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f you had to decide between eating Fear Factor maggots or having sex on
television for little or no pay, which would you choose? At some point
while watching couples humping away in bed, their bodies
delicately blurred or under puffy white comforters on The Sex Inspectors, a six-episode British sex makeover show
on HBO, you might ask yourself this question.Sex Inspectors found at least six couples who gladly signed away all their residual rights so the entire world can watch them screw in perpetuity. This still shocks me, even in our gross late-term Reality Show Age, since by now everyone knows you make zero money as a subject on reality TV and achieve only a minor, barely bankable level of fame. I mean, at least on home- or style-makeover shows, people get new kitchens or shoes. After having their screwy lives endlessly penetrated, the participants on Sex Inspectors only get a couple of dildoes, some lube and possibly hand cream. The hosts — Tracey Cox, a U.K. sex expert, and Michael Avlear, an American "gay sex columnist" — spy on couples and diagnose their coital problems. Then they visit with them and give them "tips, tasks and techniques" to spice up their sex life. The first week's couple (of
The Sex Inspector team soaks them in surveillance: "To help them, we need to look at how it's affecting their lives, so we put CCTV cameras around their bedroom and gave them cameras for their own video diaries!" Along with their confessions and footage of the couples in action, there are shots of the cameras turning and focusing like watchful black crows. There are also cameras in the couple's yard, trained on their bedroom — just to hammer home the fact we citizens of Western culture have become a bunch of totally perverted peeping toms. Cox and Avlear watch from a well-lit remote location with prim looks on their faces, pausing the footage to point out how little foreplay is involved or how someone masturbates. Although both hosts are thankfully wrinkled, pushing forty and seem knowledgeable, they suffer from the plucked media-trained demeanor that cripples so many TV personalities. You can tell they're trying really hard to generate chemistry but can't seem to click, and you assume there's some uptight exec producer on the other side of the PD-150 totally tense that they're going to say something too racy. You end up wishing Cox had a trashier mouth, say, like Stella McCartney on tons of pills — and you keep waiting for Avlear to break out of his encased, carefully controlled gay-male-host inflections to wax effusively about the joys of cocksucking. Everyone on this show, including the subjects, seems to have endured a previous makeover show which put them in muted Paul Smith shirts, Intermix blouses and printed tees in the seventy-dollar price point range. Their subjects do whatever the inspectors tell them to do like willing SM slaves. In the middle of the Body Shop, Jamie obediently uses Cox's hand to show how he tickles Charlotte's clit. "Oh! Too hard!" she says. The second episode's couple, Andrew and Nicky, make erogenous-zone body maps to point out areas they want their partner to touch and lick more often. "Darling, it's not that big!" Nicky exclaims when Andrew shows her his map. When Cox asks Charlotte why she covers her face when she orgasms, she articulately recalls a story about being embarrassed after getting caught masturbating when she was nine. Charlotte and Jamie are given different positions and pressure points to try out, and Andrew and Nicky get a box of sex toys and whips. Buttered between the scenes are interesting factoids ("A man ejaculates at twenty-eight miles per hour"), which appear in front of digitally obscured sex scenes, scored with that now-common female orgasm coo over dance beats. One more restrained aspect of the show may surprise you: how little they take advantage of the product placement potential. They go to the Body Shop to find good moisturizers for Jamie's rough hands but never stop to identify labels, and when Alvear offers a series of effervescent bath beads and candles, he doesn't mention any brand name. If they were dead, The Fab Five would be squirming in their graves. Overall, the compliant couples seem to get off on being in front of the cameras, but maybe these couples are experiencing some sort of horror that will repress them even more, and, like all of us trapped within this exploitative reality-show prison we call the twenty-first century, they just don't know it yet. It's this creepy-yet-erotic discomfort — a mix of voyeuristic thrill and moralistic awe — that makes this show worth watching. In the end, you aren't sure if the riding crops or creative penis-massage techniques are really helping these people's sex lives, or if they just feel better because they're now officially amateur porn stars. This worries me, because how will they replicate the hotness of having cameras all over their houses once The Sex Inspectors leave them alone? I suppose they could start websites. Or for a really kinky experiment, they could close the curtains. n° 
©2005 Mike Albo and Nerve.com. |
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