What happened to the romance?

Look in one direction and the dreams of the Sixties have come to pass. No Briton, it might seem, in our promiscuous culture, should have any excuse for not having the sex life they undoubtedly feel they deserve. No corner of our public lives is asexual. Read just about any magazine or newspaper, watch any sitcom or talk show, and you will come away with the idea that sex is our one true obsession. Not only that, but there is a democracy of desire: no man or woman, young or old, should feel excluded from it. There is a sex shop on every high street, a vibrator in one in three bedside drawers. The great god Viagra and its attendant chemical fixes have ushered in a gloriously priapic future for the limpest of libidos.

Little is proscribed. You can say pretty much whatever you want (unless you are Chris Morris) on prime time television, look at pretty much what you want on the internet and get up to pretty much what you want in the comfort of your home. According to our survey you have - particularly if you live in Wales - never had it so good (or at least so often).

Look in another direction, though, and we are more screwed up by sex than ever before. Despite three decades of education and propaganda for contraception, Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in western Europe, and the figures for sexually transmitted diseases are threatening epidemics. Popular culture promotes the sexualisation of children, even as there are witch-hunts for paedophiles. The language of advertising, the demise of privacy and the possibilities of new technology have increased our expectations of sex and, as a result, our anxiety about it. Far from making us more connected, the sexualised culture often makes us more alone: self-gratification is all.

Sex businesses are one of Britain's few remaining growth industries (even if, like the others, they rely to a great extent on imports), while many complain that the general busyness of their everyday lives threatens to destroy desire. A lot of knowledge has perhaps become a dangerous thing, at least as far as stable monogamy is concerned (though it is touching, almost, to see that the Observer survey reveals that the large majority of people continue not only to put their faith in a life-partner, but believe that this is the natural order of things).

One thing that is certain is that our sex lives reflect our times. If the Sixties and Seventies saw a growth in personal freedoms, the years since then have seen these dreams (in common with all me-culture hopes) made fit for the market. The ease of divorce, the ready availability of contraception and the cultural emphasis on sex as a means to self-fulÞlment has injected a fresh edge of competition into an already overheated economy. Sex has become as susceptible to painstaking analysis as the rest of our lives. It is also one more shopping decision. As Jonathan Franzen observes in 'Books in Bed' from his new collection of essays How to be Alone: 'The orgasm is now a kind of consumer purchase, and one way or another, the language that attends it is a kind of ad copy.'

Britain's current anxiety about sex is re¤ected in the desire for information in order to improve, as it were, performance and market share. Recent popular sex books and newspaper sex columns respond to this apparently insatiable urge. Riding high on Amazon's bestseller lists - and delivered in simple brown paper packages - are titles such as Five Minutes to Orgasm Every Time You Make Love by Claire D. Hutchins, Hot Sex by Tracey Cox, Sexational Secrets by Susan Bakos and Extended Massive Orgasm by Steve and Vera Bodiansky. They approach the subject, in the spirit of the age, as if it were a kind of brisk business transaction, all expertise and norms: the end being to maximise your personal investment.

The last thing, however, that you probably want to take with you into the bedroom is a norm. The statistics of the sex guides may tell us, for example, that 'most erections are between five and seven inches long... it takes a man on average three minutes to come, a woman 18 minutes' - but who wants to be just like the next couple, or indeed like any other couple, when it comes to sex? Every one of us has always secretly liked to believe we make love more singularly and sensitively than any other living being ever. (Even John Major, it now appears, was able let his sensual imagination overcome his physical awkwardness when the lights were low). One of the effects of the deafening cultural white noise about sex is that we are invited to compare and contrast our own performance - and sometimes given the creeping suspicion that other people are having far more fun, far more often.

Once the last bastion of privacy, sex has thus become an issue of disclosure: when it comes to other people's sex lives it seems we not only have the right to know, they have the duty to confess. In this respect, the chance to listen to the unedited pillow talk of the heir to the throne to his mistress on a Sun 0898 number was matched only by the spectacle of the American President forced to undergo judicial cross-examination about his preference for oral gratification, primarily in order to satisfy his nation's prurience.

In a world defined by celebrity, sex has also become the currency of public relations. Be it in literary biography or tabloid muck-raking we have come to expect all the lurid details: forget the work, let's know about the affairs. (Though many of us would rather not have heard how, for example, Anthea Turner and Grant Bovey could not keep their hands out of each other's co-ordinated undergarments; and it is a well known fact that the mere thought of Sting and Trudi Styler engaged in hour after hour of earnest Tantric coitus is enough to make anyone want to dream of blue turtles.)

When did sex become this subsidiary of the entertainment industry, an essentially public act? Was it with the publication of The Joy Of Sex, almost 30 years ago, which sanctioned recreational sex for the middle classes? A more pertinent date for our times might be 1999, when the revenues of the American adult entertainment industry, worth $10 billion, overtook those of Hollywood.

In some respects the fallout of this shift - and the penetration of pornography into mainstream culture in the past two decades - has been the 'Californication' of sex - all about image. Bruce Weber, the photographer who brought us the Calvin Klein Obsession ads, a raw note of eroticism on 10-storey billboards, believes California to be the least erotic place on earth but has no doubt that its mores are catching. The curious demand for the perfectly globed, silicon-filled breast, and even the artificially augmented penis, is powerful enough to make it a signifier of the age (at least, the late-night documentary schedules of Channels 4 and 5 would not be possible without it). And while most of us would not think of surgery as a solution to our hang-ups, almost all of us have ambitions, and many of us obsessions, about gymming and slimming into hard-bodied desirability, falling in love with received images of sex.

You could be forgiven for thinking in this respect, along with Woody Allen, that sex now occurs mostly in our heads. And certainly, of course, most of our sexual problems exist there. The pharmacological cavalry is now lined up on this particular horizon, eyeing up the fortunes to be made from lifestyle drugs. Can't get it up? There's a pill for you. Don't fancy your partner quite as much as you used to? There will probably soon be a pill for you too.

If sex were simply a biological function though, a system of mechanics and hydraulics, we would have precious few problems. With the availability of such drugs, what we apparently have come to see as the ever more complicated business of keeping ourselves and our lovers satisfied, and the anxiety at exposing our tender selves to the whims of the market, will perhaps only increase. (If we are able to pick and choose, compare and contrast partners, then it follows that our partners can do so too.) The growth of phone sex and chatrooms is a way to control these kinds of anxieties - they allow their customers to keep themselves to themselves, to experience the illusion of intimacy with none of the risk.

In this sense, perhaps, sexuality is tending to turn in on itself (though even masturbation is not immune to the intervention of sexologists. Susan Bakos, for example, in the big-selling, Sexational Secrets, suggests men use various combinations of 'the Slow Single Stroke, the Fast Single Stroke, the Slow Two-Hand Stroke, the Fast Two-Hand Stroke, the Cupped Hand, the Finger Stroke, the Wrist Pump, the Slap, the Beat, the Rub, the Open Hand Stroke and the Vagina Stimulator Stroke'. Diagrams, in some cases, are helpfully provided.)

If Philip Roth, with the 1969 publication of Portnoy's Complaint, re¤ected the breaking of this particular taboo with Portnoy and his half-pound of liver, Nicholson Baker in The Fermata (1994) took it to its logical conclusion for our own times. His novel dreamed of the power to stop time, step into it and follow our desires. Rather than using this power to save the world, his narrator decides instead to disrobe his colleagues and have his wicked ways with them in suspended animation (the ultimate fantasy for our freeze-frame, fast-forward age). In this light the new technology seems to have played right into our hands. In Porno, his sequel to Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh suggests that video and the internet have made us all voyeurs. The growth in DIY porn is the new drugs, he argues: kids are no longer shooting up but shooting footage of themselves having sex, and then showing these films in the back room of their local, or posting them on websites. Porn is 'like eating McDonald's. People know it won't do them any good but it becomes compulsive, amateur porn is the new karaoke...'

The people who tell us it is healthy and desirable for pornography to be a respectable part of mainstream culture, and that it is only our vestigial repression that makes us think otherwise, are generally those who have most to gain from it Þnancially. There is a new generation of magazines, such as Richardson and DV, that make pornography artful (interestingly it is difficult to tell which images are editorial and which are adverts), just as there is a new generation of artists who make work that is explicitly pornographic.

I once interviewed Natacha Merritt, who is in the vanguard of this trend. Merritt, 20, from San Francisco, made a good living out of taking her digital camera to bed with her and her lovers, viewing her oral techniques through its liquid crystal display and then downloading the pictures on to her website and into the pages of a graphic art book, Digital Diaries. 'Instant gratiÞcation is so much fun,' she told me, in a giggly cheerleader's voice. 'I believe absolutely in voyeurism. What else is there apart from voyeurism? If all art is not voyeuristic then what is it?'

While we talked, her surly partner of the previous night Þlmed us with his hand-held camera in a twenty-first century kind of way. 'The new technology has made us closer and closer to other people's reality,' Merritt suggested.

You could argue equally persuasively, however, that it takes us ever further away from one another; that those lists of top 10 Google search terms - 'Britney naked' and so on - are one more symptom of a general unease with the implications of modern sexuality. The biologist Steve Jones has recently placed this in a genetic context. The male of the species, he argues, is in inexorable retreat: his sperm count is in apparently terminal decline; his role in the propagation of the species, with the advent of cloning, soon to be rendered redundant. While this demise lies far into our biological future we might speculate that its neurotic portents are already with us: in the desperate testosterone of the tree-hugging Iron Johns, or the misogynistic gangsta rappers, or the men who fret about their pecs at the gym and thumb through FHM, and can't quite bring themselves to speak to actual girls.

Partly as a result of this anxiety, the biggest casualty in our sexualised culture is, generally, romance (for this reason, perhaps, a small but growing number of young people are returning to ideas of celibacy before marriage). Sex may have become no big deal, or it may be our keenest obsession, but it is what precedes it and what follows on from it that causes us most difficulty.

In the absence of rules, and surrounded by competing messages of 'political correctness' and self-fulfilment, even the simplest interaction between the sexes potentially becomes fraught. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the Observer survey seems to reinforce the idea that good 'old-fashioned' and sustainable sex between consenting adults who love each other is still the thing most of us most desire, and increasingly, perhaps, the thing we find most elusive.

The Glossary: Guide yourself through the complexities of 21st Century sex

Auto-erotic asphyxiation Depriving oneself of oxygen to heighten orgasm.

BDSM Bondage with discipline, sadism and masochism. Used to define a group of 'alternative' sexual practises.

Chubby-chasing A fetish for fat people; a phrase particularly used by gay men.

Cam Girls Women who put live webcams in their bedrooms or showers and charge people to watch.

D&S Dominance and Submission.

Erotomania An unreasonable love of a stranger or person not interested in oneself.

Frottage Rubbing against another while fully clothed, often in a crowded place, for sexual satisfaction.

Glory hole A hole cut through a wall, allowing anonymous sex between people on either side. Sometimes found in gay venues.

Handkerchief codes Colour codes to identify sexual preference. For instance, worn in left pocket it suggests an 'active' partner; in right, 'passive'.

Infantilism Dressing as a baby to achieve sexual satisfaction

Jewellery Increasingly a part of sexual decoration, through piercings of genitalia.
Kegel exercises Exercise of the pelvic muscles that control orgasm.

Latex Material of choice for the fetishist, now preferred to rubber or plastic.

MMF or FFM Threesomes composed of that gender mix. Often seen in small ads.

Negotiation [in fetish context] Arranging transactions or parameters for conduct with sex partner.

OTN Over the knee, ie. traditional spanking position. Often seen in small ads.

Polyamory Consensual open relationships, as opposed to affairs. Practicioners often consider it a sexual identity, ie. 'I'm straight and poly'.

RR Rural Routes. Prostitution code for different forms of intercourse. eg. RR1 is Oral Sex.

Sleeping princess syndrome Arousal by a partner who appears to be asleep.

Troilism Arousal by being the third party in a sex scene.

UFOs Unbelievably Fantastic Orgasms. (as rare as a UFO sighting).

VWE Very well endowed. Often seen in small ads.

Waxing Stripping hair from the torso is especially common in gay male circles where a hairless torso is often prized.

XWE Extremely well-endowed. Often used in small ads.

Yes As ever, still tricky to define.

Zoophilia Sexual attraction to animals.