What are we offering the next generation to read, watch, hear and discover?
Young people are growing up in a world where almost any question can be taken straight to a search box. But finding an answer is not the same as finding understanding. What if, alongside everything that competes for their attention, we gave them more stories, films, ideas and places worth finding?
It is late.
A phone glows in the darkness.
Somewhere, in a quiet room, a young person types a question into a search box—and hesitates before pressing enter.
Perhaps the question is about a changing body. Perhaps it is about attraction, a first relationship, consent, or something they have seen online and do not know how to understand. It may be a question they would ask a parent, teacher or older sibling if embarrassment did not stand in the way.
But the search box does not know embarrassment.
It does not know whether the person typing is frightened, curious, lonely or simply trying to make sense of a feeling for which they do not yet have words.
It offers answers at once. Explanations. Opinions. Images. Videos. Invitations to keep looking.
Some may be useful. Some may be misleading. Some may be designed not to answer a question at all, but simply to hold attention.
And that raises a question that is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid:
The internet has made information almost limitless. A teenager who is embarrassed to ask a parent or teacher can search privately. A curious young person can find explanations, opinions, stories, images and videos without revealing what they are wondering about.
That can be a wonderful thing.
It can also be deeply confusing.
The problem is not curiosity. Curiosity is part of growing up. The problem is that the digital world does not necessarily distinguish between what is informative and what is misleading, between what enlarges understanding and what merely captures attention.
As Dr Chandra-Mouli Venkataraman of the World Health Organisation has observed, “It’s easier to get hardcore pornography than a clear answer from a parent.”
That sentence should make us pause.
Not because it tells us that young people are doing something wrong.
Because it tells us something about the environment we have created for them.
Desire is older than the screen
Human beings have always wondered about love, attraction, desire and intimacy.
Long before smartphones, search engines and social media, people wrote poems about longing, painted lovers, composed songs, told stories of jealousy and devotion, debated marriage and relationships, and tried to understand the complicated territory between desire and affection.
Ancient cultures approached these subjects in very different ways.
India gave the world the Kāmasūtra of Vātsyāyana. It is perhaps one of the most misunderstood books in popular culture. It has been reduced, especially in the modern imagination, to a catalogue of sexual positions.
It is much more than that.
The Kamasutra is a work about erotic love, but also about relationships, courtship and social conduct. Wendy Doniger, a scholar of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, describes it as a book about “the art of living”—including finding a partner, marriage, courtesans and social life.
India was not alone. Greek and Roman literature explored love and desire. Chinese traditions developed rich literatures of love and eroticism. Japan produced literary and artistic traditions in which relationships, longing and sensuality could be treated with subtlety. Arabic and Persian cultures gave us celebrated traditions of love poetry and literature.
The point is not to romanticise the past. Ancient societies had their own inequalities, restrictions and prejudices.
The point is something simpler.
Human cultures have long found ways to talk about sexuality as part of life rather than isolating it as a spectacle.
These traditions were not identical. Nor were they necessarily more enlightened than our own.
But they remind us that there are many ways of talking about human intimacy.
We should not allow the loudest form of modern sexual imagery to become the only form our young people encounter.
When a screen becomes a teacher
Today, the screen is often one of the first places a young person turns.
A young adult can carry an entire universe of sexual imagery in a device that also contains their schoolwork, friendships, family conversations, music and photographs.
UNESCO reported that 71% of 15–24-year-olds surveyed had sought sexuality education or information online during the previous year. UNESCO reported that 71% of 15–24-year-olds surveyed had sought sexuality education or information online during the previous year. The organisation sees the digital space as both an opportunity and a challenge: young people can reach information privately and easily, but what they encounter may also be incomplete, poorly informed or harmful.
A young person may search for an answer to a perfectly ordinary question and encounter material designed not to educate but to attract attention.
One response says:
Here is something worth understanding.
Another says:
Here is something that will keep you watching.
The two can sometimes look deceptively similar on a screen.
The internet does not come with a built-in teacher.
And an algorithm does not ask what a young person is emotionally ready to understand. It responds to signals—interest, engagement, repetition, attention.
Curiosity can therefore become a pathway to material that was never designed to answer the question that began the search.
What young people need
The answer cannot be silence.
Nor can it be simply: Don’t look.
The World Health Organisation’s current guidance on comprehensive sexuality education is much broader than a lesson about biology or risk. It includes relationships, love, respect, consent, communication, values, decision-making, media and digital literacy, body image, sexual development and health. It also stresses that such education should be scientifically accurate, culturally relevant and age-appropriate.
In a WHO discussion of sexuality education, Dr Chandra-Mouli put the purpose succinctly:
“Sexuality education is about much more than talking to young people about sex and condoms.”
It should help prepare young people for what he described as “a healthy, and a pleasurable sexual and reproductive life.”
Young people do not need to be protected from the fact that sexuality exists.
They need opportunities to understand it.
They need language with which to understand themselves and other people.
And what is helpful must be age-appropriate. For a child, this may mean the language of body boundaries, safety and trusted adults. For an adolescent, it may include puberty, respect, consent, media literacy and relationships. For older young people, it may extend to intimacy, sexual health, communication and privacy.
WHO and UNESCO both emphasise that sexuality education should be adapted to age and developmental stage.
UNESCO asks an important question: how can digital sexuality-education content be made accessible, accurate and safe?
Perhaps we should add another:
How do we make it compelling enough to be found?
The problem with attention
This is where good intentions encounter reality.
Commercial sexual content is not a marginal presence in digital culture. It is highly visible, technologically adaptive and designed to attract attention. A Council of Europe report noted that estimates of the industry’s global revenues vary enormously—from about $6 billion to $97 billion—and stressed that no completely accurate figure is possible. It also described the industry as an early adopter of technologies including digital payments, streaming and virtual reality.
The precise size matters less to our argument than the scale and sophistication of the ecosystem.
It has money.
It has distribution.
It understands attention.
It has spent decades learning what makes people click, watch and return.
Educational institutions and public-interest creators are not competing on equal terms.
The point is not that every person who encounters explicit material will respond in the same way. People are different. Circumstances are different. Curiosity itself is not a problem.
But commercial content cannot be relied upon to provide the context, emotional literacy or respect for others that a young person may actually be searching for.
That changes the nature of the challenge.
The alternative cannot simply be worthy.
It has to be good.
It has to be engaging enough to hold attention without manipulating it. It has to be imaginative enough to live alongside fantasy without pretending that fantasy is reality. It has to be honest without becoming dreary.
Above all, it has to respect young people’s intelligence.
What good content means
Good content does not mean sanitised content.
It does not mean every story must become a lesson.
It does not mean replacing entertainment with lectures.
A good story can be funny, romantic, sensual, disturbing, adventurous, ambiguous or uncomfortable. A good film does not have to tell a young person what to think. A good novel can leave questions unanswered.
What matters is that the work gives us something more than stimulation.
It gives us context.
It gives us complexity.
It gives us a sense that intimacy is not merely performance, that attraction is not merely conquest, and that bodies belong to people. It reminds us that relationships involve another mind, another history and another set of feelings.
Good content need not preach.
It needs to enlarge the imagination.
It should also allow different young people to recognise themselves in the world it presents—without ridicule, stereotype or the assumption that one life experience speaks for everyone.
And it should make clear where help can be found. Some questions are simply questions. Others may arise from pressure, coercion, bullying, abuse or fear. A trustworthy resource should help a young person recognise the difference, protect their privacy and know when to speak to a trusted adult, counsellor, teacher or health professional.
Curiosity is not the enemy
Young people are curious.
They want to know what adults sometimes find difficult to discuss. They want to understand their changing bodies. They wonder about attraction. They worry about whether they are normal. They want to know what relationships are supposed to feel like.
Some are simply curious.
Some are lonely.
Some are looking for reassurance.
Some have questions they are too embarrassed to ask aloud.
Some are already encountering explicit material before they have the emotional maturity to interpret it.
If adults respond only with embarrassment, young people will continue to look elsewhere.
If the only available answers come from commercial entertainment, anonymous forums, influencers, algorithms or pornography, those sources will inevitably shape their understanding.
The answer is not to extinguish curiosity.
It is to give curiosity better places to go.
People are building alternatives
The alternative is not an entirely empty field.
The Burnet Institute in Australia has developed The Gist, a programme designed to help young people navigate sex and relationships and critically understand pornography. It includes a website, educational videos and in-person education sessions. The programme grew from co-design work involving young people as well as designers, artists and educators.
Its starting point is revealing.
Research behind the programme found that young people could have factual knowledge about sex without necessarily understanding what positive, pleasurable and consensual relationships look like.
Another example is AMAZE, which uses free animated videos and supporting resources to provide age-appropriate information on puberty, relationships, sexual health, personal safety and other aspects of growing up. Its material is available in many languages, and it also provides resources for parents and educators.
AMAZE has also involved young people directly through its Youth Ambassadors, who help guide content and its dissemination.
Burnet’s more recent research makes the gap even more visible. Its 2025 survey found that 77% of young respondents said sexual pleasure was not covered at school, 84% said types of sex were not covered, and only 42% said consent education was covered well. Associate Professor Megan Lim, Head of Young People’s Health at Burnet, observed:
“Porn and social media don’t show the conversations that make relationships healthy, things like boundaries, consent and checking in with each other.”
These efforts deserve recognition.
They show that people are already asking the right questions.
But a handful of thoughtful programmes cannot by themselves transform an enormous commercial ecosystem.
We need more places where young people can find information that is accurate, humane and genuinely engaging.
Let the young help create it
We have often treated young people mainly as recipients of information, rather than as participants in culture.
We tell them what they should know.
We rarely ask what they would like to create.
That may be one reason the alternative remains so small.
Some of the people best equipped to create better content are young people themselves. They understand the language of social media. They know how quickly culture changes. They know what feels authentic and what feels manufactured. They know when adults are trying too hard to sound young.
And many have already lived through the experience we are discussing.
Some may one day be able to say:
I have been there. I know what I wish I had found.
That voice matters.
The Gist offers one practical example of co-design rather than simply designing for young people. Its development involved young people directly in shaping a resource intended for their world.
Research on sexuality education has likewise shown the value of involving young people in shaping content and recommendations, drawing on their lived experience rather than treating them simply as recipients.
Some may become writers or filmmakers. Others may be teachers, illustrators, designers, researchers or developers.
What matters is not the job title.
It is whether they can make something truthful enough to be useful and alive enough to be chosen.
Stories teach differently
This is where the question becomes larger than sexuality education.
Human beings have always learned through stories.
A story can allow us to inhabit another person’s life. A film can show us what tenderness looks like without defining it. A novel can make us understand jealousy before we ever experience it. A song can express an emotion we have not yet found words for.
Stories teach differently.
They do not hand us a rulebook. They let us feel what a rule is trying to protect: another person’s dignity, a moment of trust, the pain of being misunderstood, the relief of being treated kindly.
We need stories about friendship.
About first love.
About heartbreak.
About uncertainty.
About consent.
About embarrassment.
About growing up.
About loneliness.
About respect.
About desire.
About the awkwardness and humour of becoming an adult.
About the difference between fantasy and reality.
About what it means to care for another person.
Some can be explicitly educational.
Many need not be.
Art does not have to become a textbook.
It simply needs to remain capable of showing us something true about being human.
At the same time, stories cannot replace accurate health information, age-appropriate education, supportive adults and safe places to ask difficult questions. They can, however, open the imagination and give people language for experiences that may otherwise remain confusing or private.
Technology can help
We have more tools for storytelling than any generation before us.
A young person with a phone can write, record, edit, animate, illustrate, compose music, publish a film or build an interactive experience.
Generative AI has made the production of text, images, audio and video more accessible still.
That creates new risks. New generative systems can reproduce existing cultural stereotypes, reminding us that new tools can carry old prejudices unless they are designed and used with care.
But these tools will not decide what kind of culture we make.
They can make harmful material easier to spread.
They can also help a young filmmaker make a short film, an educator create an animation, or a writer reach someone who might never have found their work in a library or classroom.
Technology can multiply the problem.
It can also help multiply the alternative.
Good things must be findable
We can make the most thoughtful film in the world.
If nobody sees it, it has little cultural effect.
The commercial attention economy understands this very well. It invests not only in production but in distribution, discoverability, recommendation and retention.
So the challenge is not merely to create good things.
It is to help good things travel.
A beautiful story needs a doorway.
A useful resource needs to be easy to find.
A young person searching privately for an answer should not have to fight through a sea of noise to reach something trustworthy.
And it must be private. A young person should be able to seek reliable information without being profiled, publicly exposed, or quietly turned into a target for further commercial attention.
We cannot complain that young people are searching in the wrong places if we have not made the right places easy to find.
Who can create the alternative?
This is not a task for one profession, one institution or one generation.
Parents can create conversations.
Teachers can create spaces for questions.
Researchers can provide evidence.
Writers can create stories.
Filmmakers can create worlds.
Artists can create images.
Publishers can take chances on new voices.
Technologists can create better ways of finding them.
Entrepreneurs can find ways to sustain them.
And young people themselves may be among the most important creators of all.
They know this digital world from the inside.
They know its language, its temptations, its humour and its possibilities.
Some of them may be able to create what the rest of us have not yet imagined.
The alternative will not be created by the people who worry about the problem alone.
It will be created by the people who can imagine something better.
Something worth finding
A young person looking for an answer will look somewhere.
The question is what meets that curiosity.
A commercial image?
An algorithm?
A stranger’s opinion?
A distorted fantasy?
Or a story that helps them understand themselves?
A film that gives them another way of seeing intimacy?
A book that gives them language for what they feel?
A conversation that answers a question without shame?
A piece of art that reminds them that another human being is never merely an image?
We cannot simply tell the next generation what not to find.
We have to give them something better to find.
Something honest enough to trust.
Something beautiful enough to remember.
Something engaging enough to choose.
It may be a story.
That story may become a film.
The film may become a conversation.
The conversation may become a culture.
And perhaps that is how the alternative begins.
With something worth finding.
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Sources & further reading
World Health Organisation — Comprehensive Sexuality Education An overview of age-appropriate, scientifically accurate sexuality education, including relationships, consent, communication, digital literacy, health and well-being. [WHO — Comprehensive Sexuality Education]
World Health Organisation — “Growing up informed: sexuality education” The source for Dr Chandra-Mouli Venkataraman’s observations and quotations used in this essay. [WHO — Growing up informed: sexuality education]
UNESCO — “Young people switched on to digital sexuality education” Research on young people’s use of digital spaces for sexuality information and the opportunities and risks involved. [UNESCO — Young people switched on to digital sexuality education]
Wendy Doniger — “Reading the Kamasutra: The Strange & the Familiar” A scholarly exploration of the *Kāmasūtra* and its wider social and cultural meaning. [American Academy of Arts and Sciences — Wendy Doniger]
Burnet Institute — The Gist An example of pornography literacy and sex-and-relationship education developed through collaboration with young people, designers, artists and educators. [Burnet Institute — The Gist]
Davis et al. — “A Digital Pornography Literacy Resource Co-Designed With Vulnerable Young People” Peer-reviewed research describing the co-design process behind The Gist [Journal of Medical Internet Research — The Gist research]
AMAZE — Sex Education and Healthy Relationships A global collection of free, animated, age-appropriate resources for young people, parents and educators, available in multiple languages. [AMAZE]
Burnet Institute — 2025 Sex, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll Survey Recent evidence on gaps in young Australians’ education around sexual pleasure, types of sex, consent and healthy relationships, including Associate Professor Megan Lim’s observations. [Burnet Institute — Survey findings]
Council of Europe — Exposure of Children to Pornographic Content A source for the discussion of the commercial industry’s scale, adaptability and early adoption of digital technologies. The report itself stresses that revenue estimates vary substantially. [Council of Europe — Report on exposure to pornographic content]
UNESCO and partners — International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education The broader evidence-informed framework developed by UNESCO, WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, UN Women and UNAIDS. [UNESCO — International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education]