And Our Survey Says...
Mark O'Halloran and Niamh Creely take us through Film Ireland's sex survey.

Mark: Any online survey about sex is bound to attract its fair share of strange types. The cyber equivalent of the dirty mack wearer, you might say. Our online respondents were a more discerning bunch than the average web browser but the data points to some interesting statistics. Why is it not surprising, for instance, that in an online survey about sex, two thirds of respondents were men? Is it because men feel they have more of a right to comment on this subject because, apparently, they think about it once every six seconds? Or is it that men are more likely to have found the link after googling the word sex for the umpteenth time? We’ll never know, I guess. But it would indeed be foolish to use a limited online survey of film buffs to represent the wider community’s attitudes to all things sexual or libidinous in Irish cinema and television. But it could also be a bit of fun, so science be damned, let’s put a few trends together.

For the most part our participants were a well-behaved bunch who obviously took the task of answering our questions seriously. For instance, when asked what they thought of the quantity of sex in Irish films or television, we got plenty of thoughtful, intelligent and sensitive answers like ‘Its expression is muted to say the least’ or ‘It depends on the context’. Lovely sentiments indeed! But then you got the odd one saying things like ‘cringe’ or ‘girls in Irish movies are ugly’ – which is total nonsense of course. Much more surprising was the fact that 89% said they had seen a porn movie at least once. 7% said they had never seen an Irish-made one but, encouragingly for the home-grown porn mogul, 24% said they’d watch one if they could get hold of it. When asked to say how sex in Irish films compares with our foreign friend the gloves finally came off with answers ranging from ‘far far far less sexy’ to ‘impotent’ and ‘mechanical and clothed’. My favourite answer in this section was ‘more realistic!!!’ Jeez.

Interestingly, those who were polled (fnar fnar) seemed to show a genuine interest in Irish-made films, with just under 90% of them claiming to have seen an Irish film in the cinema in the last year and approximately 35% claiming to see Irish films in the cinema between three and four times a year. Would that these figures were true for the general populace. Let’s just call those numbers aspirational for the moment, shall we?

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 120.