With the help of a new grant, Dr. Don Lucas, Ph.D., likely could become a YouTube star, and he’s not just talking about happiness. He’s enlightening his audiences about human sexuality.
The $5,000 grant from the Association of Psychological Science will allow Dr. Don (as the NVC community likes to call him) to pay NVC students to work on marketing, research, and technical aspects of 5MIweekly; a YouTube channel Dr. Don built for visitors to get answers about human sexuality; question the accuracy of societal beliefs about sex; test their own sexual knowledge; and introspect upon diverse definitions of sexuality, sexual development, and sexual health.
Since launching 5MIweekly with a single video for his students taking PSYC 2306: Human Sexuality in September of 2017 (it now has more than 40 videos), Dr. Don says 5MIweekly has generated more than 25,000 views and gained more than 1,300 subscribers without any marketing and only being exposed to about 24 students per human-sexuality course. The channel’s views and subscribers are mostly due to students sharing 5MIweekly with friends and family.
As one of his students said, “I wish I would have known about this stuff a long time ago—it needs to be shared!”
Despite the vast amount of sexual “information” on the Internet, Dr. Don said, “little of it is based on science, and it is dreadfully represented on YouTube, the most-used Internet platform by teenagers.” He added, “popular YouTube channels that address the science of sexuality are hindered by biases and sponsors.”
“5MIweekly serves an important role in our current, sexually-illiterate society. Not knowing about human sexuality may not seem like such a big deal, if not for the fact that sexual illiteracy is associated with unwanted pregnancies, high school and college incompletion, domestic and family violence, poverty, sexual assaults, and premature death.” said Dr. Don. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently published a press release reporting the highest rates ever of the sexually-transmitted infections gonorrhea, syphilis, and chlamydia. And the main reason the CDC gives for these unprecedented rates—a lack of empirically-based sex education.”
By addressing topics found in typical, college-level human-sexuality courses (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, love, liking, attraction, sexual physiology, safe sex, contraception, pregnancy), 5MIweekly is fulfilling its purpose of expanding the scope of people who are educated about human sexuality.
To visit and subscribe to 5MIweekly, and be a part of the fight against sexual illiteracy, go here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQFQ0vPPNPS-LYhlbKOzpFw
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Gerona Nylander