Channel 4 has a history of exploitation-driven programming. From the racist-baiting ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’ to the freak-show spectacle of ‘The Undateables’ – no group is safe when it comes to the pandering of public interest.
Now, in the network’s latest scheme, the audience itself stars as the prime tableau for ridicule and scorn. It is Channel 4’s ‘campaign for real sex’ – a series about us, and why we need some “frank discussions” about what goes on in our bedrooms.
I always find it unnerving when broadcasters attempt these kinds of social engineering projects. Of course, many people must know that ‘telly campaigns’ are little more than cynical ratings ploys, but what gets me is that one of these days they might just change something. I am scared of what they will change.
The premise of this campaign plays on some of the more notorious fears about our sex lives. With three programmes in the series so far, they have covered the usual suspects of hysteria, including online pornography, teenage virginity, and the value of having sex in a box live on television.
Its motif is a “need to start talking about sex.” Channel 4 claims that online pornography has damaged young people’s sex lives so thoroughly that they are no longer able to engage in healthy, sustainable relationships. Now is the time for our doting parents to intervene.
“Porn on the Brain,” the first show in the series, kicks things off by asserting that online porn is not only insulating young people from ‘real sex,’ but that dangerous new ‘extreme’ flavours of porn are “turning our kids into psychopaths.”
The hyperbole here is obvious on paper, but the scary thing is just how effective and convincing the journalist Martin Daubney makes it sound. He starts by explaining that porn is more accessible today than it has ever been – and that its contents are more ‘shocking’ than you could ever imagine. The conclusion he draws is that an “entire generation” has been learning sex through the lens of distorted fantasy alone. Without proper parental guidance, he claims, we are “damaging the sex lives of Britons.”
The show’s seminal piece of evidence on this part is MRI brain-scan technology. A neuroscientist from the University of Cambridge examines the interior pathways of a group of self-confessed porn addicts. She explains how there is a direct parallel between these particular readings and those of alcoholics and drug abusers – both of them demonstrating clear ‘reward and motivation’ mechanisms.
Although it is an interesting finding, there is nothing particularly special or “shocking” about it at all. You could of course repeat the same experiments with groups of compulsive ‘television addicts’ or ‘chocolate eaters,’ and find even more correlations. Addiction is a malleable thing, and can occur in just about any pleasurable activity – the real antagonism is why a person needs to become addicted in the first place, which is something you can’t explain without getting to the root cause of their neurosis first.
Nevertheless, Daubney takes up the mantle here and throws the real neuroscience out the window. He declares the MRI scans as “proof” that we are entering a new age of porn addiction. He even goes so far as to claim that porn addicted teens are responsible for new waves of sexism and sexual abuse.
To back this up, his sources include an anti-porn campaigner and a psychotherapist, who both provide very weak and contradictory arguments throughout. At one point, for instance, we are told “We have a great difficulty in proving the connection between this violent imagery and violent behaviour, but clinically it’s clear that there is a connection.” Allow that to sink in for a moment.
So this is the reason why Channel 4 wants to “reclaim sex from porn?” Remind me again why aren’t also reclaiming sex ‘from movies,’ or sex ‘from television?’ There’s a great deal of “violent imagery” there that goes unaccounted for. And reclaiming into what particular framework exactly? Where was sex before it was pornographic? Maybe the true problem is less to do with protecting children, and more to do with persecuting certain kinds of unsavoury habits.
Apparently so, according to “Sex Box,” which was the second show in the ‘campaign for real sex’ series.
In contrast to “Porn on the Brain,” Sex Box promised a more positive remedy to the conundrum of our endangered sexual economy. This time the scenario was to place a large wooden crate in the centre of a studio, and invite willing volunteers to come along to have sex live on national television.
When I first heard this idea, my immediate reaction was “oh my god.”
My second reaction was “they’ve gone and done it – they’ve ruined sex for everyone.”
Thankfully, the show was even more boring than I had imagined. At no point in the entire one-off special could you actually see what was happening inside the crate. Which apparently disappointed a lot of people on Twitter.
They ain’t really having sex in there! Lies! Looool! #SexBox
— Just Me (@antoinette213) October 7, 2013
But could you imagine what it would have been like to actually “bear all” to the public in this way? Even for an exhibitionist, I imagine it would have been the worst, most desexualised encounter imaginable.
The show also featured a panel of “world leading sex experts” sat in front of the box. The presenter, Mariella Frostrup, promised us “we’re going to tackle those tricky questions. It will be honest, and for some viewers, uncomfortable.”
What they delivered was indeed “uncomfortable,” but maybe not in the way Channel 4 had intended. From our crew of “sexperts,” we got mind-numbing small-talk, juvenile giggling, and an onslaught of downright puerile questions designed to “probe” our volunteers for details. The couple, presumably finished having sex (although there was no way we could tell), would come out and answer such million dollar questions like “what positions” they were taking, and “what kind of foreplay” they enjoyed. Real honest, frank discussions.
But maybe this is the point: you cannot have frank discussions about sex.
The network claims it wants an alternative understanding of what “real” sex is. It fancies that real sex is something divorced from pornography and smut. The naive but crucial question, however, is what “real” sex actually looks like. Can we even imagine such a thing?
Perhaps we should look at the format of Sex Box itself: we have entire studio structured to look impressive, with a host of semi-celebrity judges to impress us with their profound knowledge on the wonders of copulation, but beneath it all there is really nothing going on.
So this is the truth of real sex: there is no such thing.
People are screwing each other inside a box, and we feel nothing for it. So under the production values and the high eroticism of pornography, maybe the idea is the same. When we strip away the layers of fakery, fetishisation, and innuendo in sexual contact, we are left with nothing. Just the pure meat and bone of two idiots mashing genitalia together.
And this is my big fear about a ‘campaign for real sex.’ The campaign itself is a fantasy masking an intent that wants nothing. It is a knee-jerk response to so-called “shocking” and “new” forms of pornography now accessible online – pornography that supposedly threatens the livelihood of kids and teenagers growing up still bewildered about puberty.
But here I am also reminded of early media scares about homosexuality. There is a new and scary ‘lifestyle’ threatening an “entire generation” of innocent, vulnerable young minds, and the only step we can take to curb this ‘destructive habit’ is to intervene as parents into our kids’ sex lives to ensure that they grow up healthy and protected.
I am almost tempted to say that ‘real sex’ has more to do with making sex as conservative and utilitarian as possible – a kind of weird neo-puritanism that barely scratches the surface on why people even want to have sex in the first place. Take, for example, the following creepy passage from the network’s guide to ‘Talking to young children about sex and pornography’:
It is perfectly natural for both you and your child to be embarrassed, but the only way to get over it is by talking. The more you do it, the easier it will get. Start off with little conversations and slowly build as your confidence grows. Very quickly it will become second nature and simply what you do as a matter of course.
Could you get a purer form of repression than this? In other words: bankrupt your children of the anxiety and curiosity that makes sex worth it. Turn it into a sterile “matter of course.” Slowly chip away at their desire for independent maturity. Deprive them of spontaneous enjoyment – make them “get over it.”
Gone are the days where sex was something we could do in secret, behind our parents’ backs. Now we are told our idiotic, masturbatory pleasures are actually ‘good for us.’ Parents are advising us on the joys of safe sex, and that being “sexually active” can provide key health benefits.
And heaven forbid that sex be dirty, embarrassing, or reckless, right? Is it any wonder kids are today turning to hardcore smut to relieve themselves?
This is precisely why you cannot “reclaim sex from porn.” Because at its heart, sex is porn. Pornography is the one thing providing sex with a sustainable narrative framework. Without the fantasy – without the erotic scenario – what else is sex other than a sterile wooden crate in the midst of a bewildered studio?
The lynchpin of Channel 4’s ‘campaign for real sex’ is an attitude that is more prevalent today than it has ever been before. It is the idea that sex ought to be talked about – that enjoyment should be medicated, and that pleasure should be something you protect young people from.
So the time has come to save sex from “frank discussions.” Sex is not something to be understood. It is a kernel of enjoyment sustained only as a fantasy. It is the irreducible, unspeakable image of our desire. Once you get too close to this desire – once you seek to understand it too finely, the moment vanishes entirely. If we really want to ‘enjoy ourselves,’ then sex should stay unreal, it should stay pornographic, and it should stay out of public interest.
Social Paranoiac 