What This New Doggy Style Survey Tells Us About the State of British Sex Lives

Sex position news now, and Britain's favourite sex position is doggy style, apparently. Take a minute to imagine it. Imagine some of Britain's most iconic men and women just rattling away at it like horned up animals. Winston Churchill in a war room, tiny statuettes of battleships scattered all around him, just humping away. Edwina Currie and John Major, their old and wrinkled limbs a whirl, on all fours and going crazy. Because that is Britain, isn't it: tea and cucumber sandwiches, shirtless men drinking Stella on public transport and fucking all up on each other like dogs. Just humping away and panting. Wagging our little bulldog tails and howling to a crescendo.

This doggy bombshell – "People like doggy style, really?" you are saying, right now, "literally the most obvious sex position beyond missionary? A sex position so vanilla it could be an ice cream flavour served to children? People like that? Really?" – is really not news, at all, is it? Because it comes from a survey done by Ann Summers, the YouGov of putting things up yourself, and it took only 1,000 responses.

Pry a little deeper, though, and there are some gemlike sexual revelations in there. For example: the second most popular place British people like to have sex is "in front of the TV" (64 percent). That, for some reason, is one of the bleakest facts I think I've ever heard in my life. It encapsulates a stunning lack of original thought.

Picture the scene: you are filling out a survey form and a question asks you where on earth you would most like to have sex. The world is your sexual oyster. On a beach, maybe? White sand beneath your feet, fresh mango being fed to you by the subject of all your wet dreams? No. On a just enormous platter of caviar, among lobsters and champagne? No. In the Queen's bed, the assumption of course being that the Queen has a very sumptuous bed? No.

However: in front of the Britain's Got Talent final, while being conned by a dishonest dog, weakly pulling the band of your jogging bottoms down to reveal your junk, slamming them into the junk of another person for three short minutes before going to the kitchen and making a cup of tea? Yes. For 64 percent of British people, yes, that is the ideal – just a little bit behind "in bed" (88 percent).

I suppose this is just the traditional British squeamishness about fucking distilled crystalline in the form of an Ann Summers survey of 1,000 customers who didn't know how to un-tick the box "please do not subscribe me to your newsletter".

Weirdly, tearing a thousand people's sex lives apart and analysing them also has the effect of making sex seem incredibly cold and robotic. It says, for example, that 66 percent of Britons enjoy using "two or three" positions per sex session, with 23 percent preferring "girl on top" and 21 percent preferring "just missionary until you fall asleep bereft". When you look at sex like that, it sounds like a loveless couple chastely doing a samba, rather than some pure raw energy, of clothes ripped off and nipples bitten, of blood pumping and drawn, nails scratched down backs and being rubbed up on by four other people.

"It's fantastic to see that adults across the UK are becoming more adventurous and having fun with their sex lives," an Ann Summers spokesperson said. But are we? Where's "appalling blow-bang" on this list? Where's the dogging? Where, please, is the adventure?

I'll tell you where the adventure is: the adventure is lying in a pool in the middle of your living room carpet, flickering alternately blue and white in the glow of Amanda Holden saying something pointless. The adventure is going to need cleaning with Vanish. The adventure is going to need scraping out of the shag with an old fork.

@joelgolby

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