The buried lede of the year award must surely go to a headline in yesterday’s Times, that ostensibly reported new ‘lessons in female anatomy’ launched in schools to combat the pervasive ‘unreality’ propagated by the widespread consumption of pornography.

The lesson plans, the Times tells us, will encourage teachers to show children aged 11 and up photographs of normal female vulvas to underline the fact that many natural variations in genital appearance exist. Right at the end of the article, we then learn that the lesson plans are sponsored by Canesten, a brand of thrush cream, as part of a PR campaign titled ‘Truth, Undressed’. In effect, then, this is what the marketing industry calls an ‘advertorial’: that is, content crafted on the client’s behalf to resemble an editorial, then placed in a magazine read by your target audience in the hope that this will drive positive associations with your brand.

Generating this kind of content usually means a PR flack getting in touch with someone in the immense ecosystem of ‘experts’ for hire and creating content shaped not so much to be true as to be true enough. And in this case the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘true enough while not risking any negative association with my brand’ results in a lesson plan that has nothing whatsoever to say about the malign influence of pornography.

An unambiguous position of this nature might trigger a backlash or negative associations with the commercial sponsor, who (let’s not forget) is flogging thrush cream. Rather, Canesten simply implies that porn is like the weather — something that just is — and concludes limply that the pornographic firehose of distorted, commercialised images of naked women may be mitigated (as a brand-building exercise for thrush cream) by showing children slightly less distorted and commercialised images of naked women.

But alongside the moral cowardice you’d expect from a brand sponsor, we also shouldn’t forget that in this case they’re not paying to place the resulting content in an industry sector magazine or employing some harried twentysomething to sell it into a newspaper. They’ve found a captive audience: children legally obliged to attend compulsory education in schools.

When did it become so normal for children’s schooldays to be colonised by advertorials that a newspaper mentions it only in passing? As the Times notes, this isn’t the only corporate-sponsored lesson plan out there. Barclays sponsors a “Life Skills” programme and Dove sponsors a school workshop called “Confident Me”. All of these are, in effect, moral instruction: lessons in how to live, whether that’s financial prudence or vague messages about body confidence, created by brands with the core governing motive of promoting the brand itself.

Most of us have at one time or another met the kind of egotist who offers life advice ostensibly with the aim of helping, but ultimately to make themselves look good. Most people sense the hypocrisy at work in such cases. What kind of moral framework is implicit, for schoolchildren, in discovering that this kind of self-serving hypocrisy is structurally baked into their lesson plans?

Much is made of the endemic cynicism and nihilism of Gen Z. No wonder, then: this is a generation for whose elders the suborning of school-endorsed moral advice as a commercial brand-building exercise seems wholly unremarkable. Given this, the conclusion is that in truth Gen Z is not cynical or nihilistic enough — and that the fault lies with everyone who might have objected to the colonisation of idealism by commerce, and who instead simply shrugged and cashed in.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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