Sonipat: Most young people derive information about sex from porn, human rights activist Vithika Yadav said Monday.
“In 2011, we conducted an interview and found out that 94 per cent of young people get their information about sex from pornography,” Yadav said while speaking at ThePrint’s Democracy Wall event in Sonipat.
Vithika Yadav is the co-founder of ‘Love Matters’, a website that provides information on relationships, sex and love.
“Sexual reproduction and health are always seen in the context of family planning, which is why they (youths) try to seek other sources of information,” she added.
“Young people are not seen as autonomous beings who have the right to access quality information and facts regarding sexual health,” she said.
Cautioning against pornography, Yadav said: “Pornography out there is not the truth, what you think and understand of consent and bodies is not what it looks like in pornography…It is extremely harmful.”
Yadav said feminist and “rights-based” pornography are better options, but they still haven’t gained the kind of popularity that regular porn has.
Democracy Wall is a free-speech campus initiative. The latest edition was held at Jindal Global University in Sonipat.
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‘Most women don’t realise they are being abused’
Speaking about her initiative ‘Love Matters’, Vithika Yadav said it was conceived in 2011 and aimed at providing fact-based, correct information about sex and related matters.
She added that when people heard about the website, they thought it was urban-centric, but ‘Love Matters’ is bilingual (English-Hindi) and it caters to a large audience from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar as well.
She also spoke about their outreach in rural corners of Bihar. Narrating an incident from Bettiah, Yadav mentioned about a group of girls who made a presentation on female masturbation after attending a workshop conducted by ‘Love Matters’.
She also said the website daily answers about 300 questions from both minors and adults, not just on sexual health, but on personal issues as well.
According to Yadav, most women don’t understand that a person can be abused mentally in a non-marital relationship as well.
She said the conversation about “control versus care” had a lot of people share their personal problems with them.
Explaining it, Yadav said Bollywood and popular culture tell you that controlling is caring, but that is not the case. Most young women don’t realise when they are being abused and when they do, there is no one they can talk to, she added.
“When content related to these issues was released on the website, we saw over 50 women write to us their personal stories. In their messages, they wrote that they did not realise that they were being abused,” Yadav said.
‘Love Matters talks about sex, hence it’s blocked’
“We have never faced backlash from any government organisation, but from social media platforms like Facebook, Google and Instagram,” said Yadav.
“‘Love Matters’ talks about sex, which is why it is blocked by most firewalls and social media platforms. Social media platforms do not have proper differentiation and moderation policies,” she said.
Yadav said they want students to be able to find the right kind of information and differentiate from porn.
For this purpose, she said: “I was talking to Pornhub because I want to find out what kind of keywords young people are using because I want young people to come to the right website for correct information.”
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‘Love Matters’ is bilingual (English-Hindi) and it caters to a large audience from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar as well. Bilingual eh??