YouTube’s sex-ed agony aunts don’t need a PhD
The video opens inside a 20-something’s starter apartment — novelty string lights, overstuffed armchair, red accent wall. A young woman with black-framed glasses and a lip stud sits in front of the camera, the shot framed so tightly on her face that it cuts off the top of her head. Press “play” and she careens into a riddle. “What bleeds every month without dying, produces pleasure and can push out entire human beings?” She raises her hands to the sky. Her eyes flash wildly. “It’s the one! The only!” Her voice rumbles towards the finish. “Vagina!”
This is Laci Green, the sex-ed queen of YouTube. Since posting her first video from her dorm room in 2008 (it was a review of her NuvaRing), her videos have been viewed 131 million times.
She’s building a digital empire around what she calls “sex ed for the internet”, and she’s leading a new generation of amateur sexperts along with her. They earn money from college speaking engagements, ads on YouTube and by sponsoring products such as Durex condoms and period tracker app Clue.
And traditional media companies such as Viacom and Univision are getting in on the action, too, snapping up online sex-ed personalities and releasing their own pop-sexual content.
For young people raised with abstinence-only education in school and unfettered pornography online, these internet sex gurus offer a third option — access to other young people who feel comfortable talking about sex. This is sex ed by and for internet natives: it is personal, energetic, unfiltered and not entirely fact-checked.
The sex and relationship commentators who arose in the self-help boom of the 1980s emphasised their expert status. But while Dr Ruth, Dr Laura and Dr Drew telegraphed their academic credentials in their names, modern sex-ed stars make an asset of their amateurism. Eileen Kelly, the 20-year-old Instagram-famous founder of the sex blog and forum Birds&Bees, self-effacingly refers to herself as “a random girl from Seattle”. British sex-ed YouTuber Hannah Witton calls herself a “self-taught expert”, and her lack of credentials is part of her message.
“You don’t have to be a doctor to be involved in sex education,” Ms Witton said. “It’s sex. It should be accessible to everyone. There shouldn’t be any barriers to talking about it.”
If grade school sex-ed classes are clinical and awkward, YouTube sex-ed videos are shamelessly exuberant. A minute into her video about the secrets of the vagina, Ms Green whips out a Play-Doh model of the female reproductive system to giddily point to the cervical os. A typical YouTube editing tactic, in which dozens of takes are stitched together through hyperactive jump cuts, imbues sex-ed monologues with an almost manic energy. Illustrations pop onscreen to punctuate points, and piped-in music swells to stoke feelings.
For all the talk about the fantasies and fallacies of porn, it’s notable that there is something not entirely real about these online outlets. Watching Ms Green’s videos or scrolling through Ms Kelly’s coolly glamorous Instagram feed can feel less like talking to a sister or a friend than marvelling at a dazzling sex-ed cyborg. Or maybe they’re more like sexual avatars, modelling a level of liberation that their viewers can’t yet achieve themselves.
The exhibitionism endemic to social media stardom comes in handy here. Sex-ed YouTube borrows from the same tropes that dominate personality-driven videos across the network; these ones just have more naked people. (The relevant bits are censored, as nudity runs afoul of YouTube rules.)
A lot of the videos are styled as party games, light “social experiments” or crossover collaborations with other web stars. Ms Witton hosts a series called Drunk Advice, where she and internet-famous friends get tipsy and talk sex. Shannon Boodram’s YouTube videos play with classic video formats like the taboo confessional, the skill tutorial and the relationship skit. And Arielle Scarcella, who makes videos from a lesbian perspective, takes the internet’s appetite for discomforting voyeuristic experiments and adds a sexual twist.
The educational component kicks in when the hosts tie the stunt to a broader lesson about self-esteem, sexual health, tolerance, whatever.
“These videos mean that more people can have access to information about sex, and they get to choose who they’re comfortable getting it from,” said Debby Herbenick, an associate professor of public health at Indiana University. “Sex is still pretty stigmatised, so that can be really lovely.” On the other hand, she said, “the information is not necessarily accurate”.
Internet sexperts pull from a grab bag of materials. Ms Green, who sees her video archive as a virtual “sex-ed library”, takes care to quote sound medical resources and publishes links to references alongside her videos.