A fellow blogger from PR Media Blog has, in the past, suggested I am unrepentant in using sex to sell this site.

Not wishing to disappoint, today’s Sex Uncovered supplement in The Observer is the perfect excuse to blend media talk and sex. But forgive me if I fall asleep somewhere in the middle. The British media (and overseas, but more of that later) are no strangers to sex surveys, and these often make for light reading over a cup of tea. But sex supplements???

Are they a way of winning the Sunday circulation war by getting Times and Telegraph readers to shelve their usual politics for a spot of salacious reading and persuading News of the World followers to feel they’re getting some sophisticated sex talk for a change?

After an exhaustive “history of British sex” introduction from chief leader writer, Rafael Behr – recyling the usual suspects of Philip Larkin and 1963; the Lady Chatterley case; the issue of sex = commerce and scaring us to death with the “tyranny of the ultra-sexual market” – the Observer supplement tries to prove its sheer stamina with several interminable features and pages of results from an ICM poll.

What these results tell us is a combination of the bleeding obvious (people aged 65+ are least promiscuous) and the completely inexplicable (people living in Wales and the South West have most sexual partners). The poll’s results are then trashed by some of the feature writers, in one case deriding the finding that men tend to have a higher sex drive by suggesting that everyone who took the poll is probably lying. So much for what our survey says.

Wondering whether sex surveys are a peculiarly British media phenomenon, a quickie search proved otherwise. But at least what’s out there in the overseas media is either funny or amusingly nationalistic. A survey of Italian men from the country’s edition of Cosmopolitan found the majority were turned off in bed by “vulgar language”, while another magazine flew the flag with a cover story about impotence problems under the title, ”Males of Italy – better than the Americans.”

The Germans are happy to make similar claims, care of a survey from “prophylactic giant, Durex”, which claims the Germans have “extended their Teutonic efficiency to the bedroom.” Not to be outdone, the International Herald Tribune brings in mathematicians to deal with the inexact science of sex surveys, debunking the “men have higher sex drive myth” with the ultimate passion killer – logic. But all very, very funny.

As an Observer reader it pains me to be hard on their supplement and one part of the poll did raise a smile: Is it typically British for 40% of people to rate their sexual performance as just “average”? How would that translate to a pre-coital conversation in the bedroom (or, in the workplace,  as 17% claim)? Might it go something like “Listen, don’t expect fireworks or any of that Latin lover nonsense, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Tags: , sex surveys, Sex Uncovered, The Observer

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Journalism, Press. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.