London - Woman’s Hour host Jenni Murray says teenagers should be shown pornography in class and analyse it like they would a Jane Austen novel.
The Radio 4 presenter, 66, said youngsters could watch sex videos together before discussing it with a teacher.
She also said she wanted sex education classes to be known as ‘gender studies’ so parents would not object to children taking part.
Dame Jenni made the comments after she was asked how to tackle the prevalence of internet pornography – warning that a change in the education system was needed in order to deal with the problem.
READ: Women are worse when it comes to beer goggles
She told an audience at the Cheltenham Literary Festival: ‘We give our kids Jane Austen to read and we say, “OK let’s analyse it”.
‘We might show them a news bulletin that has been on television the night before. Why not show them pornography and teach them how to analyse it?
‘You put boys and girls together in a class and you show them a pornographic film and you analyse it in exactly the same way as you teach them to read all the other cultures around them.’
Youngsters would be given the chance to discuss what they saw so they realised that ‘normal’ women did not behave like those who appear in X-rated films.
Girls were engaging in sexual acts not for themselves but because they ‘want to please boys’, she said. Dame Jenni also said she wanted to overhaul how children were taught about the facts of life in schools.
‘I would abolish sex education,’ she declared. ‘I would put the what goes where and how and how things are made and all of that into biology because that is science and no parent is going to say “oh, I don’t want my child getting involved in biology or science”.
‘Whereas an awful lot of parents might say, “I don’t want my child to have sex education”.
‘What we would then have is a compulsory subject called gender education, so it doesn’t have the word sex in it so nobody can complain or be upset.’
Dame Jenni’s comments come weeks after MPs recommended ‘age appropriate’ lessons in pornography in schools. It was revealed last month that a culture of internet porn among children as young as eight is helping to fuel widespread sexual harassment and violence.
Primary school children are learning about sex through exposure to hardcore porn, with some even becoming addicts. A hard-hitting report by the Commons’ women and equalities committee recommended age appropriate lessons in pornography after experts suggested it could be offered to children from primary school onwards.
MPs heard that many girls face regular pestering and cat-calling amid ‘shocking’ levels of abuse in corridors and classrooms. Some experience inappropriate touching, have their skirts lifted or underwear pulled down, while staff are under-reporting incidents and often failing to take them seriously.
Dame Jenni, a mother of two sons, said: ‘We were raised in the 60s and 70s during the sexual revolution [and] we found out about these things – we had books called Our Bodies, Ourselves. We wanted to know about our pleasure. Young women now are not doing that.’
The broadcaster blamed the rise in porn culture for the shift in attitudes, but conceded: ‘You can’t get rid of [porn]. It’s there, people make a lot of money out of it and the internet is uncontrollable. But what we can do is say to parents, “for goodness sake get onto this”. A lot of parents aren’t aware of what their kids are getting access to so I think we need to talk more to our children about it.’
Dame Jenni recently said the ‘gender war’ has not yet been won and that childcare and domestic violence were problem areas.
Daily Mail