Rebuilding Sex Ed and Porn With Vex Ashley

I was never much of a porn enthusiast. Conditioned to believe that sex was an act that only men actively enjoyed, while women begrudgingly tolerated, I struggled to place myself on this spectrum of warped sexual desire. 

I remember taking a chance on porn for the first time when I was 18. A trusted friend played me a little clip on his phone and I hated every second of it. 

Why was the lighting always so bright? Why was there so much stiff dialogue before the scene began? Why was everyone so…straight and cisgender?

How did everyone find penetrative sex so easy to jump into?

I was convinced my journey with video porn was about to end, when Aashish and I discovered AFourChamberedHeart.com.

Self-described as a project that explores pornography as a creative medium, I was amazed to find a website that didn’t immediately throw me into the deep end.

Where were the options to navigate porn by category or popularity? Where were the pop-up ads and over-the-top naughty teacher/neighbour/step-sister plot lines I would find in most places?

“I saw a lot of porn that was made mostly as a functional product”, says Vex Ashley, the co-founder of A Four Chambered Heart. “It was made as a solution to the problem of sex, but I wasn’t seeing porn that explored the full creative potential of sex”.

Vex first began her journey by working as a webcam performer and posting self-made clips on her Tumblr page roughly ten years ago. 

“Webcamming was like being a children’s presenter and a sex worker at the same time. We had to manage those two roles really carefully. As it became more popular, more and more websites began to have their content stolen and reuploaded to third party sites where it could potentially exist forever. 

The webcamming space became increasingly competitive, and it pushed me into playing someone younger, cuter and sillier and act less like an adult woman. I wanted to switch to something that was more aligned with who I really was, and that’s what led to AFCH”.

Porn is not the only space that pushes you to cater your perspectives on sex to appease majorities. Sex Ed in India

is routinely policed and educators are pressured into discussing sex from fear-driven, heterosexual and able-bodied perspectives alone.

With Indian Sex Ed having its roots in STI Prevention and Family Planning programs, it’s no surprise that many educators still focus on abstinence-based modules.

Birthed from these programs that targeted lower economic classes and communities comprising SC/ST castes, present-day sex educators still believe in targeting government schools and economically vulnerable communities.

Where mainstream porn caters to the pleasure of the majority, Sex Ed and its thinly veiled moral policing primarily targets oppressed minorities that are convenient scapegoats for population spikes and the spread of diseases.

But the onset of Covid led to big changes in the way Indians talked about sex online. Educators brought their unfiltered opinions and built awareness online without worrying about engaging with minors. 

The discourse shifted from prevention, to pleasure and liberation for a more mature audience. Would this be enough to shift the focus from abstinence to autonomy? 

“People are talking about sex more than before. Most think that’s a good thing, given how the attention increases the dialogue around trans people. But increased visibility also increases pushback from law, policy and even banks. Many of the acts prohibited by the [UK] government were mostly ones that were seen as queer acts of liberation. ‘Non-normative’ acts were labelled as degenerate acts, and this censorship is a reflection of those ideas as well”.

As we deconstruct this rigidity around sex ed in India, it is interesting to look at Vex’s vision to dismantle whiteness and abandon straightness in her own work.

“Mainstream porn is full of keywords, like ‘chesty MILF’ or ‘threesome’ and ‘gangbang’.

You’re boxed in to watch content that matches only those words while the algorithm feeds you more of it. But you do not necessarily go in curious. You do not simply click on a video to discover more of yourself.

With AFCH, we found it extremely important to not define or limit our performers to keywords, so the viewer could also experience porn

in a way that did not define or label them. I wanted them to explore how expansive sex can be, while making it atmospheric and fantastical.”

This meant actors could draw boundaries based on their preferences, and explore sex based entirely on how the set and their co-stars make them feel. Actors are invited to get their own with and other sexual products as preferred, and a film is gently built based on their real-time sensations and emotions.

What if Sex Ed was built in a more community-based structure too? Instead of fixed modules that catered to the moral panic of adults and encouraged children to practice sexual safety by simply never thinking about it until marriage, what if we created discourse that redefined pleasure based on the disabled members of that community? What if our ideas for sexual performance were defined by survivors of abuse?

What is the future of Sex Ed when the pedestal for educators is dismantled and sex is defined by each of us based on our real life experiences, and not by institutes that never accounted for someone outside the mainstream in the first place?

When asked about the future of porn, Vex called for a similar dismantling of the sector’s hierarchy.

“Tube sites changed the way porn was made. The old fashioned sites that dominated the industry were bought out by the same people who ran the Tube sites and they had control over erotic content because they made nearly all of it. They decided everything— what kind of people would get cast, what kind of porn was being made, and they were trying to preserve profits, so they made content that was guaranteed to sell.

They presumed the consumers of porn were mainly your typical straight, middle aged, white guy and they made content with that demographic in mind. But people are interested in a lot more diversity in sex than those business models were actually giving them”.

As the dialogue around sex work in India is still controversial and at best, condescending towards the people who actually work in this sector, dismantling hierarchies in sex ed remains imperative.

Sex is not something that can only be defined as normal when able-bodied cishet couples explore it within their own spaces. Pleasure is normal when you find it only through oral sex.

It is normal if you ask your partner to not touch you directly, but to use a vibrator on you instead.

It is normal if you orgasm only in your shower or only when you masturbate or enjoy sex without orgasms.

Pleasure is also normal when it has nothing to do with sex and sexual contact at all.

Defining healthy sex may take a while for us to do, but there is no reason why that definition cannot be expanded to include you.