The munching monologues

I really do my best to avoid writing about sex all the time, for fear of turning into a mutant Edwina Currie, but I just keep having it forced down my throat.

I was minding my own business this week, when into my hands fell a questionnaire by a charity called Kikass, seeking feedback on yet another sex-education resource for young people. Welcome to supershagland.com – a sex education website with a difference (1). For one, it uses naughty language. The core of the site is a game in which you choose to be either a little naked boy or a little naked girl, and you have to manoeuvre this character along the screen. Guess how you get points? By collecting condoms and avoiding alcohol (God forbid that anybody gets drunk and has a fumble in a bush for fun).

When you get bored of that (believe me, you won’t be playing for long), you can click on to the ‘Fuck me!!’ section of the site. This is a single page of facts about the risks of different sexual acts, such as being ‘munched’ and ‘butt fucking’ (I thought munching was something you did in the morning to your Weetabix). Yes, I learned a new word from the site, but come on – with all the fuss about teenagers and sex you’d think somebody would realise that saying the same old thing but with swearing is really rather dull.

supershagland.com reminds us – again – about the beneficial effects of covering ourselves in rubber. But does it contain any information about the symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)? No. It would have been useful to at least list a few tips about how you tell if you’ve got something nasty brewing, and how such things are treated. Instead, the info consists of such gems as the fact that there is ‘no risk of HIV from whipping’, and defining sex toys as ‘Dildos, root vegetables, etc’ – useful stuff that.

Although the site’s writers have obviously been checking through the latest edition of their super trendy slang dictionaries, they have still managed to rattle out the same wisdom kids have been told since time began. Just because the old mantra ‘she can still get pregnant if you pull out before you come’ has been rewritten as ‘Note – pulling out and squirting off to the side does not prevent anything (HIV/STI or pregnancy) because you’re probably dribbling before you go inside the vagina’, does not mean this website will become the Encarta dictionary of sex.

I think it’s some kind of conspiracy. The safe sex groups must have got together and decided that if they make enough boring information available to young people and make it as repetitive as possible, the kids will all just fall asleep before they can get around to doing anything naughty.

Talking of conspiracies, it wasn’t just last week’s reports of ‘irritable male syndrome’ that led me to suspect there is a secret campaign afoot to turn men into Bridget Jones. (The male version of pre-menstrual tension (PMT) was first observed in sheep – the theory is that when blokes get stressed, their testosterone levels drop, causing an outbreak of grizzliness.) These days it seems that men can also develop low self-esteem from media images of beautiful bodies. On the ‘Real lives’ page of Tuesday’s Guardian supplement (G2), they asked men whether the ‘well-filled briefs’ of the new Calvin Klein model made them feel insecure (2).

Oh please. Luckily, most of the blokes questioned weren’t buying it: ‘No, it doesn’t make me feel insecure – it makes me want his phone number!’, ‘I definitely have a better body than him’ and ‘He’s just some poncy model, couldn’t give a toss, really’ were all reassuring responses. As for the few who did whine that it made them feel bad inside – it must have been their time of the month.

Read on:

Spooked about sex, by Ray Crowley

spiked-issue: Love and sex

(1) supershagland.com

(2) Guardian, 5 March 2002