The next time your flatmate walks in on you streaming a video of James Deen and having some "me time", you can now legitimately say it was for research. In a survey conducted by the National Union of Students (NUS), 60 per cent of students said that they used porn for informational purposes. It turns out that school sex education is pretty much useless, unless you want to learn about you will get pregnant and die if you get it on. And if you're LGBT, forget about it. You could probably stand to learn more about sex from a pay-per-view webcam stream.  

Almost three-quarters of the 2,500 survey respondents said that the sex and relationships education (SRE) they received in school was not practical – which makes sense, given that a third of students also admitted that they never learnt about consent in sex education. Less than a fifth of students also discussed LGBT relationships in class. 

"Inadequate SRE puts young people at risk, " said NUS Vice President Colum McGuire. "I find it alarming that sexual partners are listed as a top SRE source by our respondents. Consider this in light of the fact that consent was never even raised for two thirds of respondents."

"SRE is failing millions. NUS runs consent workshops on campuses across the country, covering a vital aspect of SRE that this government misses. The current system almost completely ignores LGBT relationships. In a country where we passed an equal marriage bill, this is the height of hypocrisy."

Leave it to YouPorn and RedTube to step in as teachers. But while forty per cent of students agreed that the porn helped them understand sex, 75 per cent of the also admitted that porn led to unrealistic expectations. As with everything, the path to enlightenment is never easy. 

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