NEW YORK — Almost three decades after Bill Clinton fired his Surgeon General for merely stating that masturbation “is a part of human sexuality, and it's a part of something that perhaps should be taught,” the subject of sex ed is once again embroiled in a culture war that, like that 1994 incident, is stoked by sensationalistic press reports.
And one of the targets this time around is porn education, particularly “porn literacy.”
Earlier this month, the Dalton School—a private school in Manhattan—dismissed its Director of Health & Wellness, Justine Ang Fonte, after a relentless campaign initiated by “concerned parents” and then broadcast internationally by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post and other tabloids.
Fonte was first targeted by the tabloid on May 22 concerning a Zoom guest lecture she gave at another Manhattan private school, Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School. Fonte’s lecture at Columbia Prep was titled, “Pornography Literacy: An Intersectional Focus on Mainstream Porn.”
Although both the headline (“Columbia Prep students and parents reel after class on ‘porn literacy’”) and the slant of the whole report by the Post’s Dana Kennedy are deeply judgmental and openly trying to get Fonte in trouble with her employers, her description of the workshop at Columbia Prep seems fairly straightforward:
“The often-explicit slide presentation and lecture by Fonte to the 120 boys and girls,” writes Kennedy, “included lessons on how porn takes care of ‘three big male vulnerabilities;’ statistics on the ‘orgasm gap’ showing straight women have far fewer orgasms with their partners than gay men or women; and photos of partially-nude women, some in bondage, to analyze ‘what is porn and what is art’.”
The lecture was prepared by Fonte for high school juniors, typically 15-17 and one year away from graduating and attending college courses.
Kennedy also salaciously stresses that she’s seen “some of the presentation” and that includes “a list of the most searched pornographic terms of 2019, including ‘creampie,’ ‘anal,’ ‘gangbang,’ ‘stepmom’ and more.”
She also adds that “one slide cited various porn genres such as ‘incest-themed,’ consensual or ‘vanilla,’ ‘barely legal,’ and ‘kink and BDSM’ (which included ‘waterboard electro’ torture porn as an example).”
Kennedy’s damning tone also extends to Fonte’s discussion of OnlyFans, particularly a slide where a performer clarified, “I identify as non-binary, but because that hasn’t hit the general consciousness of the adult industry, I say ‘girl,’ because that’s what people who want to buy my content will be looking for.”
A Highly Qualified Sex Educator
Fonte has plentiful credentials to teach such a workshop. The 35-year-old has a B.A. in Psychology from UC San Diego, a Master’s in Education in Teaching from the University of Hawai`i at Manoa, and a Master’s in Public Health in Sexuality from Columbia University.
Fonte is also very open about her theoretical framework and personal background, with a website that mentions her life experience as a BIPOC woman from an immigrant family and someone who has been “disrupting health education for 10 years” by framing her “pedagogy through the lens of Kimberlé Crenshaw's teachings on intersectionality.”
“I interrogate how our multifaceted identities shape how we experience health,” Fonte writes on her website, which was available to the Dalton and Columbia Prep administrations when they hired her. “I believe it is the responsibility of comprehensive health education to be about social justice because health is a human right. Through my teaching, I promote agency, activate empathy, fight for equity, embrace one's authentic self, and navigate care.”
As sex experts go, Fonte’s style of presentation, demeanor, topics, approach, and content are far from controversial, as can easily be seen in this YouTube video discussing “destigmatizing conversations about pleasure.”
She has also been open about her approach for years, long before the Post amplified the voices of a few angry parents. In a 2014 interview, Fonte proudly described herself as “the Dalton School’s Health Coordinator for grades 4-12 teaching health classes covering it all from puberty to pornography while organizing sex-positive programs for the school community.”
“I am currently devising a parent workshop series for the Parent Association at my school for grades 4-12,” she enthusiastically told the Center for Sex Education blog. “After conducting two well-attended parent events on ‘How to answer questions about sexuality’ I’ve convinced the administration and the community that this work is relevant!”
But in her May 22 article, the Post's Dana Kennedy used anonymous complaints, supposedly by a student and several “concerned parents,” to attempt to pillory Fonte and ultimately get her fired. She succeeded.
The “Critical Race Theory” Boogeyman
It would be naive not to see Kennedy and the Post’s shaming of a BIPOC intellectual who presented a non-shame-based view of porn in 2021 as relevant both to the current War on Porn and also the current right-wing-media-fueled panic over the supposed ideological boogeyman of “Critical Race Theory.”
Kennedy even goes out of her way to point out to Post readers that Fonte’s role model Kimberlé Crenshaw “is a law professor at Columbia University and the UCLA School of Law and an early proponent of critical race theory who coined the word ‘intersectionality’ more than 30 years ago.”
Here’s Kennedy quoting her anonymous sources on Fonte’s workshop, which from the slides appears to be a fairly standard, non-shame-based, non-stigmatizing sex education presentation:
“We were all so shocked and mortified” says one anonymous student, apparently speaking for “all” and giving her impression of a class by a qualified instructor that she did not care for. “We were all like, ‘Why are they doing this? Why do they think it’s OK? We were supposed to answer questions about the porn stuff in the Zoom chat but we were all side-chatting in group chats and tons of kids thought it was so dumb that they sent the link to their friends all over the city and they were all logging on with the password.”
An anonymous mother brought up an even bigger right-wing boogeyman: “cancel culture.”
“No one wants to be cancelled or lose their livelihood and that can be done in an instant,” said the mother, who despite her anonymity nevertheless got her notions platformed internationally by a powerful newspaper and framed as speaking for a majority. “Most parents feel the same way I do about not going public but at the same time we’re incredibly frustrated by what’s going on. None of the parents knew this was planned. We were completely left in the dark. It makes us wonder what else the school is up to.”
This disclaimer is both cruel to Fonte and laughable. Anyone even remotely familiar with the dynamics of private education knows that fee-paying parents hold all the power and that the “customer is always right” ethos is rampant. Neither that mother nor any of the extremely affluent parents who send their kids to Manhattan private schools “was cancelled” or “lost their livelihood” over the New York Post campaign.
The one person who did lose her livelihood? The educated, competent BIPOC woman whom the “concerned mother” targeted for censure.
Here’s another quote that Dana Kennedy dug up, from another anonymous parent who had nothing to do with the presentation because their kid is a middle-schooler at the pre-K-12th-grade school: “It’s outrageous that the school is introducing pornography into a mainstream classroom and starting to indoctrinate kids. The goal of this is to disrupt families.”
Warriors Against a Vast Cultural Conspiracy
After making her ideological allegiance clear through her selective quotes (not a single student or parent is quoted who approved of Fonte’s seminar), Kennedy spreads her condemnation to “a ‘pornography literacy’ program for adolescents developed in 2016 in Boston through a partnership with the city Health Commission and a Boston University professor.”
Still in full condemnation mode, Kennedy reveals as if it was a huge scandal that “among other things, the early program was designed to teach students that ‘pornography is created for entertainment and generally not for instructional purposes’ and about the danger, say, of texting each other nude photos.”
Finally, Kennedy concludes with a quote from an (again, anonymous) spokesperson for an organization called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), who told her that Fonte’s workshop was “part of an orthodoxy that has taken over schools across the country.”
“Millions of kids are being experimented on with a new curriculum that racializes and sexualizes young children, labels them by traits like skin color, gender or sexual orientation and tells them the paths of their lives are determined by those traits,” declared the anonymous FAIR source.
Kennedy did not point out that FAIR is an anti-affirmative-action group that believes in a massive cultural conspiracy to promote “diversity” which must be fought within all American institutions.
In their words: “Increasingly, American institutions—colleges and universities, businesses, government, the media and even our children’s schools—are enforcing a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to identify ourselves and each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.”
FAIR’s board of advisors includes noted critics of supposed “woke culture” like Megyn Kelly, Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan.
Columbia Prep Surrenders and Issues Mea Culpa
After May 22, Dana Kennedy and The New York Post continued their campaign to get Fonte fired. The story was amended with a follow-up after publication pointing out that the Columbia Prep head of school, Dr. William M. Donohue, had bowed to the tabloid and the parents' pressure and emailed the parent-customers, distancing the school from Fonte’s presentation.
“The content and tone of the presentation did not represent our philosophy,” Donohue mea-culpaed, “which is to educate our students in ways that promote their personal development and overall health, as well as to express respect for them as individuals.”
“It was unfortunate that we did not better inform ourselves of the speaker’s specific content in advance,” Donohue’s apology continued. “In this case, the speaker did not align with our unique CGPS mission and for this, I apologize […] Going forward we will certainly learn from this experience.”
Kennedy then quoted “one of the mothers organizing the parents’ new social media campaign” who spelled out the real stakes of the incident: “It’s not about this one class. It’s about the whole radical direction the school is going into.”
A Salad of Various “Woke” Panics
Then, a week later, Dana Kennedy published a second attack on Justine Ang Fonte’s pedagogy, taking aim at a class at Dalton where she had apparently discussed masturbation with younger students.
“Dalton Parents Enraged Over ‘Masturbation’ Videos for First-Graders,” the Post now headlined. Rehashing a months-old story about some parents who had complained about Fonte’s methods, Kennedy quotes angry parents who had taken issue with Fonte’s way of teaching kids about consensual touch. One secondhand anecdote: “One mother said another parent told her, ‘I’m paying $50,000 to these a–holes to tell my kid not to let her grandfather hug her when he sees her?’”
“We Are Furious”
Conflating a whole salad of current media-fueled right-wing obsessions —sex education, “wokeness,” critical race theory, “cancel culture”—Kennedy quotes Dalton “concerned parents” ranting full-on about modernity, embodied in the figure of the at-that-point-still-employed Justine Ang Fonte:
“Kids have no less than five classes on gender identity—this is pure indoctrination. This person should absolutely not be teaching children. Ironically, she teaches kids about ‘consent’ yet she has never gotten consent from parents about the sexually explicit, and age-inappropriate material about transgender to first-graders,” says an anonymous parent.
“We are furious,” someone else pipes in. “We were horrified to learn this was shown to our first-grade 6- and 7-year-old kids without our knowledge or consent. But it’s so hard to fight back because you’ll get canceled and your child will suffer.”
Again, the only person who suffered a cancellation of her livelihood at the end of this whole charade: Justine Ang Fonte, the BIPOC woman with the actual qualifications to teach non-shame-based sex education.
Kennedy’s article then got picked up by the right-wing echo chamber. Suzanna Bowling, a Manhattan blogger with no visible qualifications on public health or sex education, took Dana Kennedy’s reports and amplified them, saying the quiet part out loud: “Who Is Justine Ang Fonte and Why Are We Letting Her Near Children?” she headlined, lambasting the sex educator for supposedly “grooming our kids to be dysfunctional [regarding Fonte’s presentation about LGBTQ+ youth], to allow [sic] pedophilia and teach it is ok if you consent as an underage child? We need to wake up and see what is being taught to our kids before it is too late!”
On June 12, The New York Post and Dana Kennedy declared victory: “A teacher who taught controversial sex-education classes that included cartoon videos on masturbation for first graders at the posh Dalton School has resigned, The Post has learned.”
The school tried to whitewash the removal of Fonte as “a resignation,” claiming that she was leaving having “helped to develop an exemplary K-12 Health and Wellness program. Dalton—our faculty, staff, administration, and trustees—continue to stand firmly behind this program and those who teach it.”
The New York Post then dog-whistled the victorious, notably uncancelled and unharmed “concerned parents” by boasting that “Fonte is the third high-profile Dalton staffer to leave the school this year as the school struggles with a simmering conflict between the faculty and parents over its progressive agenda. Domonic Rollins, the school’s director of DEI, (‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’) left in February to ‘pursue other opportunities,’ the school said at the time. [Jim] Best, Dalton’s headmaster for the past 3 years who has been with the school a total of 16 years, announced in April he was resigning.”
Another Qualified BIPOC Woman Hounded by Right-Wing Voices
The sight of a qualified BIPOC woman being hounded out of a public health job by paranoid right-wing culture warriors should immediately bring to mind that shameful incident in 1994 when Bill Clinton removed the country’s first Black Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, for daring to point out that masturbation existed and maybe should be part of sex-ed curricula.
The non-stop criticism of Elders by Rush Limbaugh and his army of “dittoheads” was fundamental in eroding her position, which made her at the time a pioneer in having a more frank conversation about formerly taboo topics like marijuana use and sex. Many of the attacks against Elder also featured dog whistles about her identity as a BIPOC woman.
This is how Newsweek described the Elders firing 22 years later:
“At a 1994 United Nations conference on AIDS, Elders was asked if she thought teaching children about masturbation might reduce unsafe sex. Yes, she replied, ‘I think that is something that is a part of human sexuality, and it's a part of something that perhaps should be taught. But we've not even taught our children the very basics.’ The conservative outrage circuit erupted, and Clinton promptly asked her to resign.”
The Newsweek article went on to quote Elders clarifying that she felt her position would reduce unintended pregnancy and disease, and that she advocated teaching school children that masturbation is “natural and common,” not how to do it. Elders’s comments appeared in the documentary Sticky: A (Self) Love Story; director Nicholas Tana noted the irony that the U.S. still suffered from high rates of teenage pregnancies and STDs, and that Elders “was fired by the same president who felt it appropriate to insert a cigar into his intern Monica Lewinsky's vagina!”
The 2016 Newsweek cheekily referred to “the revolutionary stance that touching yourself is not a cause for moral repulsion,” but one Trump administration and several years of evangelical/conservative triumphs at the state level and in the Senate later, the expression seems much less jokey.It turns out that it is still very much a revolutionary stance to attempt to teach porn literacy or masturbation, or the destigmatization of sex and sex work, at a time when the War on Porn—fueled by right-wing outlets like The New York Post but also by supposedly liberal or progressive sources like The New York Times or The Guardian—dovetails with the broader culture wars to fuel a War on Porn education.
Meanwhile, at "The New York Times"
Over this past weekend, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Peggy Orenstein headlined, “If You Ignore Porn, You Aren’t Teaching Sex Ed.”
“Parents often say that if they try to have the sex talk with their teens, the kids plug their ears and hum or run screaming from the room,” Orenstein’s editorial begins. “But late last month, those roles were reversed: After a workshop for high school juniors at the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School promoting critical thinking about online pornography, it was parents who flipped out. Some took to the media—The New York Post, Fox News, The Federalist and other like-minded outlets jumped on the story—accusing the school of indoctrinating children.”
But instead of denouncing the campaign against Fonte or addressing the actual shaming campaign that got her removed, Orenstein makes a mild general suggestion that “refusing to discuss sexually explicit media, which is more accessible to minors than at any other time in history, won’t make it go away.”
“Curiosity about sex and masturbation is natural: good for girls, boys and everyone beyond those designations,” Orenstein continues, again without addressing the War on Porn education or the mainstreaming of the notions of religiously inspired groups like Exodus Cry, via their ally Nicholas Kristof, or by the very New York Times that publishes her.
“Adult porn use is a different conversation,” Orenstein protests. “One could also debate the potential for sexual liberation of ethically produced porn, queer porn or feminist porn, but those sites are typically behind a pay wall, and most teenagers don’t have their own credit cards.”
Then, of course, she gets to familiar anti-porn talking points (of the supposedly “feminist” variety), which invisibilize all of queer sexual expression and itsfundamental role in LGBTQ+ coming-out processes. “The free content most readily available to minors tends to show sex as something men do to rather than with women,” Orenstein proclaims, channeling verbatim virulent anti-porn crusaders like Gail Dines or Laila Mickelwait. “It often portrays female pleasure as a performance for male satisfaction, shows wildly unrealistic bodies, is indifferent to consent (sometimes in its actual production) and flirts with incest.”
Orenstein even quotes that methodologically meaningless “2020 analysis of more than 4,000 heterosexual scenes on Pornhub and Xvideos, 45 percent and 35 percent, respectively, contained aggression, almost exclusively directed at women.”
Dreaming of a Liberal, “Ethical Porn” Utopia
After continuing along these lines for several paragraphs, Orenstein concedes that “to be fair, though, mainstream media use is associated with many of the same beliefs and behaviors, so even if you could block all the triple-X sites on the internet (and good luck with that), it wouldn’t be enough.”
But then, like Kristof, she brings it all back to porn, because why address complicated internet-wide moderation issues when you can bring up again and again what the dirty, dirty pictures are doing to our poor cis boys and girls?
After a series of statements that essentially boil down to “I just want to make sure you know that I also consider porn extremely objectionable, even though I evidence zero knowledge of the adult content being produced in 2021,” Orenstein finally arrives at her defense of “porn literacy.”
“Porn literacy,” she writes, “may sound salacious, and it certainly makes for sensationalist headlines. But like other media literacy courses (including those aimed at reducing teen use of tobacco, drugs and alcohol or offsetting damaging messages about body image), when they’re done right, the aim is to reduce risk, help identify and question the incessant messages that bombard teens, encourage them to hone their values and give them more agency over their experience.” Her conclusion: “I’d rather we didn’t have to talk to kids about explicit media, and I wish pornography weren’t, for so many, their first encounter with human sexuality, that it didn’t arrive so early to hijack their imaginations with its proscribed fantasies.”
While Peggy Orenstein wishes for a more liberal, chaste, NPR-ready utopia that will never come, in reality the War on Porn rages on—and another well-meaning, highly qualified BIPOC woman has lost her job, thrown under the bus by supposed "progressives" buckling under right-wing pressure.
