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Home > Sex Tech > Planned Parenthood Is Battling Sexual Ignorance with a Chatbot

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Home›Sex Tech›Planned Parenthood Is Battling Sexual Ignorance with a Chatbot

Planned Parenthood Is Battling Sexual Ignorance with a Chatbot

By M. Christian
February 6, 2020
2296
0

Roo is designed to answer teenagers’ questions and even learn, itself, along the way.

Planned Parenthood

In her 2016 study Changes in Adolescents’ Receipt of Sex Education, 2006–2013, Dr. Laura Lindberg writes of a significant and ongoing decline in the availability of quality sex education for young adults.  

Talking to The Guttmacher Institute about her study, she lays out her findings:

Relying on parents alone to provide teens with necessary information about sex is inadequate. Schools should provide medically accurate and comprehensive sex education, so teens have the information and skills they need to enjoy the best health possible.

The problem is, sex education in the United States—principally quality sex education that covers subjects like birth control, HIV prevention, consent, and gender and sexual orientation issues—is spotty at best, with some states even continuing to teach abstinence despite the long-debunked effectiveness of abstinence education.  

So if parents can’t provide the necessary basics and public education is either not there or way out of date, where can young adults go to receive essential, and most of all non-judgemental, information about human sexuality?

The answer could very well be to a state-of-the-art chatbot from one of the most respected sources of information on the subject: Planned Parenthood.

Answer my questions, Roo

Planned Parenthood’s Roo chatbot was created by Work & Co, but unlike others of its kind, this system was designed and built from the get-go to understand as well as answer questions specifically from young adults.

Before it was even created, for instance, Planned Parenthood laid the groundwork for Roo by talking with students at MESA (Math Engineering Science Academy) High School in Bushwick, New York about what they’d actually want from an online sex education interactive resource.

According to Planned Parenthood’s senior director of the Digital Product Lab, Ambreen Molitor, confidentiality was a big part of the students being comfortable with the experience.

More than that, this reported lack of feeling safe to ask anything they wanted reveals why public school, and even sex ed from parents, has been so ineffective for teens.  

Ask Roo anything you want

Planned Parenthood Logo

Interviewed by Vox, Molitor said that even online resources don’t always feel secure, noting that “Gen Z’s teens in general are very aware that when you’re searching on Google, you’re being cookie’d. They’re very cognizant of what they type into the browser or the search query—which is really unique.”

But this isn’t the only thing Molitor learned. In addition to needing to be secure, she also found out that their platform had to be mobile, reflecting how many teens prefer to use their phones rather than computers at home or at their schools.

She also discovered that being direct, and in particular asking straight-up questions about sex, is not something many young people feel at ease doing. So, they built into Roo the ability to be casual: the system can recognize an indirect question and respond in as human-like a manner as possible.

“We wanted to bring that tone to life, as well,” Molitor told Mashable, talking about this casual approach to listening and responding, “So the way that Roo speaks to the user is to allow that comfort zone to continue to happen.”

A chatbot that learns

Roo

In addition to this research and thoughtful engineering, Roo has also been designed to learn, delivering more and more helpful information as it interacts with a user.  

At first, this might sound like simply an add-on, but, reflecting back on Molitor’s discussions with teens and how they sometimes find asking a direct question about sex intimidating or embarrassing, this feature makes a lot of sense. By paying attention to how they are asking a question, Roo can get better and better at accurately hearing, and then responding to, what might be between the lines.

This nuance would be just about impossible for a teacher in a classroom setting to achieve or for a parent to be able to handle.  

Going further, Roo even enables teens to leave the bot environment and text their questions to a healthcare expert or, if they’d prefer to meet with someone face-to-face, talk to someone at the nearest Planned Parenthood facility.

To protect their health and plan their futures

Tragically, young adults in the United States are far too frequently treated as either reckless quasi-feral animals in need of caging and stern, if not brutal, “education” to curb their urges, or they are treated as too ignorant and naive to be trusted with honest information about human sexuality.

While some parents do an excellent job of providing this information, and some teenagers are lucky to live in an area with a good educational system, what most young people learn about sex hasn’t evolved much since those whispered rumors in high school bathrooms.

With Roo, though, Planned Parenthood has made an important new step in treating teenagers as the young adults that they are, deserving of respect and unbiased information about sex as well as smart enough to learn and make their own informed decisions.

“Planned Parenthood believes all young people have the right to the evidence-based information and skills they need to protect their health and plan their futures,” president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Dr. Leana Wen, put it in her statement about the release of Roo, “and we’re excited for Roo to be a credible, approachable resource to get the personalized answers they need.”

After all, “to protect their health and plan their futures” is what everyone, parent or teacher, should always be thinking when it comes to young adults and sex—and everything else that’s important. 

Image sources: News 8 WROC

M. Christian

M.Christian (they/them) loves nothing better than exploring the intersections of sex and technology—and speculating on the future of both. A highly regarded erotica writer they have six novels,12 collections, 100+ short stories, and 25 anthologies as an editor to their name. Their non-fiction regularly appears in many sites, but they're most proud of being a regular contributor to Future of Sex.

Of their erotic fiction, Tristan Taormino said that “M.Christian is a literary stylist of the highest caliber: smart, funny, frightening, sexy—there's nothing [they] can't write about… and brilliantly.”

Reflecting their unique ability to sympathetically and convincingly write for a range of genders and sexual orientations, their stories have appeared in multiple editions of Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, The Mammoth Books of Erotica, and others. Their collection of gay erotic fiction, Dirty Words, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

While a majority of their stories have been collected into books like Dirty Words, their fondness for combining sex and science fiction is clearly evident in collections that include Rude Mechanicals, Technorotica, Better Than The Real Thing, Skin Effect Effect, Bachelor Machine, and Hard Drive: The Best Sci-Fi Erotica of M.Christian.

As a novelist, M.Christian’s versatility is on full display with Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Brushes, Painted Doll; and the somewhat controversial queer BDSM/horror/thrillers Finger's Breadth, and Me2.

M.Christian has worked on the industry’s production side as an Associate Publisher for Renaissance E Books and as a Publisher for Digital Parchment Services. The latter dedicated to celebrating the works of science-fiction legends such as William Rotsler, Jerome Bixby, Jody Scott, Arthur Byron Cover, Ernest Hogan, and James Van Hise.

Covering topics like BDSM safety, sexual education, senior sexuality concerns, queer and gender issues, plus reviewing a variety of sex tech products, M.Christian’s non-fiction has appeared on sites like Kinkly, Tickle.Life, Sexpert, Queer Majority, Sex for Every Body, and—of course—their ongoing work for Future of Sex.

If there’s anything M.Christian enjoys more than writing, it’s teaching. A featured presenter, sometimes with their friend Ralph Greco Jr, at national sex and BDSM events, they have lectured on kink play (with an emphasis on safety), polyamory, boosting sexual creativity, and erotica writing--for beginners or those wanting to go pro.

M.Christian is a cohost on two popular sex-education podcasts: Love’s Outer Limits with Dr. Amy Marsh and Licking Non-Vanilla with Ralph Greco, Jr.
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