The Zoella Vibrator Scandal Proves Exactly Why We Should Be Teaching Teens About Female Pleasure

Update: AQA have responded to criticism detailed below with a statement saying 'Our belief – which is shared by many teachers and parents who have contacted us – is that it isn’t appropriate for us to ask children as young as 14 to study a website that includes sexual content aimed at adults....Effective relationships and sex education in schools is vitally important and we completely support it.' You can read the full statement here.****__**

This weekend, social media was awash with a sex scandal involving the very popular and formerly PG, Zoe Sugg. That’s right, a sex scandal – we’re growing up, guys. After it was reported that her website, Zoella, had been dropped from the AQA media studies GCSE curriculum following a story the brand posted about sex toys, fans of the vlogger turned business mogul went into overdrive.

Why? Because AQA, Britain biggest exam board, had decided that ‘recent content is aimed specifically at an adult audience and not suitable for GCSE students.’ Immediately, it was assumed they were referring to a recent round-up on the Zoella website of the ‘Best sex toys to spice up your life in 2021’. The sex toys are almost all vibrators designed for women, with two specifically for men.

While AQA never specified what content they were referring to, this article was the most recent of the ‘adult content’ variety. And according to the board, the concerns were actually raised by parents and teachers first. ‘We share these concerns [with parents] so we’re taking the necessary steps to remove Zoella from our 2021 and 2022 assessment materials . . . with immediate effect,’ Sandra Allan, head of curriculum for creative arts at AQA, wrote to teachers.

Now, there’s a few things these teachers, parents and the people designing these young adults curriculums are misunderstanding. First of all, Zoella as a brand is aimed at 25-35 year old women, not teenagers – meaning the people designing school kids study material really aren’t doing their research very well, which is slightly concerning. Second of all, Zoe maintains that she was never aware Zoella was included in a GCSE curriculum – which you would hope someone would mention to her, considering the responsibility it then puts on the website when it comes to education resources.

But more of all, what all of these adults that are meant to be educating our children have misunderstood is: female pleasure is actually really important for teenagers to learn about. Put aside the fact the article was never actually aimed at teenagers themselves, if Zoella was appropriate for GSCE students to use as an education resource before, why does talking about masturbation make it unsuitable?

All of the people involved in removing Zoella from the curriculum are in powerful positions in these teenagers lives, they’re quite literally responsible for helping them develop healthy attitudes towards their bodies, sex and consent. What does removing it because of this type of content say to those teenagers? It tells them what society has for years, that women seeking pleasure is ‘not suitable’.

So many of us grew up feeling the stigma around female masturbation and pleasure, so few of us were actually taught about it or how important it is in our lives. And where has that led us? To a society that still makes women feel ashamed of exploring their bodies, embarrassed to prioritise our own orgasms during sex and with all genders forced to learn about sex from easily-accessible and incredibly damaging porn online.

It’s completely ignorant to believe that GCSE-aged students aren’t already exploring their bodies, having sex or even buying sex toys. Whether they see an article about sex toys or not, best believe many are already engaging in sexual activity in some form. Ignorance might be bliss for people in charge of having the awkward sex conversations – although it shouldn’t be awkward if you have a healthy attitude towards sex and pleasure - but when it comes to young women, it’s completely damaging to be so naive.

16-year-old blogger, Lexie, agrees. 'Zoella getting dropped from the GCSE curriculum really bothers me,' she told Grazia. 'Female pleasure is still such a taboo topic, and something that most girls I know feel awkward talking about. I was in Year 6 when I first learnt about male masturbation, and yet I don't think I've ever learnt about female masturbation in that same context.

'I'm lucky enough to have a mum who is open and happy to teach me about these things, but there are so many other teenage girls who have to grow up and explore their body without any prior education or understanding of what's normal,' Lexie continued. 'We need to stop shaming women for talking about masturbation - it is reinforcing the archaic idea that men own our bodies. And for what it's worth, I can assure you that masturbation and sex toys are not unknown, foreign topics to most GCSE students.'

Lexie is right, according to multiple studies, not only to children discover their genitals and the pleasure they bring around 6-years-old, the average age girls begin actually masturbating in the UK is 12-years-old. By 14 then, they've likely spent years exploring their body and feeling the same that comes with silence around that topic.

It's understandable why articles about masturbation or sex toys might seem scary to parents of GCSE-aged teens, but they shouldn’t be. For women that do end up feeling ashamed of masturbation as they grow up - because of this very fear from adults in their life - vibrators are often the first experience one might have orgasms and understanding their own pleasure. Quite often, since stigma around sex toys is still also huge, they’re something we only use alone – helping you explore your body in private before worrying about adding anyone else to the mix. In fact, you would think that helping young women realise they orgasm better without men would be a positive lesson for most parents.

By removing their access to conversations around it - further stigmatising it - teenagers are left to learn about pleasure from their peers instead. Sure, some might understand the important of masturbation and talk about doing it the good old analogue way – although only 20% of women masturbating without a vibrator, according to Womanizer –, helping educate their friends on exploring their bodies. But mostly, let's be honest, young women are learning about sex and pleasure from porn or partnered sex with their awkward counterparts.

That means they’re growing up – with the benefit of porn – to have unrealistic expectations of their own bodies as well as what’s expected of them during sex. Particularly if they're straight. Learning from porn, they're also more likely to have terrifying misunderstandings of consent. Couple this with the pressure from young men their age and the stigma around female pleasure from them, and young women are left with extremely unhealthy attitudes towards sex that can take years to overwrite.

What we need to take away from this is not necessarily that Zoella should be put back on the curriculum, but that attitudes around sex education for young women need to change. It shouldn’t take Zoe Sugg’s army of followers to explain to the people we trust to educate younger generations that the topic female pleasure is essential to get right from an early age. Stop being so scared of young women enjoying sex, a 14, 15 or 16-year old buying a vibrator isn’t going to hurt anyone – but it might make her confident enough in her understand of sex and pleasure to stop her peers from hurting each other.

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