“You always need empathy first”: Sophia Smith Galer talks sex-ed and ethical journalism

CURR, Jasper Ostle

Few journalists have their finger so successfully on the pulse of the internet as Sophia Smith Galer, who started making TikTok videos in 2019, and has since garnered over 130 million views. Last year she published her first book ‘Losing It: Sex Education for the 21st Century’.

Scroll through her social media accounts and you’ll see digestible videos about sex, misogyny, healthcare, and politics, delivered compellingly by Sophia in her signature headbands.

Her journalism and social media intersect. Like her latest investigation, where Sophia found that doctors were regularly denying women ultrasounds, which can be life-saving, because they were deemed ‘virgins.’ When she began to write this story she wasn’t sure how widespread this occurrence was, but received an unprompted message from a follower relaying this exact experience and asking Sophia to look into it: “something clicked, if it was happening to her, and in the few places I had found - I knew it must be happening everywhere.” 

I met Sophia after her talk hosted by Cambridge University for Reproductive Rights, where she’d discussed her journey into journalism (first the BBC and now Vice News) and answered questions on abortion rights, Andrew Tate, and social media algorithms. 

During the talk, she spoke about the overturning of Roe v Wade being a wake up call for her activism, and many across the room nodded in agreement. She tells me about a Vice investigation she published last year revealing that US anti-abortion groups were funding a UK anti-abortion charity specifically to give anti-abortion talks to schoolchildren and medical professionals. She sees a passivity in Britain to medical misogyny: “people don’t realise how other types of medical agency are being neglected here. Seeing Roe v Wade just shows you how fraught ignorance can be, even though America is an outlier with this change, we see most of the world going in the opposite direction.”

We start talking about the sex education Cambridge gives us in Freshers Week, and she tells me a part of problem with workshops like these is the misconception we should only get sex education at school or university - we don’t magically graduate and automatically know how to navigate a lifetime of sexual agency. Workplaces deliver training on first aid, unconscious bias, and professionalism, but far less often on sex.

“I think it's quite clear that NHS trusts could benefit from individuals [sex educators] like this if this role doesn't currently exist… Imagine in a work setting, right? I've been around people who are first aiders. I've been around people who are mental health first aiders. Imagine if workplace settings have sexual health first aiders. Obviously just like the first aiders and the mental health first aiders, they are not medical professionals. They're not gonna be able to diagnose you, but this understanding that our sexual health and wellbeing is part of our physical and mental health and wellbeing.” 

It is this holistic view of sexual agency as fundamental to our wellbeing that weaves through Galer’s work. Medical misogyny, in her stories, is often connected to sexual agency.

In her talk she tells us about a doctor friend telling her about the “pill ladder” - a rulebook for what birth control pills to put patients on. Sophia, who had been suffering harsh side effects as a result of her birth control, was shocked that her doctor had never told her about the process which was determining her healthcare. It’s this kind of information, she argues, that we deserve to know more about in order make decisions about our health.

This idea of ‘informed consent’ is connected to social attitudes to sex too. Too often, Sophia says, we think about consent as just “not being raped,” but autonomy is more complex than that.

“Really being autonomous in decision making doesn't just mean sex. To be autonomous in decision-making is not something that happens with only an individual person, it’s through communication. If I want to make decisions that lead to positive health outcomes for me it relies on having had a really good conversation with a doctor. Or a really good conversation with my partner, where we've really communicated stuff to each other. My autonomy has been added to and enhanced by my ability to actually communicate and hear from other people.

There are loads of examples of what is ‘normalised coercion’. So the sort of very common experience of having felt sort of persuaded or like guided into a sex act, that you reflect on and you're like, did I really want to do that? No. Why did it happen?”

Sophia sees this reliance on the binary yes and no as hindering our conversations around sex. The digital frontier is making this harder too: “it’s not really been helped by the creation of consent apps where it's like, say yes, say no. Sex is ongoing, consent is ongoing.”

“Autonomy can also be like that as well. So when someone in the street shouts, heckles or sexually harasses me in the street, it's not simply that I do not consent to that happening. It's my selfhood at that moment that feels really affected and harmed by that.

I've lost agency: agency is about having control over yourself and your own actions. At that moment, I've lost control. They've taken control.” 

I move our conversation to another type of control: the social media algorithm.

Sophia’s reporting over the last few weeks broke the story that TikTok’s algorithm was promoting horrific search suggestions surrounding the death of Nicola Bulley. This was fuelled by content creators making videos that purported to ‘solve’ the disappearance. Similarly, she found that even when it was reported that Andrew Tate was being ‘banned’ on Tiktok, videos of him were still receiving billions of views and the ‘search bar’ feature was suggesting his name to viewers.

In her talk, Galer spoke about the fact that content creators aren’t held to ethical or journalistic standards that news organisations are: 

“Ultimately people can make complaints, for example, to Ofcom about what they've seen broadcasters do if they're unhappy with them. But a content creator, who’s regulating them? There's no one regulating the content creators… there’s no process through which they acknowledge the harm they’ve promoted.” 

I agree with Sophia’s questioning, but ask if she’s giving too much credit to news organisations reported to Ofcom, by presuming they’ll “learn” from acknowledging the harm they’ve promoted. Just look at the headlines over the past month, we’ve seen the Daily Mail reinforce the language of domestic abusers after Emma Pattinson’s killing, and invasive reporting into Nicola Bulley after her disappearance, as well as the continuous misgendering of the murdered teenager Brianna Ghey.

So, how should journalists be reporting on cases like these?

“You always need to have empathy first. I'm assuming all journalists, in the course of their work, have moments where you are more educated about that in the interviews that you do and the stories that you do than you ever were when you were training, you know?

Because you're actually putting empathy into practice and you're deploying it. In my work, I have to deploy it all the time. Things have happened to people that are really often really bad. That's the best way to describe it. They're horrible things that should never have happened to people. Talking to these people, you're constantly deploying empathy. And I think in those scenarios, especially because of the media law and historical ways of reporting on these issues, we are already hypersensitive.”

Sophia tells me her next big project - ‘Body Atlas’ - is trying to improve the sexual reproductive health information on Wikipedia: “one of the digital wonders of the world.” She’s been working on a landscape review of how bad Wikipedia’s current information is. 

“When it comes to country pages on abortion, they can be vastly improved. For example, there's a page on birth control in the United States that's only available in English and Hebrew, even though the US is the second largest country of Spanish speakers. That’s just one language - there are so many more examples” 

So, over the next few months, she’ll be organising editing events in different places where people can come and help contribute to improving these pages. She’ll return to Cambridge for one soon, she assures me. 

“You’ll pick a page and you populate the page. I've done the job of - here are some gaps and here are some useful links you can refer to. And here's how you can help fill the gap. I’ll be back for one, just you wait.” 

If you’re interested in helping, there’s an introductory session happening in London on April 6th, sign up here.

If you want to attend an event by the Cambridge University Reproductive Rights society, check out their website.