Don Lucas, Ph.D., professor of psychology and coordinator of Northwest Vista College’s psychology department, celebrated his YouTube channel, 5MIweekly, surpassing one million views on April 8.
5MIweekly was born of the frustration to overcome the barriers separating people from scientific information.
“More than 80% of Americans want comprehensive and science-based sex education (CSE) for themselves or their children, but less than 20% of Americans will get it. Political, religious, and cultural misunderstandings about sex education have caused CSE to only sporadically be used for the US population,” said Dr. Lucas.
5MIweekly is composed of free, original, and entertaining, 3- to 18-minute length science-based human sexuality videos. Video topics are akin to those found within a typical college-level human-sexuality course (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, love, attraction, sexual physiology, safe sex, contraception, pregnancy).
Lucas continued, “Not being able to learn about sexuality using scientific sources of information on the Internet may not seem like such a big deal, if not for the fact that sexual illiteracy is associated with fear and anxiety, STIs and shame, low self-esteem and poor body image, high school and college incompletion, family and domestic violence, and rape.”
“For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is reporting the highest rates ever of the sexually transmitted infections gonorrhea, syphilis, and chlamydia. And the main reason the CDC gives for these unpreceded rates—a lack of empirically-based sex education.”
Since launching 5MIweekly with a single video in the Fall of 2017 for students in his Human Sexuality course (PSYC 2306), 5MIweekly now has 81 videos and is supported by the Association for Psychological Science. Additionally, 5MIweekly has more than 6,500 subscribers and is used by human sexuality professors in their courses across the US and other countries. And now, 5MIweekly has garnered its latest accolade, surpassing the million-view mark.
As one of Dr. Lucas’ Human Sexuality students said, “I wish I would have known this stuff a long time ago—this needs to be shared with the public!”
