You’re the affair-er sex, girls!

WOMEN are now more likely to cheat than men, a survey reveals.One in five said they would “definitely” have an affair if they fell for another bloke.

In contrast, just nine per cent of fellas were certain they would betray their partner.

The study of 3,000 people has for the first time exposed girls as the bigger love rats.

Wildly-misogynistic with an undercurrent designed to promote the kind of sexual mistrust which can really damage a relationship? I’m sure I read something similar in the not-too-distant past… oh, yes, that’s right, in The Sun:

One in 10 trick dads

One in ten mums TRICKED their fella into getting them pregnant, a survey revealed yesterday.

Top ruses were lying about being on the pill or just not mentioning contraception.

A quarter of those who duped their man said he ‘would have given in one day anyway’, the survey of 3000 mums found.

But half said they were not even bothered if the father stuck around.

Back then it was a poll by my favourite bullshit-mining marketing team OnePoll on behalf of misguided parenting club Bounty, and caused some genuine controversy, more of which you can read here. Although I’ve not seen anything which confirms this, I’d say the angle and the structure of the story strongly reeks of OnePoll again, but that is of course just conjecture. So, back to this latest worthless PR guff (because I’m going somewhere with this):

It found that women aged 35 to 40 were most likely to cheat.

Many were childless and embark on flings in a bid to get pregnant.

But while 15 per cent of men would forgive a cheating wife or girlfriend, just 12 per cent of women would take back a partner who strayed.

Nearly a quarter of single girls said they would consider a fling with a married man or one in a steady relationship.

Brilliant – so not only are those with girlfriends charged to watch their womenfolk with an eagle eye lest the strumpet stray, but also those men on the receiving end of a fling should be guarded as the harlot may just be using you for your sperm, with a paternity suit and child support payments the inevitable result of your liasons dangereux. Good to see this survey has the full range of deceitful women covered, and the full range of unsuspecting men fully warned, then.

What are we missing so far? Inevitably, the PR paymasters, who funded this whole piece of sexist and insulting bullshit in the first place. And while this next paragraph isn’t the fourth paragraph (in order to obey, ahem, Marsh’s Fourth Paragraph Law), it is the 9th sentence – which in an adult newspaper where each paragraph is more than 20 words long, would be around the 4th para. Perhaps I need to adjust the law to a word-count law… In any case, here’s the money shot:

Only 12 per cent of single men would try to bed a married woman or one in a long-term relationship, according to the poll for matchmakers Coffee and Company.

So this whole piece is a backhanded way of getting the name of an ‘online matchmaker’ into the press. While also telling men that women are up for it. Even readers of The Sun can do those sums…

C and C boss Lorraine Adams said: “Sometimes the need to experience motherhood overrides moral values about someone else’s marriage vows.”

Aaaand sometimes the need to advertise your hook-up site overrides moral values about being a decent human being and responsible with the press you put out, it seems.

So, that’s the polling company (who I will provisionally call UnoPollo) and the PR paymasters complicit in this sexist stitch-up, then. But what of The Sun? Surely they are clean as a whistle, after all they’re just reporting what they’re given, right? I think they get a pass on this one.

Wait, hold on a second, what’s that in the ‘Related Stories’… from back in October…

Vile website urges married people to have secret affairs – Source: The Sun

Oh dear.

AN attractive couple lie entwined in a cotton sheet – clearly satisfied after what seems to have been a steamy sex session.

Cue subtitles for a dramatic finale: “This couple is married . . . NOT to each other.”

The controversial TV ad for an infidelity website caused outrage when it aired in America.

Now, you may think this a little hypocritical of The Sun, having with the left hand poured judgement and scorn (you can pour those by hand, the metaphor stands) on websites set up to help people cheat on their partners, while with the right hand running direct PR copy for identical services. And you’d be right, partly. After all, this isn’t the first time The Sun has promoted find-and-fuck websites – having promoted in April the site ‘F-Buddy.com’ with a story about Jeremy Clarkson’s package.

However, there’s another angle to this – the ‘outraged’ article by The Sun is plausibly and almost certainly not outrage added by the publication (who, after all, published  in the region of 4,290 articles on the topic of affairs in 2010). Instead, I strongly believe the outrage angle is in the original press release by the website’s PR team. The theory goes, fake a controversy and you get attention, tell people there’s a new website coming where people can sign up and find someone willing to have sex with them and it doesn’t matter what spin you put on it, people will come.

Could I be right? Well, let’s take a look at the next paragraph… which is paragraph four…

And now it could hit Britain as part of the multi-million pound UK launch of ashleymadison.com.

Plus the remainder of the piece includes a flattering interview with the website founder, a description of the service on offer, a rate card for website features and a couple of sweet human-interest stories:

He clearly revels in the debate over his business but, amazingly, also tries to convince the world there are heart-warming stories surrounding infidelity.

Like the Ashley Madison Diaries, a book written by a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who allegedly found her Prince Charming on the website.

Or the elderly gentleman nursing a wife with Alzheimer’s.

Thus we see the power of manufactroversies, and negative PR. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, sometimes.

For those who follow my Bad News exposures of the murkier elements of public relations in the news, I’ll be speaking on the topic at Glasgow Skeptics in the Pub on January 17th and Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub on March 15th. I’m also available for other SitPs, I’m sure!

Also, I’m one of the orgainsers of QED, which you should ALL come to – February 5th/6th, Manchester, tickets still on sale, visit www.qedcon.org

OnePoll is an interesting beast – is business model is to pay people around 10p for their participation in a relatively quick online survey, with the idea being that the more surveys you take part in, the more you earn. The upshot of this means the quicker you complete the survey, the faster you can move on to the next one. It also means that when you’re asked a screening question like ‘Are you single or in a relationship?‘, and you can see the name of the survey is ‘Being In Relationships!‘, it’s pretty easy to see that to enter the survey and claim your shiny 10p, you obviously pretend to be in a relationship. Or pretend to be a football fan. Or pretend to be self-employed. Etc. For the sake of your 10p, you enter a load of results which become utterly meaningless.

The speed issue has a knock-on effect elsewhere, too. As I’ve pointed out before, when asked a badly designed question like ‘Which celebrity would you least like to go on holiday with?‘ where the possible responses are from a set list, rather than stopping to think, ‘Actually, I don’t care about any of these people, I’d like to tick the none of the above option, but there isn’t one‘, instead you pick a choice fairly-randomly, fairly-quickly and progress on towards your 10p, and so we get this in the newspapers: Cheryl Cole is celebrity most Brits want to holiday with unlike Katie Price.  I can imagine the most significant factor in these types of questions is often the order the options are presented, rather than their actual content, with a bias towards the options that appear first in the list (that would be my prediction, anyway).

What’s more, to get you started, when you first sign up to One Poll you get something in the region of £2, too – so it feels like a breeze to start really earning. Here’s the kicker though, and of course there is one – before you see a penny of your earnings, you need to accrue £40. At 10p per survey, that’s 400 surveys. I’ve been playing for about months now, and I’m on about £17. So, I can imagine there would be a pretty reasonable fallout rate as people became disillusioned with the process and give up, and thus often OnePoll never have to pay a penny to most of the people they survey. Which makes their business model pretty cheap, then.

Still, despite their flaws (or, more accurately, because of them) OnePoll have a quite staggering ability to make it to press, with around 3 stories a day making the mainstream news. With a bit of research, friend of the MSS Peter Wood was able to identify that these survey-turned-stories tend to net OnePoll around £3250 each. At the rate these surveys make it into the news, I’m sure business in the polling industry must well be booming. Here’s what you get for that price:

- Identify survey angle and compile questionnaire
- Design and script survey ready for upload to www.OnePoll.com
- Place survey on OnePoll’s member area (75,000 strong panel)
- Run the survey online
- Achieve minimum sample of 2,000 UK-based respondents
- Collate and present data
- Mine data and identify news angles
- Create draft news copy for approval – embed PR messages

And therein lies the rub – not only do OnePoll admit to data mining (the practice of gathering together a huge sample of data, and then looking for anomalies and potentially-interesting results within that set, aside from any pre-specified effect to examine), but they actively design and script surveys to produce data to back-up a pre-designed angle. The process is simple: write the story first, then write a survey biased in your favour to ‘discover’ what you’ve already decided in your story, then sell it as breaking research – mostly with a lovely mention of a company’s name, most frequently in the 4th paragraph.

(As a brief but important aside, the 4th paragraph rule I go on about a lot is done for a very well contrived reason – when editing copy, classically editors cut from the bottom up, originally to fit the space left for the story in that day’s newspaper. So copywriters are taught to put the most salient details in the top paragraph, and introduce supporting details in order of importance, with the least significant bits at the bottom ready to be cut if needed. So to ensure the name of the paymaster of the story isn’t cut (and often, in news-in-brief style stories, they are), the company or product name has to appear high enough up to be salvaged from the slice, but low enough to semi-obscure that the whole purpose of the article is promotion. Hence, the 4th paragraph.)

So, why am I telling you all of this? Partly, because it fascinates me. Partly, because it’s everywhere. But mostly, with OnePoll being responsible for some very irresponsible and unethical surveys of late, because there can be real damage involved in this approach. One such example bobbed to the surface this Friday, when the following article appeared in the Daily Record:

Dad by trickery

One in 10 women has tricked a man into getting them pregnant, it was claimed yesterday.

But less than half of them actually wanted the person the used to stick around once the baby was born.

Figures emerged in a poll of 3000 mums for parenting club Bounty.com

And in The Sun:

One in 10 trick dads

One in ten mums TRICKED their fella into getting them pregnant, a survey revealed yesterday.

Top ruses were lying about being on the pill or just not mentioning contraception.

A quarter of those who duped their man said he ‘would have given in one day anyway’, the survey of 3000 mums found.

But half said they were not even bothered if the father stuck around.

This was all promotion for parenting website Bounty.com, who appear to be unrelated to the tissue-paper manufacturer ‘Bounty’ or the chocolate bar ‘Bounty’, or indeed Dogg The Bounty Hunter (alas). Their press release went into a little more detail about the deception perpetrated by 10% of women:

PRESS RELEASE: Bounty

Written: Friday 29th October, 2010

One in 10 women have tricked a man into getting them pregnant with less than half actually wanting the person they ‘used’ to stick around once the baby was born. Incredibly, 23 per cent of women who hoodwinked their partner said they knew he would give in one day, but needed to be ”encouraged” to speed things up.

A third of unrepentant women said their biological clock was ticking, while 19 per cent of tricksters knew their partner never wanted to have a baby. The shocking figures emerged in a study of 3,000 mums – which also shows 65 per cent of these mums were successful the very first time they tried to trick their partner.

And those women who didn’t fall pregnant first time round continued to sleep with someone and lie to them a further nine times until they finally conceived.

Twelve per cent of ladies would simply drop a pill every now and then, and 11 per cent resorted to getting their partner drunk.

Faye Mingo, spokeswoman for parenting club Bounty.com, said: ”Thankfully our research found that 86 per cent women polled would never consider ‘tricking’ their partners into conceiving. But a over a quarter admitted they fell pregnant before their partner had actually agreed to ‘try for a baby’. Whilst we do understand that some women in stable relationships may feel the need to nudge things along when their biological clock starts ticking, the possible implications of tricking a partner must be considered. “

Now, remember that bit about the 4th paragraph rule? Do you think the reassuring quote from the contact at Bounty.com appears so low down in the article by coincidence? Most likely it’s there so that when editors get snipping, they cut the quote in favour of all of the juicy stats above – which is exactly what happened in both the Daily Record and The Sun. Also, bear in mind that this poll claims to be from 3000 mums, yet as I’ve demonstrated there’s a major incentive to take surveys that aren’t applicable to you, and another major incentive to skip through those surveys as quickly as possible. Do you still trust these stats?

On top of that, over a quarter of mums admitted they fell pregnant before they talked about trying to have a baby with their partner – does that really count as deceit? Or is that a misunderstanding of their cycles, making a mistake, both partners forgetting to use contraception, or one of the myriad of other reasons people fall pregnant unexpectedly? Does that still make these women liars, tricksters, and unrepentant manipulators? Absolutely not.

Speaking of unrepentent manipulators, this survey and the associated press around it are still up on OnePoll’s website, and also on Bounty’s website. That’s where they were when I first spotted them on Friday, and tweeted links to the press release behind the news. After I’d raised the story, especially with sexual health advocate Dr Petra Boynton, a lot of people made a lot of noise, rightly disgusted that Onepoll and a parenting website would raise the spectre of paternity paranoia in order to get their name in the press. How did Bounty respond? By deleting their tweet pushing the story out onto Twitter.

Clearly, then, they’re proud of their work. Fortunately, I knew well enough to screencap their promotional tweet, and made the point in a subsequent message. Here’s their response when I caught them red-handed:

Apologies 2 any1 offended by our recent research story – this was meant as a bit of seasonal fun & is by no means a judgement of anyone

By no means judgemental? They’re telling the world that women who get pregnant without their partner’s agreement are liars, based on stats that are more than questionable from a polling company with a past record of using dodgy stats, biased polls and borderline shock tactics in order to get their clients into the news. As for ‘seasonal’, I’m not sure what season it is to call women liars – maybe that one went missing from my calendar. These stories absolutely aren’t ‘fun’, though – as Dr Petra points out, the paranoia over paternity is a real fear for a lot of men, as is the idea that they’ve been tricked into fatherhood. Both fears can play a not unsubstantial role in cases of domestic abuse, so it’s easy to see how branding 10% of the female population as liars could have a significantly damaging effect.

I won’t go into the reasons why the findings from the survey are flawed here, mainly because Dr Petra is an expert in the field and has done the job far better than I ever could. I do, however, fully recommend you check out her appraisal of the story.

As for OnePoll, if you’d like to find out more about their past wrongs – and there are lots of them – check out our website under ‘bad pr’ (which is also the name of my skeptics in the pub talk, if anyone wants to book me). How did they respond to the outcry at their sexist and deeply damaging release? They emailed the following to Petra:

“As the agency which commissioned this research and distributed the resulting news story, I would like to respond. OnePoll polled 3,000 mothers on behalf of Bounty, looking into the subject of pregnancy. The stats emerged that a small percentage of women admitted to tricking their partner into getting pregnant. I’d like to say that the resulting story in no way glorifies or condones this, in fact Bounty support the very opposite in their quotes. As market research specialists and providers of national news, we would always present the stats, as they are, however controversial. I would like to apologise to anyone who was offended by this piece of research”.

Four in ten ‘feuding with their family’ with women blamed for starting trouble

Nearly 20 million Britons are not speaking to members of their family after bitter bust-ups – and the majority hold their mothers responsible, a study has found.

Eight out of ten said it was women family members who were responsible for starting trouble. A third said they had gone for periods of time not talking to their mothers.

Couples may feel relieved to make it past the ‘seven-year itch’ without marital strife.

But it seems their problems may only just be starting.

Married couples begin to grow bored with each other after ten years and 11 months, according to researchers.

Researchers indeed, but who funded the survey? Well, the full press release is here:

In fact the study of 3,000 married people shows six in 10 often feel they need to be reminded why they married their partner in the first place.

A spokesman for www.lovinglinks.co.uk said: ”Ten years is a long time to be committed to just one person, and it is easy to become complacent when you’re stuck in the same routine day in and day out.

LovingLinks.com – presumably they’re some kind of marriage guidance website? Or relationship psychologists? Or even just a company set up to gather reliable, independent data on how love lives play out in today’s world? Let’s see from their website:

The discreet extramarital dating service for married men and women.

Lovinklinks.com – we’re everything you imagined us to be.

Yep, it’s a place for finding your sexy bit-on-the side.

So, to clarify, research from a company who specialise in getting you someone to fill the needs your spouse no longer fulfils suggests that your spouse will soon no longer fulfil your needs. Look out for it in a news cycle near you.

“One in five women would forgive their man for a one-night stand as long as it meant nothing to them.

The figures emerged in a report which also revealed that eight out of 10 Britons couldn’t care less if their partner became involved with someone else, as long as they didn’t have sex.

Despite nine out of 10 women claiming they would dump a man who had regular sex with someone else, millions would forgive indiscretions over the phone or by text, although half of girls still say they would show their partner the door if he kissed another woman.” – Source: Daily Express, 29/09/2010

Prime example, then – sexy angle, backed up with a nice, traditional ‘men cheat, ladies – deal with it’ undertone more in keeping with an episode of the Sopranos than with what most of us would experience in our lives, I’d imagine. On top of that, we have a flurry of statistics, including the up-scaled extrapolation of what ‘millions’ believe, based on the sample data. You’ve five seconds to guess what company appears in the next paragraph, having commissioned the survey. It’s a classic.

Time’s up. So:

“The poll of 3,000 people was conducted by extra marital dating service lovinglinks.co.uk”

Yep, we’ve a dating site who specialise in hooking up bits-on-the-side telling their customer base ‘it’s OK, there’s a good chance your Mrs would let you off anyway’. This goes some way towards explaining why this isn’t featured on the web version of the newspaper (do the Express want to come up in a Google search for an extra-marital dating site in an article which is anything but condemnation?), and also goes some way towards hinting as to why, of the 3,000 PEOPLE polled, we’ve only the results of the women’s views published. I wonder who lovinglinks.co.uk see as their market demographic…

Still, it would be terrible PR for lovinglinks, having engineered and planted this story, to appear to delight in the findings, hence the standard concerned-and-responsible quote from a spokesman (nameless, you’ll note):

Yesterday a spokseman said: “We expected the results to show that sex is just sex and that sharing intimate feelings with  someone other than a partner would be much more hurtful

“Instead, the thought of a partner getting intimate in the physical way is more disturbing.”

This quote is interesting for two reasons – firstly, the contrite and sympathetic tone serves to go some way towards hiding the intent of this piece, which is clearly to get men to google and join lovinglinks.co.uk. Secondly, the statement itself is intriguingly worded – their initial expectations outline not only what they ‘expected’ to get from the survey results, but also what they want the take-home message to be: sex is just sex. OK, so they follow that catchy, take-home slogan with a contrary finding, but the message is still there.

What’s more, the original press release from lovinglinks.co.uk backs that position up even further:

“While Brits don’t like to think of a partner cheating, they are becoming more open minded about the need for excitement outside the confines of a relationship.

“Most also seem to understand that it is natural to have naughty thoughts about people other than their partner.” - Source: lovinglinks.co.uk

The strategy, here, is of the lead-a-horse-to-water approach…

What’s particularly interesting with these kinds of stories is the penetration the can achieve (no, that’s not a pun). Take for example, this review of the play ‘The Country’ by arts review site theartsdesk.com:

“Adultery has had a good press recently. Websites such as meet-to-cheat.com, illicitencounters.com and lovinglinks.co.uk have been in the news, and statistics suggest that more of us are being unfaithful than ever before. But although adultery is a staple of farce and mainstream drama, there are few plays that deal with the subject with quite the unsettling ambiguity and disturbing depth that characterise Martin Crimp’s modernistic play”

Hey presto, PR passed off not only as news (such as here and here), but also as a pop-culture truism. And with another little boost to the profile of the dating site to boot.

• Does it involve a survey?
• Are the results surprising, shocking or a bit sexy?
• Is it actively about sex – predominately how to get more of it, or how to make what little you get of it better?
• Is there a company name in the fourth paragraph?

Those are some pretty simple, rule-of-thumb guidelines for spotting Bad PR. Now, here’s your starter for 10, from the Daily Star (I won’t give you the link just yet, it’ll spoil the fun):

HOLIDAYS THE BIGGEST TURN-ON FOR WOMEN

Right away, that’s one or two ticks on our checklist. Let’s take this paragraph by paragraph:

Heading off on holiday is an even bigger turn-on for women than sex.

OK, we’ve still got two ticks I think. And I should have clarified – by paragraph, remember this is the Daily Star, so 14 words can reasonably pass for a paragraph, just as bullshit can comfortably pass for news.

A trip away topped a poll to find the most exciting things in a woman’s life, followed by becoming a mum.

Tick! There’s the survey angle covered, and we’re only in paragraph two. What’s particularly nice is that, only two paragraphs in, we’ve dismissed all women as being most content only in being taken abroad, or when breeding. Now I’m not dismissing that for a large number of women, having a child (which I think is a better way of terming it than ‘becoming a mum’ – as if a ‘mum’ is a radical and overwhelming identity shift, caterpillar to butterfly, pinnacle of achievement) is indeed exciting. I largely don’t dismiss that based on the fact that for a lot of men it’s pretty damnably exciting too (I note those men aren’t covered in this survey, though presumably they would favour ‘boobs’ or ‘cars’ or ‘footy’ or ‘beer’ or ‘anything which helps us escape the crushing inevitability of tabloid stereotyping’ over a holiday).

I would however question the ranking of exciting events – if we accept that, as successful Darwinian evolvers and products of natural selection, breeding does rank pretty high on our bucket list, it’s then wildly surprising/unlikely that it’s topped by a simple trip to the Costa Del. I suspect (although I stress I’ve no evidence of this, this is just conjecture and poll-taking-experience) that those options were picked from a very short list of choices (more of which later), or even that they represent two lists conflated. Certainly I’m sure psychologists would consider the excitement of holding your progeny in your arms for the first time is in a different category of joy than first stepping off the plane in Ibiza. As I say, layman here. Let’s press on:

Romping with a loved one was third, followed by a pay rise and…

OK, I know I’m a tease to stop that sentence unfinished, but:

1. I couldn’t get past the tabloid use of romp without comment (I’m positive nobody who has had sex in the last 60 years has ever done so after describing the act or issuing the invitation using the r- word) and
2. What follows next is something you’d NEVER guess. Ever. In a year of Sundays.

Not even in a year of eating ice-cream-sundaes, on sunny days, with the 80s/90s indie band The Sundays, on a Sunday. Go on, guess.

Wrong.

Here’s what the Star/regurgitated press release placed 5th in the poll:

Romping with a loved one was third, followed by a pay rise and backing a winner on the horses in fifth.

That’s right, your lovely, holiday-goin’, baby-lovin’, loved-one-rompin’, pay-rise-earnin’ girl loves a flutter. Apparently. Or, indeed, if, unlike me, you are a girl – then gambling on the gee-gees is 100% your 5th favourite buzz. It is.

Or, it’s bullshit. Now, were I privy to the poll (alas, this time I wasn’t, as OnePoll has gender restrictions on polls, so my y chromosome exempted me from peeking behind this particular curtain) I’d be able to present you with the almost-inevitably leading question which produced this crowbarred equine outcome. However, all I can work from is the rest of the top 10 – which is stated to be made of ‘romantic nights away, their wedding day, Christmas Day, a girls’ night out and passing the driving test.‘

In this company, does a flutter on the races really stand out as being the fifth most exciting event in a girls life? I suspect that if we were able to examine the numbers, we’d see the first few options would take care of a very sizable chunk of the respondents, with women asked only to choose their top option. From those not hoovered up by those incredibly common responses (I mean how many of us wouldn’t be excited by sex, on a holiday we bought with our pay rise, to celebrate the birth of a child? Hang on, maybe I misread that…) I can imagine the remaining percentages were much of a muchness. Add to that the ability to influence respondents with the wording of the question (the exact text of which we’re not given) and the overall survey itself (again, not available) and I can imagine engineering an unusual result wouldn’t be too difficult, especially amongst pollsters eager to quickly bank their 10p payment.

Still, as I say, this is just speculation from experience, and I’d be more than happy if OnePoll (who I know, interestingly, have staff members who read this very blog due to my past criticisms of their work) would email me with the raw data from the survey. If this happens, I’ll not only update or correct this article, but I’ll also praise them to high heavens. We’ll see.

So, now, to paragraph 4, and those of you with good memories will know that this is where the last checkpoint can be, well, checked. Is there a company name in paragraph 4? Or ‘Marsh’s Fourth-Paragraph-Reveal Law‘ as all the cool kids (OK, just me then) are calling it? Well…

Horseracing promotion body Racing For Change carried out a study of 4,000 housewives.

Bingo. Or, more accurately, Horse Racing. This playing-the-sex-card survey was all in aid of promoting the idea of gambling on horses, and a website which offers such an option. Next up, the obligatory quote from a spokesman to show that the company really cares about the results of the survey, and didn’t just commission it in order to generate a weird, sexy headline to whore their, erm, horses:

A spokesman said: “We wanted to poll women to find out what in life most excites them, and we’ve found that it’s a whole range of things.

“From sex and pay rises, to winning money on the horses and romantic nights away, there’s lots to excite the lives of the nation’s women. But escaping the humdrum of daily life and relaxing and sunning yourself by the pool on holiday topped the list.”

And then top the whole thing off with a couple of other data-mined platitudes from the results you received:

Seven in 10 of those polled agreed that “the best things in life are free”.  But a whopping 83% admitted that they could do with more excitement in their life.

Textbook, and one of the most unusual and cack-handed playings of the sex card I think I’ve ever seen. But then again, when it comes to Bad PR, the next ill-judged crow-barring of sex to sell a product is only ever over the next fence.

Get your QED ticket now!

For what it’s worth, and almost inevitably, the whole piece came from a OnePoll survey, released in their press archive. The release is pretty much exactly as appeared in the Star (minus a few obvious stylistic additions from the Ooh Aah Daily Staah), but it does include the full quote from the Racing For Life spokesman, which resolves the general interest in the findings into something a bit more predictably self-serving:

We’re not surprised that a flutter on the horses can be one of life’s big excitements. When you pit your wits against the bookies and win big money then it’s a great thrill. Royal Ascot starts this week and is a favourites’ graveyard so there’s no better race meeting for big priced winners that can take the bookies to the cleaners. With five days of fabulous racing and high fashion, it’s just the place to get Lady Luck on your side.

Bad PR – the best worst-use of the sex card you’re likely to ever see.

No you heard me right – I said he HAS the largest penis in showbusiness, not that he IS the largest penis in showbusiness. As reported in multiple sources last week, including our old friend The Sun:

A survey carried out among 4,000 housewives revealed a large portion of them think Clarkson is the proud owner of a ten-and-a-quarter inch penis.

Unsurprisingly, of course, The Sun went with the headline ‘Clarkson in Poll Pole Position‘. See what they did there? That’s called journalism. Or something.

Apparently, according to this definitely-scientific survey of random women (and I love the specific implication that they were housewives – more of that later), the Top Gear hosting, Daily Mail writing, right wing caricature Clarkson is in possession of a ten and a quarter inch effort, downstairs, with Gordon Ramsey closely following behind him – or at least as closely as his speculated 9 and a half inches will allow, at any rate.

Now, those of you of a more skeptical bent – and I believe there are quite a few of you out there – will have spotted the inherent flaw in this entire piece: no, I’m not talking about the continuation of some rather dodgy and long-debunked myths regarding size, ego and masculinity; or that the numbers involved are ludicrously and comically out of kilter with the real average underpants size of a fella; or even the fact that they’re clearly confused by the fact that Clarkson is a massive cock, rather than that he possesses such. No, I’m talking about the glaring fact that this survey purports to have surveyed people’s opinions and speculations of something which is grounded in fact. At the moment, Clarkson’s piece is entirely safely secreted in his over-tight dad-jeans, and thus while there is a factual answer to the penis problem, there’s only baseless speculation at this stage. Were we able to open the box, we’d be able to put the speculation aside and start dealing in facts.

What we have, in short, ladies and gentleman, is Schrödinger’s Cock.

Still, I’m a bit obsessive and irritant when it comes to these kinds of nonsense stories – clearly, there’s something afoot here, and I’m not talking about the almost-a-foot purported Clarkson package. Reading on in the Sun’s tadger tale, we see this little chick of light in the curtain of cock-ypop. Quoting the story:

‘A spokesman for the online dating website who carried out the survey said: “The majority of the blokes in the poll have huge egos and women clearly think some have packages to match.’

Ah-hah – so the survey was commissioned for an online dating site, eh? Interesting. Well, this led me to do a bit of digging, and by digging I mean googling the exact phrase the spokesman used, in order to find the initial press release this whole nonsense came from. Really, it’s often that simple. Especially in this case, where the quick google search turned up the source of the story… the PR survey firm One Poll.

Now, what’s good about being able to get to the actual press release, apart from giving you the ability to track directly the way in which these stories hit the tabloid near word-for-word from the initial release, is that you get to see the small changes the newspaper editor makes, often to try and make the story look less like the bullshit excuse for getting a brand name into the national press that it actually is.  Quoting the press release:

“The poll was carried out in the wake of Sarah Brighman’s declaration that ex-husband  Andrew Lloyd Webber has one of the biggest manhoods in Britain. Over 4,000 ladies voted in the poll, conducted by www.F-Buddy.co.uk, an online no-strings dating site for adults. Yesterday a spokesman for F-Buddy.co.uk said: ”The majority of the blokes in the poll have huge egos and women clearly think some have packages to match.”

So, this ‘online dating site’ is in fact a site called ‘F-Buddy’. Three points and an explicit tag for anyone who can guess what the F stands for. Yeah. They describe themselves as ‘the original and best place for adults looking for no strings attached sex’.

What we have here, then, is a simply an advert for a sex site, masquerading as a lighthearted news piece, which made it to the front cover of the Daily Star on Thursday April 15th (fyi, the headline that day was ‘Jordon Holiday Boobs Horror: Breast implants explode on Red Sea scuba dive’).

Where’s the harm here? Well, besides being another example of the shocking ease in which national newspapers can be manipulated – likely willingly – by cynical pr surveys to run adverts as front page news, I think there’s something deeper here, too. While it’s always been true that sex sells, there’s a real cynicism to selling via the engendering of insecurity-preying stereotypes – the underlying message is clearly that size matters, with the full press release even including the downright infuriating line:

“The poll revealed a quarter of women would dump a bloke if their manhood didn’t measure up to the mark.”

Well, if it means more people sign up to websites to anonymously-screw their fears away, it’s all in a good cause, I guess… In the same vein, Phones 4U recently told us that Men with iPhones are more attractive to women, while City Deal website Groupola.com want men to know that it’s Simon Cowell’s power that makes him the most desired one-night-stand amongst women.

That smell you’re getting a whiff of is the scent of more male dignity being sacrificed on the fire of brand awareness.

Fake orgasm story? Trot out a Meg Ryan pic

To help me vent my frustration and ongoing obsession with the dodgy PR stories that make the papers on a daily basis, I thought I’d start a bit of a ‘BadPR’ series, taking a look at stories as they appear in the papers, the press release that inspired them (often word-for-word inspiration, no less), and the companies who benefit. Regular readers of the blog will know the score, and irregular readers of the blog will soon pick it up, so without further intro I give you today’s offering:

Ex girls top at fake fun

The fake orgasm capital of Britain is Exeter, claims a new survey. A whopping 57 per cent of women in the Devon town admit to feigning it. Meanwhile, girls in Oxford were happiest in bed with only a third faking their big O. Nationally, one in 10 women admits acting most times. And a fifth said they thought about another man if they wanted satisfaction. – Source: The People

And, alternatively:

Poor show, chaps: Survey reveals nearly one in ten women fake it between the sheets

It is enough to make even the most confident lover a little worried. One in ten women fake an orgasm almost every single time they make love, according to a poll. Researchers found that 48 per cent of British women had faked the height of passion. But an Oscar-worthy 9 per cent admitted it happened every time they have sex. Seven per cent have ended a relationship because they were unsatisfied in bed but just one in ten of those told their partner the real reason for the break-up.  

Not surprisingly, one in five women claims to be extremely unhappy with their sex life, with 16 per cent complaining about a lack of foreplay, and 11 saying their partner orgasms too quickly. Even more worrying for men, the poll of 3,000 women revealed that almost 38 per cent of women reckon their partner would struggle to tell the difference between a real and fake orgasm. One in five women even admitted to thinking about another man in bed to help them reach orgasm, with a famous actor or a male friend the most popular people to fantasise about. - Source: Daily Mail

So, answers on a postcard – who do you think’s behind this? Let’s take a look at the themes of the story – half of women in Exeter are sexually dissatisfied, 10% of UK women aren’t fulfilled by their men, a fifth want other men; men are bad at sex, men don’t know what they’re doing, even men who are confident in bed should worry, men’s poor performance is often the reason for the end of a relationship.

Pretty much an anti-men message there, then. The aim of both articles seems to be to undermine men and make them doubt their performance. Any clues yet? Let’s take a look at the press release the articles were taken from:

FAKE IT

One in ten women fake an orgasm almost every single time they have sex, a new study has found. Researchers found that a whopping 48 per cent of British women have faked it in bed, with nine per cent admitting they do it most of the time, or even every time they have sex. Seven per cent have even dumped their other half because they didn’t satisfy them in bed, but just one in ten of those told them the real reason for the break-up. Not surprisingly, one in five women claims to be extremely unhappy with their sex life, with 16 per cent complaining about a lack of foreplay, and 11 saying their partner orgasms too quickly. - Source: One Poll (bless em)

Wow, that’s uncannily almost word-for-word what appeared in the papers! Funny that. Read on…

A spokesman for Stimul8, a fruit flavoured energy soft drink reputed for its aphrodisiac and performance enhancing ingredients, which commissioned the survey said: ”It appears guys in the UK have their work cut out if one in five women are saying they are extremely unhappy with their sex life. ’But it’s not all down to the blokes as women need to communicate a bit more with their partner to let them know what it is they really want. ’Although it may be down to tiredness or stress, if a guy isn’t doing it right, he’s not going to know unless he is told.”

I think we can stop there. “Stimul8, a fruit flavoured energy soft drink reputed for its aphrodisiac and performance enhancing ingredients”. So this is all to peddle a soft drink with dubious ‘reputed’ claims to aphrodisiac properties. Interesting wording – note how the claims are not only softened by ‘reputed’, they’re also attached to the ingredients, not the drink. Because claiming it about the drink, would require substantiation, and would be liable to ASA complaints. However, it seems you can makes claims about the ‘reputed’ benefits of ingredients, without needing to back it up with proof.

Do you like sex? Are you a susceptible moron? Then you should buy... Stimul8!

For completion, let’s take a look at the Stimul8 website – ooohh, bikini-clad girls, loud Nuts-style fonts and lots of shots of the magic liquid (erm, I mean Stimul8 there!), all hidden behind an age-verification warning. Attached to a press release aimed at undermining a guy’s sexual confidence. In order to sell a drink which claims to ‘enhance performance’:

Stimul8® is designed to enhance your performance. It comes in a discreet 60ml bottle so you can give yourself the edge anytime, anyplace, anywhere. We think this is the fruitiest tasting shot product on the market.

This fruity little number is packed with a special blend of leaves, roots and berries derived from Damiana, Korean Ginseng, Echinacea, Schizandra and Ginkgo Biloba – all renowned for their aphrodisiac properties. Add to that energy boosting L-Arginine, Caffeine, Anthocyanin, plus sugars and you’ve got a heady liquid performance enhancer.

I checked – all of those ingredients are indeed ‘renowned’ for their aphrodisiac properties (if by ‘renowned’ you accept ‘sometimes claimed to have’)… however, try and find a herb that hasn’t been claimed to have aphrodisiac properties. Really, try – I did: Marapuama, Catuba, Cajueiro, Suma, Maca, Avena Sativa, Yohumbune, Ajwain (aka Bishop’s Weed), Ashwaghandha, Shitawari and even Hemp (hemp for fuck’s sake!) were all claimed to have such properties on a single page I picked out of Google. It turns out, if you’re going to make up a property for a herb, a good one to pick is one that men are prone to be susceptible to – sexual performance. And with newspapers, PR departments and fucking soft drinks trying to perpetuate these fears for gain, it’s easy to see why this sexual hang-up persists.

Thanks for playing.

Sources

• The People –  http://www.people.co.uk/news/tm_headline=ex-girls-top-at-fake-fun%26method=full%26objectid=22109518%26siteid=93463-name_page.html
• Daily Mail – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1256134/Poor-chaps-Survey-reveals-nearly-women-fake-sheets.html
• OnePoll – http://www.onepoll.com/press-archive/survey-reveals–women-fake-it