Sex Box: Ban This Opaque Filth!

A new television show will feature couples having sex in a sound-proofed box in a television studio with audience and then being interviewed about it afterwards.
Three couples, two straight and one gay, will take turns to step into the opaque box before being quizzed about what they got up to by host Mariella Frostrup and a panel of sex experts.
Makers of the show, called Sex Box, claim that the programme, which will air on Channel 4, is intended to 'reclaim sex from pornography'.

The first couple to use the 'sex box' for the pre-recorded, hour-long show, which will air on October 7, is 20-somethings Rachel and Dean. They will be followed by Matt and John, who are in a long-term relationship, and childhood sweethearts Lynette and Des.
The couples, whose time in the box will not be filmed, will speak to a panel including television sex expert Tracey Cox, relationship expert Dan Savage, and psychotherapist and author Phillip Hodson.
Cox said: 'The Box itself is a unique way to get peoples' attention and to recognise that sex is a normal part of all our lives and something we need to be talking about openly and honestly.'

Daily Mail.

It says something - and is a more than a bit worrying - that the Mail reports this news so matter-of-factly, when it's bringing out Fagburn's inner Mary Whitehouse.
If Sex Box helps British people stop being quite so prudish and hung-up and fucked-up about sex, great.
But Fagburn suspects the thinking behind commissioning this was not to help the nation shake off its sexual chains, and begin the long walk to erotic freedom.
It's more that they know people - lots of people - will watch it just because they hope to see some shagging (albeit opaquely).*
It's more of a sign of our continuing collective sexual repression and alienation, than liberation, what Herbert Marcuse called repressive desublimation.
There is something seriously wrong with a country where sex induces infinitely more embarrassed giggles than it does orgasms.
Remember when the "public service broadcaster" Channel 4 used to show silly fluff in this timeslot like docudramas about Gramsci?
Or, as it would doubtless have to be pitched today, Prison Confessions Of A Red Sardinian Sex Dwarf.

Still above from The Year Of The Sex Olympics, a 1968 BBC TV film.

In a future Britain, the appetites and passions of the masses are controlled by television, with a constant stream of pornography regulating sexual desire. When audiences show signs of boredom, the 'high drive' broadcasters must find new methods to engage them...

BFI Screen Online - watch it here.

* It's hard to tell from Channel 4's preview exactly what the viewer will see; "While the talk is intimate, the couples' love-making is hidden from view, taking place in a private area where nobody but them can see what's going on: inside the Sex Box."
Presumably you will get glimpses of thrusting shadows in the opaque box, otherwise what's the point of it, when they might as well be shagging backstage or in a bedroom?

2012: The Year Of The Sex Olympics

You can clearly say anything you want now.
Ironically, this was alleged to have happened during the recording of the play, The Year Of The Sex Olympics.

Now regarded as one of the 1960s' most effective and engaging one-off pieces of science fiction, the play is chiefly remembered for the prescience of the scenarios it develops. Most obviously, the play's characters devise a television programme called 'The Live Life Show' in which a group of people is separated from society. The ensuing struggle to adapt to new surroundings is broadcast live, with the viewing public's voyeuristic pleasure heightened by the problems participants endure. Both the template for this fictitious entertainment and the audience's rapt reaction seem to presage the proliferation of 'reality' television in the 1990s... Similarly, the 'dumbing down', 'sexing up' and sheer predominance of television appear to have been predicted by Kneale's play. (BFI).

Dumbing down and sexing up as weapons of mass distraction?
Can't happen here!
Let prurient sex hysteria rule the day.
And hurrah for repressive desublimation!

PS You can watch the incredibly prescient, The Year Of The Sex Olympics here.
"I remember the old slogan; fight fire with fire, sex with sex. Now they've dowsed it, dowsed it with this..."
Though one thing it didn't predict was its flipside; voyeuristic, salacious and hypocritical tabloid witch hunts...

50 Shades Of Grey: Bestseller Of Oppression

'Freed from the sublimated form which was the very token of its irreconcilable dreams – a form which is the style, the language in which the story is told – sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression. It could not be said of any of the sexy women in contemporary literature what Balzac says of the whore Esther: that hers was the tenderness which blossoms only in infinity. This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression. Sexuality is no exception.' 

Herbert Marcuse, The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation 
This society turns everything it touches into mere dust.
"This heaven gives me migraine" - Gang Of Four.