When Anne Philpott looks skywards, she must sometimes expect to catch a fleeting glimpse of St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, gazing sympathetically upon her. Her mission is to make safe sex — all that latex, fumbling and negotiation — appeal to young people as sexy and desirable.
If that were not difficult enough, Philpott wants to recruit Britain’s porn-film producers to popularise her message. But at least her brainchild, the Pleasure Project, has won some measure of recognition: it has been nominated for a prize by the orgasm industry’s own awards ceremony, the Erotic Awards, in London tonight.
Enough of us have heard the safe-sex message — and then ignored it — to show that there must be something fundamentally wrong with our education campaigns. Sexually transmitted infections have jumped by more than 57 per cent in the past decade. More than 700,000 cases were diagnosed in 1993. For chlamydia and syphilis, the rate of increase is steeper still. In the North West, chlamydia infections have leapt by 262 per cent in the past decade.
One response, by the high street chain Boots, is to offer free chlamydia screening for 16 to 24-year-olds in its London pharmacies. The Public Health Minister, Caroline Flint, last week welcomed this new “accessible” screening for youngsters who lead “such busy lives”. Boots says that it will be rolled out nationally if successful. But one thing that isn’t getting rolled out nationally is condoms, especially where youth, fun and frolics are involved. A poll of 10,000 Britons holidaying in Ibiza, Magaluf and Ayia Napa found that 79 per cent of people on holiday with their friends were unfaithful to a partner left at home. Yet 61 per cent of them still chose not to use a condom, according to research by Mates, a condom manufacturer.
Philpott believes that the best way to change that is to reinvent condoms as an erotic adjunct to sex. “The Pleasure Project was born out of a sense of frustration that the world of sexual health does not look at desire or pleasure when promoting safe-sex messages. It just looks at warning people about death and disease,” she says. “When people sell toothpaste, they don’t do it by showing pictures of the hideous decay and diseases you can get if you don’t brush. They concentrate on showing people enjoying their healthy, bright, sexy teeth.”
Part of her work thus involves trying to convince people worldwide that condoms can be used as an enticing part of foreplay. But in Britain, Philpott has a special target: the blue-movie makers. Because the industry exists on the fringes of acceptability, it has ironically escaped the type of public protests that break out when films or soaps portray heroic characters chain-smoking or drink-driving. There’s no angry porn-viewers’ pressure group lobbying producers to stop glamorising high-risk sex by filming the stars riding bareback. So Philpott, who has a masters in public health and has worked in global HIV prevention since the early 1990s, is trying to reform the industry from the inside, along with a group of Project volunteers.
She has been working as a consultant on erotic films, trying to help the producers to incorporate condoms in matter-of-fact ways into their storylines. “It is very rare for porn stars to use barrier methods, and the ones that I worked with were nervous about it,” she says. “They don’t seem to worry about having sex in front of 30 people in a studio, but they were worried about putting the condom on wrongly or losing their erection. In the end, though, they were really keen to help to put the message across.”
The stars might be open to persuasion (not least because last year panic spread through the American industry after a leading actor was found to be HIV positive), but Philpott faces another obstacle. “The film directors say it is very difficult to feature safe sex because the distributors believe it won’t sell. But I think it is a really effective way to sell the concept because young viewers would be getting turned on by the films while watching good practice, so it would be a great way of getting it into their heads. It would almost be subliminal advertising.”
Philpott describes her nomination for the Erotic Awards’ Campaigner of the Year as a “real boost” for her plans, which include introducing to the industry a system of safe-sex audits: “It would be a kind of pleasure kitemark so that we can declare people ‘pleasure-proficient’ in incorporating condoms into erotic films, books and other materials.” Far-fetched? Perhaps not. She has already won the co-operation of a leading British blue-movie director, albeit a rather unconventional one.
Anna Span is not only rare as a female film-maker in a male-dominated industry, she also aims to make women-friendly movies with plots, dialogue and eye contact, along with the usual porno palette of postures’n’pumping. “I agree with the need to put out the safe-sex message, and I always tell my actors that they are welcome to use condoms if they want,” says Span, 33. “I try to get a different, female- friendly angle to sex. People in my films clearly enjoy the sex. It’s not misogynistic, there are always plots and a build-up to the action, so that the characters have three dimensions and women viewers can get an idea of what the man’s personality is like. I like people to come away from watching my stuff without feeling that they have added to the world’s demise.”
Span agrees that safe-sex movies can be hard to sell and her answer is a good old British compromise: “People in the industry say that you can’t sell a tape with lots of condoms in it, and I have never done a 100 per cent condom movie. I strike a balance. Condoms can have an erotic quality in themselves. They send a scene in a different direction. You can show it as a way of young couples being nice and respectful to each other while having fun. I may have a woman putting a condom on to a man with her mouth. That’s a very descriptively erotic thing, showing that she has a sexy skill. Or it may be part of a whole doctor-nurse thing, where there’s lots of medical stuff about.”
Span, the London-based director of titles such as Hoxton Honey and Toy With Me, says that she is beginning to prove that safe-sex sells. “After a lot of lobbying, I got Ann Summers to start selling my videos in January. Since then they have shifted tens of thousands of them.”
But Span does not pretend that safe-sex scenes are a smooth ride. “The guys in the industry do thousands of sex scenes, so lots of them suffer from desensitisation, which can get worse if they wear a condom. I have also used female condoms with female actors and I have to admit that they do keep popping out. Perhaps I’m not the best person to be promoting them.”
Britain’s Sexual Fantasies is on Channel 5 on Monday at 11.05pm; www.erotic-awards.co.uk; www.the-pleasure-project.org
Fearful fantasies
Phew, that’s me off the hook. And maybe you, too.
