Scraping the bottom of the barrel

[oursin]

Sex Uncovered 2014: An intimate look at British attitudes to sex, a special supplement to The Observer. (Report in main section.)

We ask ourselves, what is the point? what is the point? given that the first findings of the latest iterations of the somewhat more scientifically and statistically reputable NATSAL have already been published.

The supplement - surprise! - ticks all the boxes we might expect, but we very much doubt that it can lay any claim to being a significant contribution to human knowledge about sex in society today. (I am just not convinced of the depth of their research when somebody thinks the term 'bonkbuster' is a new, post-50 Shades, coinage: nitcomb, I haz 1.)

And no-one ever interrogates the 'porn made him do it' claim for assaults committed by v young boys.

What would be interesting to me (maybe it's a bit niche) would be to see this set in the context of how to put reader-grabbing sex in the papers without falling foul of censorship and public opinion, so ably outlined in Adrian Bingham's works on the topic. Okay, someone does mention Dyhouse's Girl Trouble in the contexts of panics around teenage girls, but on the whole, historical context FAIL.

Comments

[davidgillon]

I haven't read the full article, but there is some interesting stuff buried in there: number who would never have sex with a phyically disabled person down from 70% in 2008, to 44% now. That's still appallingly depressing, but less appallingly depressing than it was. Unfortunately I suspect it may be post-Paralympics 'I'd consider banging a hot amputee sprinter' rather than a change in attitudes towards disabled people in general.

(Does NATSAL even cover attitudes to disability? It's not in the preliminary infographic.)

[oursin]

Don't know what was in this iteration - the trouble is that these days it all seems to get published as a range of articles in all sorts of different journals, not as a full report like it was the first time in the 1990s, and so far we don't seem to have had much at all.

There is some possibility I may be having some interaction with one or two of the people involved within the next few months, and I'll raise this question if I get a chance.

[davidgillon]

Thanks, though as I say I suspect a lot of people will have answered the Observer poll thinking of Pistorius or one of the female amputee sprinters, not disabled people in general, so it's a question that needs an extensive probing of its own rather than just a passing question in a broader survey.