Channel 4, The Sexperience 1000 Sex Data Visualizer, Brits’ iPhone Sex Habits, The BBC and Porn in The UK

The cheeky monkeys at Channel 4 sent me a press release this morning about the Sexperience 1000 (requires Flash), a data visualizer that uses sex survey responses from a thousand British people. The data visualizer is pre-promo for the new season of UK sex ed show Channel 4’s Sexperience, which we can’t watch through regular channels here in America but is something I’ve been a fan of since its launch in 2008 – I use their anatomy educational videos on my sex ed pages (fellatio and cunnilingus especially).

Drilling down through the data is completely addictive. I love that you can sort by phone!

However, I have recently become very disappointed with Sexperience – I think you’ll feel the same way when you hear me out. While the series started out as an incredible resource for accurate sex information, in its second season Sexperience took a right turn into conservative disinformation as the series attempted to tackle porn and young people. Instead of what they should have done – take a page from the amazing porn-and-young-people resource site Bish Traning – Sexperience’s unhinged anti-porn agenda completely undermined the value of what they’re trying to do.

To me, it typifies the mind-boggling heights that anti-porn hysteria is hitting in the UK right now. In this regard, they have certainly gone further than any wingnut Americans have. One TinyNibbles commenter said, “[Sexperience] had a huge amount of dubious parent-oriented fearmongering around porn – I mean, taking the 2 Girls 1 Cup phenomena and concluding that’s the kind of sexual act kids will want to do? Really?” Another commenter summed it up perfectly:

The presenter, Anna Richardson, has an obvious dislike of porn, so skews all the discussion towards how evil it is. She comes up with some nonsensical stuff like claiming she was generally searching for porn online like a child would and somehow found freely available child porn within a couple of minutes and never has any facts or figures to back up her theories. Most of stuff she does is shock tactics, like taking parents onto Chat Roulette and painting this as the normal experiences children get of the internet.

She rarely, if ever, in the several series on, talks about child filters or not putting a PC in the kid’s room where they can access it without supervision; and always paints porn as being this corrupting evil that is some sort of “boogieman” trying to force kids to click on links or pretending “niche” (for want of a better word) stuff like triple anal, scat, S&M etc stuff as being the sort of porn you instantly find on Google.

I’m not saying 12 year olds should be looking at porn but the idea that they present is that kids will grow up warped and insecure because they are curious about sex and might search for some images or videos online or because they somehow stumbled upon hardcore sites.

So it was a bit strange that Channel 4 reached out to me for traffic – though they did specifically say they thought “this would be good for Daily Violet readers” and sent a duplicate PR email to editor (me) of my tech blog, Techyum. Well, I’m putting the Sexperience 1000 here, where it belongs. They included,

It is an interactive survey of the sexual experiences and preferences of 1000 Brits, which allows you to ask questions and follow each individual’s response. For instance, did you know that, of the 167 people who have had sex in their parents bed, 62 shop at Tesco and 10 now drive a BMW?

You can also take a cheeky peek and explore individual’s experiences. If you go to ‘have you ever engaged in partner swapping’ and click on ‘Threesome’ you’ll see that the vast majority of people who engage is partner swapping have also had a Threesome.

It’s a cool data visualizer, but we should always consider the source. I’m doing a lot of meditation on the UK and its anti-porn hysteria, especially after listening to Jacqui Smith’s “Porn Again” on BBC Radio (you can listen to it here). Jacqui Smith was the former UK Home Secretary that got caught writing off porn in her expenses – it was her husband’s expenses. We find out in her intended-for-redemption radio report that while she has legislated against porn, she’s actually never seen any of what she’s created laws to restrict and regulate. Not reassuring to hear that a lawmaker has taken information about media on faith, and acted on it. And do I believe that she’s actually never seen much (if any) pornography, as her program goes on to totally inaccurately represent UK TV-cam-girls as the UK porn industry. It gets worse if you’re an American: I blew my top when they unquestionably represented all American pornography as torture porn. No, they really did. And that’s just… insane. Bizarre, given that anyone with an internet connection can see it’s not true.

I think to myself, this is the insanity I’m walking into next April when I keynote at Brunel University (London) for an international (academic) pornography conference. So typical to characterize Americans as uneducated, brutal savages. I’m sick of it, and sickened by it. I was astonished, as I have always held BBC in high esteem for its record of unbiased reporting – but sadly, this is not so with porn topics.

How can we know any real or possible dangers of porn if we don’t talk about it accurately, unbiased and with balanced perspectives? Oh – right. That’s why the internet still beats old media.