Good sex matters: Pleasure as a driver of online sex education for young people

Abstract

Background There are few documented examples of online sex education platforms that make an impact on young people’s sexual health and wellbeing, yet research shows that new media has enormous potential to be harnessed in this way. The same is true for a pleasure-positive approach to sex education curricula and programmes. This research provides empirical evidence from the Love Matters' websites in Mexico, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, and India to highlight the prevalence and importance of talking about pleasure-related topics with young people. Methodology Love Matters is an online sex education platform targeting seven countries and attracting 30 million website visits in 2018. We analysed data through Google Analytics to explore the difference between sex education-focused content and pleasure-focused content and how young people engage with different types of sexual health information on the Love Matters platforms. Results Pleasure-focused content is 1.5 times more popular than sex education-focused content across all platforms. However, education-focused content attracts more organic traffic, suggesting young people purposefully search for sexual health information online. Users generally spend longer on the site engaging with sex education-focused content than pleasure-focused content. Conclusion This research provides empirical evidence from five countries in the Global South to support the notion that young people are actively looking for sexual health information that covers the full scope of sexual experience and pleasure, including – but not limited to – the reduction of health risks. This paper furthers the efforts to adopt a pleasure-positive approach to both online and offline sex education interventions.