Fertility, porn, imagination… it’s time for a new approach to sex education | Eva Wiseman

Do you ever get that thing, that slightly psychedelic thing, when you hear an idea so good that it changes how you encounter the rest of the world? When it installs itself like a migrainous aura in your vision, colouring unrelated thoughts, its simplicity offering whispered suggestions for other ways a problem might be solved? It happened for me with porn.

An essay by Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan offers a solution to the many problems with pornography, and rather than the suggestion that people just switch off their phones or even that schools teach “porn literacy”, it is to offer young people a kind of “negative” sex education. “It wouldn’t assert its authority to tell the truth about sex,” but remind them that, “the authority on what sex is, and could become, lies with them.” Lessons in the lost power of sexual imagination. I could not love this more.

There is something about the suggestion that the very shape of our education – not just the content of lessons – must be adapted and remoulded in order to improve modern lives, that keeps speaking to me, whether in discussions about policing, the politicisation of masks or choices on what to have for lunch. And the one I keep coming back to is fertility.

A few weeks ago, Dorothy Byrne, the president of Cambridge University’s all-female Murray Edwards College, announced she was planning to introduce fertility seminars, to teach women they should start planning to have children by their mid-30s. “Young women are being taught that they all have to do well in school, get a degree, be successful in their career and be beautiful,” Byrne said in an interview. “The thing that is getting lost along the way is that you forget to have a baby.” I was not the only person to scoff at this, and scoff quite rudely, too, at the idea that fertility rates might be at their lowest level since records began in 1938, because busy women are simply forgetting to procreate. No, across my borough of the internet at least, there was a collective scoff so loud that I believe a couple of laptop screens shattered.

It is true that fewer babies are being born. A substantial fertility decline in Britain over the past decade is largely driven by a drop in “first births” – people remaining child-free, many by choice. According to a YouGov survey of people who are not parents, more than a third say they never want to have children, with 19% saying, while they have no plans for children soon, they might change their minds – “age, cost and lifestyle” being cited as the main reasons for not doing so. So there’s that. There’s the way the world has tilted, which means both that becoming a parent is no longer a compulsory part of growing up and that societal changes mean it’s increasingly hard to create a home for a child that feels secure. These seem to me far more realistic explanations than “I forgot”, closely followed by Byrne’s basic point that many of us are trying to have children later in life, which can influence fertility.

Except, her solution (which assumes, it’s worth pointing out, everybody wants to be a parent, rather than simply strive for a fabulous life of freedom and decent conversation) ignores 50% of the population. She is not alone, of course, in placing the responsibility of family-planning solely on women’s shoulders. Apart from being taught how to prevent pregnancy, boys and men are encouraged to remain blissfully ignorant in matters of fertility, loud orchestral strings traditionally playing over conversations about dwindling eggs or indeed sluggish sperm, in order perhaps, to maintain the romance.

There is a thriving fertility industry aimed solely at women, from period apps to IVF, the path between them littered with ads for fertility MOTs and egg freezing. Would so many women need to invest in these services if, instead of simply being shown how to roll a condom on to a banana, their boyfriends had learned more about the effect of lifestyle choices and their age on sperm quality? If, as well as being taught about women’s fertility, we had all been educated about the many different ways people today end up building a family, whether they’re single, or trans, or in same-sex relationships? Not only would men be more informed, but they’d be able to take more responsibility for choices typically left for women to navigate alone.

The aim of improving our country’s handle on fertility should not simply be to increase the numbers of babies born, it should be to empower everybody to make educated choices. It’s not just about more – more babies, more education – it’s about better. It’s not just about what is taught, it’s about who it’s taught to. Our lives spin on, and the lessons that did for then will not do for now.

Srinivasan’s elegant suggestion sums up for me the thrilling possibilities of education. How much better could our futures be if lessons moved like this, fast enough to truly understand and encompass the modern world? How much happier could we be?

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman