My name is Sarah Oakes.

I'm the Editor of 'Daily Life'

and it's my enormous pleasure to welcome you here today.

Some housekeeping before we begin:

our special guest speaker

will talk for around 40 minutes.

At the end of that time, you might like to take the

opportunity to move to 1 of the microphones beside the

seating and, ah, and take the opportunity to

ask a question.

Today's speaker is Brooke Magnanti, whose beautiful

Italian surname I fear I may have just butchered.

She is a truly fascinating woman.

As Belle de Jour, the creator of

'Secret Diary of a Call Girl', the blog that became

the book, that became the TV series, Brooke gave us a

tantalising account of work in the sex industry.

Today, as a scientific researcher, she now takes on

the private and public myths surrounding sex and why we

believe them.

Brooke's book 'The Sex Myth'

unpicks the hysteria around media reporting, the

research, the assumptions, rumours and wives'

tales that we have around sex.

Sex isn't and easy subject to debate; personal history,

politics, fear, years of oppression get in the way.

But, Brooke's funny, fearless and fact-based way of

writing, finds a way to cut through all of that noise, as

you are about to find out.

Please give a very warm welcome to Brooke Magnanti.

(APPLAUSE)

BROOKE MAGNANTI: My God, there's a metric

fuck-load of you

(LAUGHING)

It was only a couple of ago, I actually thought to

ask someone.

I was like:

"Sydney Opera House is pretty big isn't it?"

"And, you know:"

"How many people are going to be there?"

"Mm, don't know, hundreds?"

"And I thought: "Well, the audience participation of

the bit of the talk might not go as well because I can

just about see people if I shade my eyes. But, hi

(LAUGHING)

Oh, sorry, that's not me.

Um, obviously I'm Brooke Magnanti and I'm going to be

talking about just a couple of the sex myths that I wrote

about in my book.

Um, first off, I should make clear:

this is this is Billy Piper.

Um, she is a really lovely lady; a fantastic actress.

Last year, I was giving a talk at'Sceptics on the Fringe'

ah, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and, little did I

know there was actually a reviewer in the audience who

wasn't familiar with my secret double life as a, ah,

child health scientist.

(LAUGHING)

And so, when I read the review he said:

"I went going- I went to this talk expecting Belle de Jour

and I got statistics lecture."

"So, I just want to make clear, I'm not actually Billy

Piper, as you've probably guessed by now."

But, ah, what I can claim to be trying to do

(LAUGHING)

is 'making statistics standards sexy, one standard

deviation at a time.'

And, I look forward to the next series of

'Secret Diary of a Call Girl' which, ah, for some reason,

I've heard nothing about, so far, in which she is revealed

to be, ah, an incredible nerd who spends her days hanging

around by the computer, incessantly tweeting about

little mistakes that she finds in other people's

scientific papers.

So, what are some common sex myths overall?

Things that we tend to hear in the media and tend to just

take without any particular evidence for whether or not

they're true?

I'm just going to go a few through a few of them: ah,

'Women don't want sex they want companionship?'

The, the myth that if, ah, women are sexually active,

they're only using it to get something from men.

The idea that 'All men are potential rapists'

and they just have to see a naked woman and then that's

it; they go crazy, they go mad and they attack anybody

they see.

That there are 'Many women who are

forcibly trafficked for sex' and I'm sure that one will be

coming up on Q & A on Monday.

The 'Drug-addicted streetwalkers are more common

than call girls?'

This is one that I actually get a lot.

There's a lot of people who say:

"Well, there aren't many people in the sex industry

like you."

"And, while it's probably true that there aren't too

many people in that sex industry who specifically

work in child health epidemiology" go figure.

(LAUGHTER)

Um, there are, actually, obviously a lot of people who

are in a similar situation to I was, which was, ah, being a

migrant student who ran out of money.

And, realising that I was on a visa that severely limited,

not only the kind of work that I could do, but the

number of hours I could work.

So, there're actually quite a lot of us. Ah,

'Porn is the biggest entertainment industry'

is another myth we get quite a lot of, and that sex

addiction is a growing disease.

And, I'm going to be talking about 2 these today.

Mainly, sex addiction and the idea that women don't want

sex, they just want companionship and that as

soon as they're married, sex is just off the table.

Now I've been married for 3 years now, so you

do the maths.

Obviously I haven't had sex since 2010.

(LAUGHTER)

This is the wonderful poet Philip Larkin, chewing on his

pen, rather fetchingly, ah, famously he never married,

but kept about 5 Mistresses, secret from each other.

And in one of his poems he says:

"Where do these innate assumptions come from?"

"And that was the thinking that I went into writing"

'The Sex Myth' with.

Not only just that, there are some of these ideas, and, and

to what extent are they right or are they wrong, but where

do they actually come from?

And, I have to say, um, I blame myself.

And, I blame myself as someone who is now kind of,

by circumstance, ah,a columnist; a member of the media;

somebody who has to produce 500 to 900 words 3

times a week on topics that I sometimes only know a little

bit about but I've got really strong opinions, damn it.

(LAUGHTER)

So, I came up with this thing called

'The Feedback Model' and The Feedback Model sounds

really, you know, portentous.

Um, it's just 'a' feedback model.

It's how some of these things could happen.

The way it starts off at the top is that somebody spots a

shock statistic of some kind, maybe in a medical journal

or, more likely, in the press release for a medical

journal, ah, often without any context.

Often it'll be somebody who does not specifically have

the background in the topic that's being written about

from an academic perspective.

You can often take a statistic like that and just

sort of fit it into a predetermined message.

So, if you're a writer and you have an editor who comes

to you and says: "We really need something on

sex addiction because there's a famous person who's

admitted to being a sex addict and we need some great

sounding number."

"And you go, and you Google it and you find that number

and you whack it in there," just as, just as a throwaway

almost, which means that little or no critical thought

is applied to: who were the people that were

actually involved in making this statistic?

But, also who are the people that are the statistics

themselves?

If you hear about some percentage of women, ah, who

give up on sex after marriage or, some percentage of men

who are sex addicts and, and just not really

thinking about:

"Well, who actually were the people that they pulled to

get these numbers?"

"But, very often, you know, where there is smoke

there is fire."

Ah, they are people who experience huge losses

in libido.

There are people who experience problems with, ah,

restraining their sexual activity within

a relationship.

And, crucially, there's not a lot of support out there for

those people that is coherent, or that is

non-profit, or that is not in some way taking advantage of

them still further.

Now, where you've got a group of people who are concerned

and who are getting support, of course they're going to

talk about this.

And, especially in the age of the Internet, everybody's got

a blog, everybody can get together and they can tweet

about it, or they can post to Facebook.

And so, talking about the problems and why aren't they

finding support.

Then, someone like me comes along with 500 to 900 words

to write 3 times a week and decides to write about this

phenomenon, at which point the cycle continues again,

because I need a shock statistic to kind of head off

my piece.

We get so used to seeing these things that they often

just kind of enter into the day to day mythology without

anyone really knowing where they originated.

And that's where it's often really handy to try and break

the cycle, this feedback loop, and ask:

"Where did the original numbers come from?"

(LAUGHTER)

You can probably guess I'm going to talk about sex

addiction now and the wonderful saying that

'Three men make a tiger.' You know, if somebody runs up

to you, if- I, I live in a tiny little village in the

north-west of Scotland and if somebody came running up the

one street in our village and said:

"You wouldn't believe it. Oh my God, there is a tiger

in the village."

"It'd be like:" "You are clearly on something."

"And then a 2nd person runs along and says:

"No really, it's true." I saw it.

It's there.

"You kind of go: "Oh well, well, you know, maybe

Can they both be on something?"

"By the time a 3rd person is running up, telling you that

this thing exists," you absolutely believe it because

why would three people, independently, be making

it up?

So, let's put Tiger Woods in to The Feedback

(LAUGHING)

Loop.

The statistic that we get a lot of is this one

that claims: "In 1991, an estimated 3-6%

of adults had sex addiction." Sometimes, this is

qualified by saying "adults in the US

"or sometime it, it's just inserted whatever country

you're in.

It'll say 'in UK' or 'in Australia'

or even 'worldwide.' Well, we know that, you know,

there's porn, there's cheaters'

dating sites for married people and, of course, people

get divorces because people are cheating.

So, this is kind of, the lay of the land.

So, we kind of figure that maybe these must be related,

you know?

That, maybe these things are happening because somebody

has a sex addiction?

Now, obviously, there's some truth to the fact that there

are people with intimacy issues in their relationships

who are seeking relationships outside or, for whatever

reason, have very, ah, I don't know how we'd say it,

non-monogamous arrangements?

And, and everything on the spectrum in between.

There's not a great deal of support for people either who

are experiencing intimacy issues that they personally

or their partners are having problems with, or who just

have some kind of alternative lifestyle that doesn't fit

the whole 'man and woman who get

married and they settled down in the suburbs and they have