Rule one of politics is: try not to get your name mentioned in a headline about sex toys. But rules are made to be broken – at least for bad girls like Labour MP Samantha Niblett. The honourable member for South Derbyshire (Edwina Currie’s erstwhile stomping ground, whilst we’re at it) has scandalised Westminster with her intention – threat? – to bring aides d’amour into parliament, should the security guards allow such items through the scanners. Niblett told Politics Home this week that she is launching a “summer of sex”, in an attempt to educate buttoned-up Brits about the value of pleasure and connection.

And you know what? Good for her.

Of course, such a suggestion has been met with sanctimonious faux-horror. Some, Kemi Badenoch chief among them, have questioned an MP prioritising sex education when there is so much else for the government to be worrying about – doesn’t Niblett know there’s a war on? (For that matter, are vibrators really the best use of our rapidly depleting energy resources?) Others, such as the bluff gentleman I heard deriding the plans on the radio last night, have felt the need to point out that we talk about sex all the time. It’s everywhere. Does it really need to be in parliament too? What’s the point?

I wonder if that gentleman’s wife would agree with his casual dismissal that there is anything people in this country have left to learn about satisfaction. The ubiquity of sexualised content – from steamy scenes Gen Z apparently can’t handle in film and TV, to adverts using the allure of foot fetishists to market pedicures, underpinned by more online pornography than we know what to do with – does not equate to a sexually content and confident society. Look around, and evidence of our uneasy relationship with our bodies and the pleasure they can offer is everywhere.

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Let’s start with the sex toys, since Samantha Niblett brought them up. The age of consent in the UK is 16, but adult entertainment shops (the kind that sell products from decent brands which aren’t full of potentially harmful chemicals one finds in cheap online versions) are strictly for over-18s. The message that sends to young people: have sex if you must, but you’re not allowed to enjoy it. The stigma persists past the age of 18. Survey data on UK sex toy usage is patchy, mostly carried out by the brands themselves and highly unreliable given the sensitivity of the subject. But they consistently find that far more people use them than feel confident admitting it even to their partner, let alone anyone else. Anecdotal evidence of female friends whose recent male romantic interests have been intimidated, even horrified, by the idea of incorporating a vibrator suggest even millennials – supposedly a generation steeped in sex positivity – have a way to go on acceptance.

Tackle sex toy stigma, and we might get somewhere towards closing the orgasm gap, which sees (straight) men significantly more likely to achieve satisfaction from a sexual encounter than (straight) women. Again, studies vary, but one found that 95 per cent of heterosexual men said they usually orgasmed, compared to just 65 per cent of heterosexual women. (Interestingly, the figures were much more egalitarian for the queer community: 89 per cent of gay men and 86 per cent of lesbian women.) Why might that be? Does the gentleman on the radio have any ideas he would like to share with the group?

We can’t blame men entirely for this, when pleasure hardly features in even “comprehensive” sex ed. Frank discussions about contraception and sexual health are vital, but they miss the point about what sex is actually for the vast majority of the time. If young women graduate adolescence with little idea about what works for them, their male partners are unlikely to be able to magically figure it out.

Lack of education applies to the darker side of sex too. Society’s squeamishness at admitting the age children become curious does not protect them from adult content or ideas – it just guarantees they will seek out the information elsewhere. The debate over pornography and age verification rightly highlights the tragic state of affairs where half of children have seen online porn by the age of 13 – with a quarter exposed to it while still at primary school. The damage done to young people who got their ideas of sex by the most extreme, sometimes violent, online content imaginable is well documented. There is less consensus about what to do about it.

The fact is, this content is out there, and some children will be exposed to it whatever guardrails are put in place. What then? In a healthy society, if a pupil has questions about strangulation they’ve seen online, there should be a space for a teacher to answer it – noting that it is incredibly dangerous, illegal, and should never be considered a mainstream activity – without fear that puritans in politics and the media will frame it as “teaching” innocent children about choking. We need a sex ed curriculum that accepts this rather than wilfully pretending it never happens, and teaches teenagers that porn is to real sex what action films are to real life: a form of entertainment and fantasy that should in no circumstances be used as a template.

That’s the message of MakeLoveNotPorn, the adult video website founded by Cindy Gallop, with whom Niblett has teamed up. Mock it if you want, but if it’s a choice between hardcore pornography and a more inclusive, realistic and human form of online erotic content, I know what I’d want my children watching.

And since we’re on porn, people watch it – about a third of adult internet users, if Ofcom is to be believed. Samantha Niblett is far from alone in her viewing habits, she’s just more upfront than the rest of us. We can pretend it doesn’t happen and demonise anyone who watches or makes it, or we can have an honest conversation about consent and coercion and how to protect performers. (We could stop them being routinely denied banking services for a start – a plight the media and political class were outraged over when Nigel Farage was the victim, but which garners little sympathy when it’s OnlyFans models and sex workers facing debanking discrimination.)

Is any of this an issue for parliament? Admittedly it doesn’t quite match up to war in Iran and the cost of living crisis. But sex is a core part of the human experience. Politicians have a track record of ignoring or undervaluing it: during Covid, the government essentially banned sex for people who did not live with a partner for months on end, with no thought to the value of intimacy and connection. They didn’t think it mattered all that much. They were wrong. If a backbench MP wants to spend the summer trying to redress the balance, all the more power to her. I’ll be in the front row of the press gallery when she brings in her props, hoping to catch a vibrator.

[Further reading: Meet the Angry Young Women]

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