The last weeks at the “Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School” and the prestigious Dalton School” have been under intense polemic. On May 22nd, the right-wing outlet, New York Post published an article titled: “Columbia Prep Students and Parents Reel After Class on ‘Porn Literacy’.” This piece was born through the protest of parents worried that their children were being taught, “pornography classes,” without their consent.
According to NY Post, Justine Ang Fonte, a longtime sex education teacher, was hired to give a workshop for 16-17-year-olds, on sex education. The teacher’s work was presented in slides and was entitled: “Pornography Literacy: An Intersectional Approach to Mainstream Porn.”
According to the Post:
“The often-explicit slide presentation and lecture by Fonte to 120 boys and girls included lessons on how porn takes care of ‘three big male vulnerabilities’; statistics on the ‘orgasm gap’ showing straight women have fewer orgasms with their partners than gay men or women; and photos of partially-nude women, some in bondage, to analyze ‘what is porn and what is art.”
This method of study by Professor Fonte starts “from the social theory ‘intersectionality,’ a component of critical race theory,” the Post explained.
The presentation included pornographic terms which were the most searched in 2019. “Creampie”, “anal”, “gangbang”, “stepmother”; were some of the words most requested by users.
“One slide cited various porn genres such as ‘incest-themed,’ consensual or ‘vanilla,’ ‘barely legal,’ and ‘kink and BDSM’ (which included ‘waterboard electro’ torture porn as an example),” read Kennedy’s article.
After the seminar, which was carried out via zoom, several of the parents and students spoke with the Post and anonymously explained the discomfort and disbelief generated by attending a workshop of this style, with that type of content, without prior notice.
School students criticized the material for being inappropriate, not very relevant to their knowledge of sexuality, and for taking time away from preparing for more important subjects. Likewise, parents questioned the radical turn that the Columbia Grammar school is taking to teach children about issues related to critical race theory.
The parents asked the school for meetings and explanations, in the end, after the Post’s story was published, “the Columbia school principal, Dr. William M. Donohue, sent a conciliatory email to the school parents saying that the ‘content and tone of the presentation did not represent our philosophy, which is to educate our students in ways that promote their personal development and overall health, as well as express respect for them as individuals.”
However, the controversy continued, and on July 7th 2021, Valeriya Safronova, a reporter for the style section of the New York Times, wrote an article titled, “A Private School Sex Educator Defends Her Methods.”
In the article, the Times victimizes teacher Justine Ang Fonte and demonizes concerned parents as well as “conservative media persecution,” children and defends the methods used by the teacher in her classes.
After presenting a glowing mini profile of Fonte, highlighting her career as a teacher and the classes she teaches, the Times proceeded to justify the teacher’s materials by explaining that current organizations and sex education teachers are developing their classes in that way. But just because something is done a certain way, does not mean it is the correct way.
Safranova writes: “Multiple sex educators interviewed for this article said there was nothing inappropriate about her classes there or at Columbia. All of it was in line with current National Sex Education Standards and the World Health Organization’s International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education.”
“The national standards are also used in public schools in New York City, where students in grades 6 through 12 take lessons on sexuality as part of their health education. Parents can opt out of certain aspects of the program,” she continued.
Safranova completely ignores the complaints from the parents, one has to wonder if she is a parent herself, although, with her attitude, this is unlikely. Many people on the liberal-sphere that have no children and are not planning to have any children, seem to think they have more of a say than parents on how to raise the next generation.
What the Times article does, however, is explain the content of the masturbation video for the first graders.
“The material for her first-grade class never used the term masturbation,” Ms. Fonte said recently. “The lesson was about private parts being private and included a cartoon in which two characters use anatomically correct names for their genitals and say that sometimes it feels good to touch them. ‘It’s OK to touch yourself and see how different body parts feel, but it’s best to only do it in private,’ the narrator tells viewers.”
This way of teaching children sex education, through intersectionality, gender identification and even pornography or explicit masturbation material, is part of “an orthodoxy that has taken over schools across the country,” he said. a spokesperson for FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, told the New York Post.
According to this spokesperson “Millions of kids are being experimented on with a new curriculum that racializes and sexualizes young children, labels them by traits like skin color, gender or sexual orientation, and tells them the paths of their lives are determined by those traits.”
