The Sex Clinic reveals some alarming facts about young Britons.
The Sex Clinic reveals some alarming facts about young Britons.
In among the sea of television we have at our fingertips these days, I do believe I stumbled across the year's most horrifying show over the weekend.
It wasn't HBO's Chernobyl with five episodes each more devastating than the last. It wasn't the return of The Handmaid's Tale either. Because,sure, that show's overarching theme of women being held in child-bearing servitude is terrifying, but it's not like it's real life or anything like that. (Insert nervous laughter here.)
No, the year's most horrifying show might just be The Sex Clinic, a six-episode series that's turned up on TVNZ OnDemand and documents a bunch of young Brits getting their sexual health check – warts and all.
And it's not shocking for the reasons you might suspect i.e. getting an eyeful of the various lumps and bumps found on these strangers' nether regions. (Although discovering that one young man's penis problems were down to the fact he hadn't washed it in more than 20 years was a real spit-your-mouthful-of-tea-out moment).
Instead, the most shocking revelations to be found at The Sex Clinic were around condom usage – or the distinct lack thereof.
The Sex Clinic may be the most terrifying thing on TV these days.
The series sees dozens of young men and women turning up to a brightly lit, candy-coloured clinic to discuss their sexual health concerns with a panel of experts, including doctor Naomi, nurse Sarah and health adviser Kevin, and so many of their stories had one common thread – they didn't use condoms. Ever.
With some of the men boasting of sexual partners numbering in the hundreds, that's a terrifying thought, indeed – even if the universally accepted equation for figuring out a young man's conquests is to reduce the number he's claimed to have bedded by at least a third.
Scotsman Jordan, for example, proudly tells viewers: "Contraception is a crime". JJ, meanwhile, claims to have had 150 sexual partners so far and has used a condom exactly once.
"Thinking about it now, that's bad, isn't it?" he muses.
JJ might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but he's hit the nail on the head right there, especially with World Health Organisation data stating there are one million new STIs contracted every single day around the world right now. That's a whole lot of syphilis, chlamydia and gonorrhoea.
But The Sex Clinic isn't entirely about these eye-opening condom confessions, thankfully. Many of the patients who walk through the door are generally fun to watch, especially as they nervously wait and trade stories in the clinic's reception area.
The show also has a fantastic cross-section of talent. While the patients are mostly quite young, there are still all manner of shapes, sizes, colours and sexual persuasions to find among them. The women are refreshingly honest and unashamed about enjoying sex.
Pansexual Nu is a delight as she looks for sex tips that her physical disabilities can accommodate - although by the sounds of her very adventurous sex life, I'm not sure she needs that advice.
And amid all the medical swabs, shouts of discomfort during physical examinations and giggling over shared fetishes, there's plenty of heart to be found.
There's Michelle, who turns up to get a few lumps checked, but is really in need of a hug after admitting to feeling lost after the end of a relationship. A gender-fluid drag performer looks positively elated after chatting to an expert about how to connect with their partner while in the lows of their bipolar disorder.
Even when one of the clinic's patients says he prefers sleeping with porn actresses because they're "pedigree dogs" who've got their sexual health paperwork in order, Nurse Sarah gently asks why he thinks it's ever okay to speak about women that way – and uncovers a decade's worth of hurt lurking beneath the surface.
I will forever scratch my head as to why anyone would want to have their sexual health check filmed for the entire world to see, but more power to this lot, I say. And if the Sex Clinic experience can convince Contraception-Is-A-Crime Jordan to pop on a condom – or at the very least help women to identify Jordan and give him a very wide berth – then this whole experiment really will have all been worth it.
The full season of The Sex Clinic is available now on TVNZ OnDemand.
