Journeying #13 Dr Caroline West, Sexpert and Host of Glow West podcast

My guest this week has been listed as one of the ‘Wonder Women shaping 2020’ by the Irish Country Woman magazine, and I definitely agree. 

Dr Caroline West is passionate about creating spaces for calm, informed conversations about sex, and wants to banish shame and stigma from the bedroom. 

It is shocking to think sex education has not evolved all that much since I was a teenager in the 90s. We didn’t have access to the internet, so we remained clueless about all our unanswered questions. The legacy of that ignorance is that parents today still do not have the language to speak openly with their teenagers about sex. But rather than stay clueless like us 90s kids, today’s teens can just fill in the gaps by going online and finding a minefield of information on sex, including porn. And this often how they are ‘educating’ themselves on how to have sex.

 Caroline is on a mission to stop the cycle of ignorance, and to introduce positive sex education for all young people in Ireland.  

Topics discussed include: 

Sex education in the 1990s – EuroTrash and Cosmopolitan magazines contrasted with religious-led sex education classes

 Lad Culture of the nineties – in hindsight, not actually empowering for women 

 Ireland – are we still a sex-negative society?  

 Sex-Ed - should it be the domain of school teachers and religious orders? 

 Need for independent workshops to normalize language around sex education 

 Is pornography being used as a sex education tool for young people? 

 Teaching Porn Literacy 

 How to normalize the conversation around sex

 Evoke.ie ‘Agony Aunt’ / Sexpert 

 Sigmund Freud on female orgasms

 From Ballybrack in Dublin to the Porn Awards in Las Vegas!

Motives to enter the porn/sex work/sugar baby industry

OnlyFans Performers 

‘A hierarchy of sex workers’ 

Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act of 2017 – has led to increased violence toward sex workers in Ireland

Decriminalisation of sex work 

Sugar Daddy & Sugar Baby sites … popular option for Irish university students over stacking shelves in Tesco

Sex Toy Industry unregulated 

Need to move toward encapsulating sex with personal wellbeing & health 

Caroline’s GlowWest Podcast: amazing resource for calm, informative conversations around sex

Sources:
Dr Caroline West's website: https://iamcarolinewest.com/glow-west

about Glow West podcast: https://tortoiseshack.ie/glow-west-podcast/

Caroline's sex column on Evoke.ie:  https://evoke.ie/author/caroline-west
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