SEX ED TOPICS IN THE NEWS
The latest sex & relationships references out there in the media
ON CONTROVERSIES OVER DISNEY’S LIVE-ACTION SNOW WHITE REMAKE
“Snow White, Disney’s live-action remake, has seemed like a poisoned apple. Its world premiere had no red-carpet media so as to prevent stars Rachel Zegler, age 23, and Gal Gadot, 39, from answering questions. Since 2021 the studio has confronted criticism and backlash revolving around culture wars and whether it’s positive to be classified as woke.
Complaints about Zegler, who is of Colombian descent, being cast as the princess with ‘skin as white as snow’ echoed those Halle Bailey faced for playing The Little Mermaid, with some fans outraged at Disney’s push for more culturally representative storytelling. Ironically its narratives are often criticised for pushing old-fashioned ideals.
Then dwarf actor Peter Dinklage said Disney was making a ‘backwards story about 7 dwarfs living in a cave’.
Saying it had consulted ‘with members of the dwarfism community to avoid reinforcing stereotypes’, Disney used CGI to create the characters.
In 2021 Zegler called the 1937 film dated and weird, with the prince a ‘guy who literally stalks Snow White’. Now she ‘won’t be dreaming about true love’ but ‘about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader her father told her she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true’.
Disney’s fan base is famously highly invested and protective; TikTokkers said: ‘Criticising Disney princesses is not feminist’; the online tradwife community took it as a personal insult that Snow White would dream of something other than being a wife and mother and because falling in love was no longer her priority.
Zegler carefully worded her next response: ‘What an honour to be a part of something people feel so passionately about. We’re not always going to agree with everyone who surrounds us.’
Pro-Palestinian activists had called for a boycott of the film over the casting of Israeli actor Gadot; others criticised her playing a villain, the Evil Queen. Meanwhile Zegler posted on X: ‘Free Palestine.’ She was also forced to apologise after declaring she hoped Trump supporters would ‘never know peace’.
So Snow White has been a lightning rod for some major issues”
WORDS Why Disney’s “enchanting” Snow White remake is really being seen as a poisoned apple (Metro, 15/3/25)
ON WHY YOUNG PEOPLE MAKE DEEPFAKES “Good news about deepfake nudes (typically created by young people using free or cheap ‘nudify’ apps): teens understand that using AI to generate nonconsensual nudes is not OK, says Melissa Stroebel, head of research for a Thorn survey of 1,200 young people aged 13-20.
10% know a victim, suggesting that ‘it is happening in almost every school system’ in the US and likely ‘every town has had at least one person targeted’ – and 84% ‘overwhelmingly recognise’ deepfake nudes as abuse.
Stroebel says: ‘It’s hopeful that kids have clarity on this’ – in a 2023 survey, many men didn’t think fake nudes were wrong.
Roberta Duffield of Blackbird.AI deepfake-detection tools says: ‘Deepfake nudes targeting kids (and adults) are one of the most insidious and wide-reaching harms of AI. For young people still forming their identity, the psychological, reputational and social consequences can be severe. Education campaigns are needed to help folks question content before sharing.’
30% of teens who create fake nudes share them with kids at school and 29% with online-only contacts.
Last year the New York Times declared that teens are confronting an ‘epidemic’ of fake nudes in middle and high schools.
Young people, as digital natives, are more likely to be early adopters of emerging technologies like nudify apps and to engage in riskier behaviour. Motivations for creating deepfake nudes include ‘sexual curiosity, pleasure seeking, revenge’ and peer pressure. For a boy aged 14 it was to strike back at a bully.
• ‘I just wanted to see what it would look like’ (boy, 15)
• ‘I was dared to’ (girl, 18)
• ‘I was horny and WASN’T thinking straight’ (boy, 18)
• ‘Everyone will see it, they’ll be embarrassed and it will never go away’ (boy, 13)
• ‘As soon as everyone knows it’s a deepfake, all feelings of panic and fear are gone. t’s not actually you, so there’s no pressure. It’s a little stressful, but it’s not actually their body’ (girl, 16)
• ‘You control what offends you. It’s wrong to make deepfake nudes, but ultimately it’s fake’ (boy, 13)
• ‘It dehumanises the person, as you use them for pleasure without consent’ (boy, 18)
Since nudify apps became more mainstream, the majority of victims have been female, but young men have been targeted, too
Young people may be too ashamed or traumatised to report their experience.
Teens are more likely to seek help on combating harms from fake nudes (76%) than on coping with other online sexual interactions (46%). Most use tools like blocking or reporting but 57% approach a parent, school authority, friends or police.
Kids, Stroebel says, want to know how to protect themselves and their friends”
WORDS “It’s not actually you”: Teens cope while adults debate harms of fake nudes (ArsTechnica, 3/3/25)
WAYS OF TALKING WITH BOYS & YOUNG MEN ABOUT IMAGES
Boys and young men are bombarded by images and content that shape their sense of themselves and others, says the charity Men At Work.
Here are some questions to ask boys and young men about the stunt pulled at the February 2025 Grammy Awards by a clothed Kanye West and his wife Bianca Censori, wearing an “invisible dress”…
o Would the images you’ve seen of this event make sense if the roles were reversed?
o What would we feel / think / say if the roles were reversed?
o What does the man being dressed and the woman being (basically) undressed mean?
o What does the man being dressed “anonymously” – in contrast to the (almost complete) visibility of the woman – mean?
o Are the sunglasses significant in terms of who can see / be seen? If so, in what ways?
o Do you imagine that the relationship is an equal one? If yes, what are the signs that it is? If no, what are the signs that it isn’t?
o Do we need to know more about the context of this event to “read” the image in a meaningful way?
o If we do know more about the context of the image – the people involved and some of their story – does this put this image into a wider “pattern”? If so, what is that?o What role do you think power and choice play in this image?o What role – if any – do you think power and choice should have in a healthy relationship?
o Where else in life do we see the imbalance of “Who does what” / “Who is represented in which ways” that the image shows?
Thanks to Men At Work CIC for this dialogue plan and its 12 Dialogue Themes of: 1) Respect, 2) The “Man Rules”, 3) Being safe, 4) Friends/mates/bros etc, 5) What does money mean, 6) People – not objects, 7) Control?, 8) Taking no for an answer, 9) Safe & safe to be around, 10) Respect & disrespect in relationships, 11) Help! and 12) Future me: who & how
ON PORN, CHOKING & YOUNG PEOPLE “The average age people first see porn is 13 – often by accident,” writes Baroness Gabby Bertin, age 46. “Much of it is violent. Video titles prominent on homepages include words like ‘attack’, ‘kidnap’, ‘force’, ‘violate’ and ‘destroy’. Strangling, aka ‘choking’, is so widespread in porn that young people report it as a mainstream sexual practice.
I am no Mary Whitehouse. I’m a Conservative. I believe in free speech. Consenting adults should be able to indulge their interests as long as those interests don’t harm others.
But abusive porn is harming people. A whole generation is learning how to have sex, and how to treat the opposite sex, from distorted and often disturbing depictions. Porn is often cited in relation to young people’s poor mental health, violence against women and girls (VAWG) and misogynistic attitudes.
In my year-long government review I was astounded by what I heard. The teacher who said boys aged 14 asked her how to ‘choke’ a girl during sex. The schoolboy awaiting arrest for sexual assault who couldn’t understand that he’d done anything wrong. The nurse treating sexual injuries every day.
Men and boys are victims of this culture too. It is a confusing world for our sons, who are taught to reject sexist attitudes while being shown something very different online. Porn depicting coercion, degradation
and penetration with harmful objects – effectively banned in the ‘offline’ world of cinemas and DVDs – is rife.I urge the government to ban legal but harmful porn that would be prohibited offline. I recommend that non-fatal strangulation is explicitly outlawed.There is no safe way to strangle someone – even a small amount of pressure to the neck can damage the brain. Just as the act of strangling is illegal, its depiction in porn should be too”
WORDS Teenage boys are asking teachers how to CHOKE girls during sex – this is why degrading porn MUST be banned, writes BARONESS BERTIN (DailyMail, 27/2/25)
MORE FROM BERTIN
• “I’m not saying people shouldn’t watch porn. I’m not a prude”
• Porn is “‘rewiring’ how young people think about gender, sex & their role in society. Boys are ‘taught to reject sexist attitudes while… porn shows them that anything goes’”
On BODY IMAGE in the film BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY, starring actor Renée Zellweger, age 55…
• “Bridget Jones suggested being an adult was NOT about morphing into an exhaustingly ‘perfect’ woman who’d stepped out of a catalogue: skeletally thin, immaculately dressed, poised, never pissed, loud or crass, always witty and well informed. You didn’t have to have your shit together in order to find a relationship, build a successful career and be a good daughter, friend or mother”
• “Gen Z loves ‘Bridge’ because she represents the opposite of the pressure on younger women in Instagram culture to have a perfect body even though she was so obsessed by her weight that she kept a diary of calories consumed and thought being 130lb was fat. I hated that about Bridget probably because that aspect of her was realistic.
The 90s were hardcore for body shaming and weight regulation. There was zero body positivity. It was ‘be thin or go home’. The new film has thankfully jettisoned the fat-person-deserves-to-be-shamed theme, presumably because it’s verboten to admit that women still bend themselves into idealised shapes to be ornamental. The only difference is that now you don’t have to be a cadaver”
• “Some women celebrate Bridget’s candour about calorie-, work- and romance-related anxieties; others find those obsessions anti-feminist. There’s no male equivalent who expresses men’s anxieties and aspirations”
• “The passionate drunk-girl-next-door everydayness of Bridget is a spirit reflected, in the first 2 films, in the slightly slovenly doughy-cuddly perfection of Zellweger’s face”
• Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding: “There’s a big audience with Gen Z. My daughter’s friends are relating to her because the world has got harder for them with social media and they’re still worrying about their body but also feeling guilty because of body positivity for worrying about it”
• Renée Zellweger: “I went to a party at a supermodel friend’s house. She’s the 6ft-tall, lanky, long-hair, just zenith-prototype beauty standard for my generation. A girl, about 11, said to me: ‘Oh my gosh – you don’t have to have big boobs and a big round behind to be gorgeous.’ Her idea of the beauty standard was the complete opposite to what was sort of imposed on my generation”
“I wasn’t taking care of myself in my 30s. I didn’t make great choices all the time”
“I don’t think that Bridget is not fit. She’s got nice things in nice places that don’t occur on me without extra effort”
On some SEX & RELATIONSHIPS themes in the film BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY, starring actor Renée Zellweger, age 55…
“Zellweger first piled on the pounds and adopted an English accent 24 years ago. Since then Bridget Jones has stumbled through romantic disappointments, full-blown passion, pregnancy and widowhood, dragging with her a generation of female fans who appreciate the funny side of growing old disgracefully. Mysteriously Jones seems to be surrounded by the same friends who all believe she needs a jolly good shagging.
Jones insists that she is now completely asexual. But she jumps on Tinder and purchases an unseemly amount of condoms.
Zellweger’s affair with 27-year-old Leo Woodall doesn’t entirely ring true. Much fun is made of his wet-shirt moment, echoing Colin Firth’s turn in Pride And Prejudice.
There are a handful of chuckles (often at the expense of an intimate medical condition of Jones’s daughter Mabel, age 6, who is taught how to pronounce ‘syphilis’ by gynaecologist Emma Thompson)”
WORDS Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (Film Review, 19/2/25)
AND MORE…
• A friend signs Jones up to Tinder as: “Tragic widow seeks sexual reawakening”
• “Over the years we’ve come to terms with the normalised sexual harassment and fat shaming in Bridget Jones books and movies, from bum-patting in the work lift and Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver abusing his power as Bridget’s boss – and don’t get us started on the constant obsessing over her weight”
• “Jones has a red-hot summer fling with a man 20 years her junior. Here is a fiftysomething who, though she might have all the usual hangups about her body image and ageing, would never dream of letting them impact on her unadulterated enjoyment of sex”
• Renée Zellweger on Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding: “She was sort of pushing back and making fun of all the noise. It was a symptom of that moment where the media was just throwing out this image: here’s the paradigm for beauty and success you’re meant to conform to. Bridget subverts that notion”
“It’s an inevitability, isn’t it? Society evolves and so does the girl”
ON CHILD MARRIAGE “The star of a film about a schoolgirl forced to marry an older man is evangelical about her role – despite the fact that her Kenyan community might see it as a betrayal and treat her as an outcast.
The film highlights how accepted child marriage is despite being against the law.
Michelle Lemuya Ikeny, age 15, said: ‘I want the film to spark conversation. It’s not something people want to talk about.’
She plays Nawi, 13, in this coming-of-age film set in rural Turkana, where 1 in 4 girls are married before 18.
Ikeny says: ‘So many of my friends had to leave school or never went to school because someone paid a dowry to marry them, so their father married them off.’
Last year she won an Africa Movie Academy Award for best promising actor.
After Nawi finds out that her exam results are top in the county, she hears that her father is selling her to a wealthy man, Shadrack, in exchange for ‘60 sheep, 8 camels and 100 goats’.
Nawi smears blood on her legs on her wedding night to fake a period then runs away to go to high school in Nairobi. She outsmarts her furious father and Shadtrack then confronts them after learning that her baby sister has been promised to Shadrack as a replacement bride.
When Nawi’s classmate doesn’t show up for an exam, boys joke that she’s ‘busy making babies’.
The story was written by Milcah Cherotich, whose sister was forced into marriage at 14 and gave birth at 15. The child died while being carried on her back: ‘She lived a life that was not hers. A life designed by my parents and her husband. Those are things I wanted to change.’
Backlash is expected, she says.
Watching it with her uncle – a supporter of child marriage – Cherotich said: ‘After 55 minutes he was crying. I was rejoicing, thinking: “At least 1 man has been touched.”
In sub-Saharan Africa 1 in 3 girls marry before 18. Globally 1 in 5 women aged 20-24 were married as girls vs nearly 1 in 4 10 years ago.
Ikeny believes the film can change lives: ‘When you watch it, try to put yourself in the shoes of Nawi, of all those 640 million girls. When you’re young you have so many dreams’”
WORDS Teenage actress takes on child marriage in role mirroring real life (BBC, 26/1/25)
ON THE CLASSIC 1970s HANDBOOK “Sex positivity, polyamory, threesomes: the extent to which they’re now more acceptable has a lot to do with Alex Comfort. In 1972 the British physician published THE JOY OF SEX, the first popular book in English that explained and celebrated the art of making love.
A coffee table how-to guide with tasteful drawings of a naked couple in a range of sexual positions, it became an international bestseller and helped shift perceptions of sex along the procreational-recreational axis.
Now it’s the subject of an upcoming comedy by Sharon Maguire.
‘We didn’t have The Joy of Sex in my house growing up because [we were] Irish Catholic. Sex wasn’t mentioned, never mind a book about it,’ she says.
The film focuses on the love triangle between Comfort, his wife Ruth and her best friend Jane Henderson, Comfort’s lover and collaborator.
The middle-aged couple took Polaroids of their bedroom exploits, which Comfort, thinking they could be used, proudly showed his publishers, much to their distress.
Instead 2 illustrators drew the graphic scenes with porn models who ‘kept pouting at the camera’, says Maguire. That wasn’t
deemed suitable for the target audience of loving couples. So one illustrator, Charles Raymond, volunteered with his wife to re-enact Comfort and Henderson’s sex life while the other illustrator drew them.‘It sounds like a sex romp but it was well intentioned. There was really nothing like it. No textbooks, even medical ones – no illustrations, no pictures,’ says Maguire.Hippyishly hirsute, Raymond no doubt helped establish beards as a symbol of virility in the 1970s.
Comfort found sex hard to talk about.He liked to compare sex to cooking: knowing what to do in the kitchen results in better meals, so knowing what to do in the bedroom can lead to a happier life.He would have been pleased that unorthodox forms of sexuality are ‘more out in the open,’ says Maguire. ‘But for all the complications of sex, love and desire we all experience, monogamy remains the norm.’The sexual revolution he envisaged never quite materialised”
WORDS “They were trying to do 200 different poses during power cuts”: Bridget Jones director takes on The Joy of Sex (Guardian, 9/2/25)
🌈 “Powerful speeches, trans acceptance, queer joy & some frankly amazing outfits… Here are LGBT+ MOMENTS from the 2025 Golden Globes you need to know about:
1) Karla Sofía Gascón honours trans community…
Star of trans musical drama Emilia Pérez, the trans actor accepted the Best Motion Picture – Musical Or Comedy award, saying she wore a yellow and orange Saint Laurent gown because she wanted the trans community to know that: ‘Light always wins over darkness. You can beat us up but you can never take away our soul, our existence, our identity…
I want to say to you – raise your voice and say: ‘I am who I am, not who you want!’
2) Wicked brings queer joy despite being ‘snubbed’…
The highest-grossing adaptation of a Broadway musical featuring an out LGBTQ+ actor, Cynthia Erivo, Wicked took home only 1 award: Cinematic and Box Office Achievement. Presenters Jeff Goldblum and MichelleYeoh filled their time with fun moments featuring LGBTQ+ terminology
3) Baby Reindeer wins 2 awards…
The hit Netflix show’s creator and star Richard Gadd won Best Limited TV Series and JessicaGunning won Best Supporting Female Actor for playing a stalker. Gadd, who is bisexual, said fans’ support ‘means the world’ to him
4) Jodie Foster dedicates win to wife and sons…
Speaking of her sons Kit & Charlie’s support, Foster dedicated the Best Actress In A Limited Series award for True Detective: Night Country to ‘the love of my life, Alex’ (her wife AlexHedison)
5) Queer Eye star stuns in new gown…
Jonathan Van Ness showed up in a gorgeous Siriano gown that hung beautifully on him
Honourable mentions
* The stars of The Substance, ‘divas’ Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, reenacted their characters’ tensions, creating a significantly camp and funny moment that delighted viewers
* Actor Andrew Garfield set Gay Twitter on fire by giving a smouldering look to the camera while slowly putting on a very sexy pair of glasses and adjusting the neckline of his partially unbuttoned shirt. The clip took the internet by storm”
🌈 WORDS The most iconic LGBTQ+ moments at the 2025 Golden Globes – including Jeff Goldblum saying “zaddy” (PinkNews, 6/1/25)