KEY POINTS:
Sex sells, according to popular wisdom, which is why it's everywhere including in this, my very first Monday column.
If I want your undivided attention, say the marketing geniuses, the 100 per cent guaranteed formula for piquing your interest is merely to mention sex. Especially if you're male. (And if it hasn't become clear yet, parental guidance is recommended for this column.)
We don't get enough sex. Well, not me personally, you understand, but great numbers of "us". And even if we do, it's probably not the really great sex that we're told everyone else is having, or thinking about having, all the time.
This is why so many of us need help to do it better. Premature ejaculation. Erectile dysfunction. These are "important community issues", as the head of an Australian company selling the latest "nasal delivery technology" for erectile dysfunction, associate professor Jack Vaifman, proclaimed last week (I confess it was news to me).
Yes, Vaifman acknowledged, sex can be a taboo subject for some people. That's why it requires "thought-provoking" advertisements. His company's idea of such being those great big billboards, in attention-seeking yellow and red, which assail me on the drive to and from Auckland airport, asking me if I want "longer lasting sex".
The answer to that is, no, I don't, and I wish they'd stop asking me. If I had longer lasting sex, I'd never get the school lunches made or this column written. Have these people not read the latest research that concludes, quite rightly, that the optimal time for sexual intercourse (not including foreplay) is three to 13 minutes?
An earlier study of 1500 couples in 2005 found that the median time for sexual intercourse was 7.3 minutes. And, yes, women in the study were actually armed with stopwatches. Very sexy.
Researchers think it's important for us to know this vital information because so many people are hung up on the idea that good sex is about endurance and performance. How often, how long, how many, achieved or not achieved. In other words, the mechanics of the act, which, frankly, is all you're left with when you strip sex of its emotional meaning. No wonder so many men suffer from performance-anxiety.
As American psychologist Marianne Brandon said "There are so many myths in our culture of what other people are doing sexually. Most people's sex lives are not as exciting as other people think they are.
But to get back to those "Do You Want Longer Lasting Sex?" billboards, branded "culturally insensitive" last week for having offended a number of Pacific Island people. A Tongan mother, Eseta Funganitao, told the Herald that she'd been shocked to see the "ugly" billboards, which her two pre-teen children had also seen. "Sex is tapu, sacred," she said, "not to be discussed publicly."
On TV, Phil Clemas, of APN Outdoor Advertising, argued that his client was advertising a remedy for a legitimate health problem for men - and it was pretty hard to do that without putting the word "sex" in the advertisement. (Seriously, Phil?) Also, they hadn't been totally insensitive; the sites for the billboards had been chosen to avoid "high-risk" locations, near schools, for example. (Seriously, Phil?)
But cultural sensitivity is a poor argument for removing billboards (and that goes for that "whaka" billboard, too). If we used personal offence on account of religious or cultural sensibilities as a rule for what's acceptable we'd all be wearing burqas. In a free society, there has to be a happy medium between burqas and boobs on bikes.
In the homogenous old days, let's say 50 or so years ago, we had something called common decency, a kind of unspoken consensus about what we could and couldn't do, or say, or show in our shared public places.
Now, of course, absolutely everything is out in the open, in those public spaces that we share with our children, including television and the route to the airport.
Is this really a big deal? Well, yes, says an American think-tank, RAND, whose recent studies suggested that watching TV shows with sexual content hastens the initiation of teen sexual activity; that sexual talk has the same effect on teenagers as sexual depiction. And that TV shows portraying the less exciting reality of pregnancy and other sexual risks can educate teenagers.
The rationale, of course, is that sex sells, and the more explicit the better.
But according to a study by Iowa State University, advertisers may actually be better off placing their commercials during television programmes free of the distractions of sex and violence.
What TV executives seem not to have woken up to yet is that the more explicit television becomes, the less communal it becomes, which means we're less inclined to welcome it into the family.
Whatever television companies and the marketers of sexual dysfunction remedies might say, some things really should stay behind closed doors.
Tapu. Misa@gmail.com
