Dolly Doctor for the Instagram generation
A twist on old-school advice columns, Vice’s In Bloom project targets millennials with peer-to-peer sex ed from voices they trust, on platforms they love.
In a school library past the encyclopedias and dictionaries are a group of teenage girls huddled around a Dolly magazine. They’re fervently reading the sealed Q&A section of Dolly Doctor, a cultural touchpoint for many Australian teens growing up in the 80s, 90s and 00s.
This was me and friends, and this was my memory of ‘school-based’ sex education. It was thanks to Dolly Doctor that I learnt a tampon wasn’t actually going to take my virginity. That sealed section allowed me and my sexually anxious friends to talk about things we couldn’t possibly ask our teachers. And now thinking back, amongst the swirl of curiosity, worry and puberty blues, it was back at this library corner that my friends and I started our sex-positive journey.
Sex-positivity is a movement that has gained new momentum on social media platforms such as Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter, where people (many of them young) in so many words and images are trying to counter slut-shaming, body-shaming and kink-shaming.
In 2018, this social media conversation leapt onto the small screen with SBS VICELAND’s show Slutever, hosted by Karley Sciortino — who, like Dolly Doctor, started writing about sex in magazines. Slutever’s show tagline being, “Everyone’s horny but why are we so weird about it?”
This was the exact question that rang in my head when I looked into actual school-based sex education, which addresses sex in mechanical, biological terms and doesn’t at all address non-hetero types of sexuality or the ever-changing sexual etiquette with the advent of mobile phones and social media.
A study published by medical journal BMJ Open, titled “What do young people think about their school-based sex and relationship education?”, found teens were longing for information on their sexuality but that school-based sex ed wasn’t sex-positive.
The majority of classrooms are teaching curriculums that assume sex is shameful, private and promiscuous. This reluctance to talk about sex and sexuality honestly is harmful, potentially dangerous, for teens who will inevitably need to navigate a world that revolves around sex.
So earlier this year, VICE ran an anonymous questionnaire that asked our younger readers to submit a question that they were too afraid to ask their teachers or peers. We received 500 responses overnight. Some questions showed that sexual etiquette had changed with the advent of social media, such as, “Is it ever okay to send nudes of yourself to someone?” or “Is ghosting emotionally harmful?”
Some questions were complex: “How do you think being bold, sexy and spontaneous fits into this new era where consent is the main game?”. Others were basic and fundamental: “What are ways to casually bring up putting on a condom without killing the mood?”.
It was apparent that teens were either more confused or more curious than generations before.
This led to In Bloom, an advice show that would answer these questions based on lived experience. For the show to be authentic we decided to select real, anonymous questions from the questionnaire. VICE’s associate producer Laura Apelt, who is the age of our target audience, was tasked with reading each response and thematically organising into episode themes, which ended up being:
- LGBTQI+,
- Social Media,
- Love & Relationships, and
- Consent.
During the inception of In Bloom we decided we didn’t want experts answering the questions at the risk of experts being too politically correct on sex and potentially fall back on mechanical terms of sex. We wanted so-called non-experts; young adults who were writing their own rulebook. The cool kids of the internet, the ones behind Tumblr accounts and Instagram accounts that resonated with millennials and teens, such as Eileen Kelly from Killer and a Sweet Thang, a sex educator who has a social media following of 400K. Or Celeste Mountjoy from Filthyratbag, a satirical illustrator who has a social media following of 250K. Or Chella Man, a deaf genderqueer artist who has a social media following of 180K.
Using ‘millennial influencers’ for a campaign is a tried and tested marketing tool. However this was genuinely an editorial choice moreso than a marketing choice. We had to ensure that the talent were genuinely engaged in the editorial premise, so we pre-interviewed each person to gauge their personal sex education, their personal boundaries and their personal activism. Armed with this information that we were able to curate the questions we gave to them to answer.
Admittedly one of the biggest challenges we faced was to have diverse representation in a limited talent pool of only 15 people. We chatted with a high-schooler from Canada who was raised Muslim, LIL Yamz, who had been vlogging on YouTube what it is like Growing up Muslim. We chatted with sex worker, Tilly Lawless, who writes and talks about sex workers rights. We chatted with Australian-African DJ, Flex Mami, a pop culture, millennial queen whose real talk about friends and career speaks honestly to contemporary issues facing millennials in an ever-changing digital landscape. We chatted with Jesse Dutlow, who studied at Hillsong Church and grew up with Christian faith. We chatted with Jordan Lee, who is openly gay in Indonesia. We chatted with Theodora Abigail, a teen mum who is also from Indonesia.
As most people in the talent pool weren’t from Melbourne or even Australia, we embraced ‘the selfie’ and asked everyone to record their answers on their mobile phone. Not only did this make the answers feel intimate and authentic, but logistically it meant we could ask anyone who had a mobile phone and a decent internet connection to be involved.
It might be frowned upon by filmmakers for not being a cinematic or beautiful medium, but mobile footage has democratised information and news. What we lacked in aesthetic from the hodge-podge of mobile footage, we made up for in the art direction from VICE’s young, talented designer Ash Goodall.
Ash’s inspirations were pulled from Tumblr, throwback 90s culture, teen diaries and young vloggers. The fonts, the backgrounds and the frames made In Bloom cohesive and appealed to an audience that was a lot younger than the average VICE viewer.
The average VICE viewer will usually watch documentaries longer than five minutes on YouTube or Facebook, but with In Bloom it was largely an Instagram campaign.
With Instagram’s constantly evolving functions and tools, we made over 50 individual assets specific to Instagram’s specs — from its 1:1 ratio timeline limited to 60 seconds, to its 9:16 ratio stories limited to 15 seconds. The 9:16 ratio IGTV format had its own limitations, not just for our channel but the talent’s channels too. We found it most effective to tag our talent’s Instagram handle in a VICE Instagram story because of a recent function where they could essentially “re-Instagram” as their own story.
All of this was in an effort to make In Bloom look and feel “peer-to-peer”, as if the young viewer were listening to someone of their ilk.
Peer educating isn’t a new thing, it’s a model that continues to grow in the United States with peer-to-peer sex ed programmes such as TEEN PEP and Peer-2-Peer rolling out. Hearing from a teen rather than a teacher allows a conversation that is two-way and more connected. The efficacy of these programmes can be backed by a review of 15 peer-led sex ed programs that finds peer-to-peer sex education is effective and increasing teens’ knowledge about sexual health.
In Bloom wasn’t intended to be an educational tool for classrooms, but it was intended to create the connection and conversation that my friends and I had in that library corner. I hope that as the series grows that there will be more diverse representations answering trickier questions about the ever-changing life of teens.
Anu Hasbold is a senior producer at VICE and has been making VICE Australia’s tentpole documentaries and digital series’ for the past three years.
