MakeLoveNotPorn’s About Us page puts it, “We want to see how you actually have sex in the real world. In all its crazystupidfunnysexystupendous-messysillydownanddirtylovingcasualhumanness. We don’t want to see you making porn like they do in porn world. And it should go without saying that what you capture absolutely must be consensual. If not, things will not go well for you.”
Everything old is new again: the enduring value of “sexual pattern films”
Gallop’s website was inspired by an overwhelming response to her 2009 TEDTalk, where she spoke candidly about her experiences dating younger men. She noticed that most of her dates, if not all, seemed to have absorbed the filmic conventions of hardcore commercial porn as literal instruction in how to conduct a real-life sexual encounter. In her talk, Gallop said she had to explain—more than once—that she would rather her dates not ejaculate on her face, thank you very much. Gallop knew there had to be a better way for young people to learn about sex.
Way back in the 1970s, the National Sex Forum (NSF) in the US, had come to the same conclusion as Gallop did so many years later. It created a number of “sexual pattern films” showing real people doing real things, alone and with each other. For many years these films were available in university libraries all over the US, and possibly in many international libraries as well. Eventually the NSF became the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (IASHS), a private graduate school in San Francisco, and continued to create sex ed media for adults as well as educate numerous sexologists.
In 2008, as a student at IASHS, I watched many of those films as part of my coursework. Though they seemed quite quaint in decor, fashion, and lack of condoms—most of filmed prior to the AIDs epidemic—I was struck by their value and even their sweetness. The regular people who had been convinced to have sex on camera in the heyday of the 1970’s American Sexual Revolution, were gay, straight, lesbian, young, middling, and old, and not all of them were white, either.
One of my favorite moments was watching a man struggle with a zipper on the back of his partner’s dress. It was all too human and entirely unscripted. Another featured the late writer, Ed Brecher—author ofThe Sex Researchers—and a female partner, enjoying a long, leisurely afternoon of lovemaking, wine, and cannabis ingestion. These two were the oldest people in the NSF film catalog. There was something about the candor in these short films that was unforgettable.
Another milestone was the late Joani Blank’s film, Orgasm: Faces of Ecstasy, which showed people from the shoulders up experiencing profound physical pleasure. Blank is also celebrated for having founded Good Vibrations, an adult products retailer that welcomed female and queer customers.
The always necessary courage of sexual visionaries
By announcing her unabashed stance in favor of sex and pleasure education, MP Niblett will mostly likely experience a fair amount of ridicule and possibly even worse forms of hostility. Yet her message and leadership are of paramount importance in times like this and hundreds of thousands of people will be empowered if her vision of a comprehansive program of lifelong sex education and more open culture bears fruit. I hope her efforts are valued by her peers and constituents and that she will not suffer the same fate as another progressive public official, former US Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who was forced to resign in 1994 for advocating masturbation as a sex ed topic and the distribution of contraception in schools.
In her search for collaborators in her Summer of Sex initiative, I hope too that Niblett manages to hook up with the Unitarian Church’s well-respected, lifelong sex ed program, Our Whole Lives (OWL), as a model curriculum, as well as the Scarleteen youth sex ed site. Both are well respected and have been around for quite some time. These resources could serve her well. And there are thousands of sexologists and sex therapists around the world, such as those who are members of AASECT, who could also be a wealth of information for the campaign. I hope many step up to show their support.
In the meantime, carry on, MP Niblett! Yes, please!
Image Source: A.R. Marsh using Ideogram.ai.
