When it comes to sex, there’s no such thing as a simple question. Even the most basic inquiry soon turns out to be loaded. Most sex surveys start by asking the respondent whether they are male or female. Why not female or male? And what about all the other options – all the people who would describe themselves as neither or both? Why do surveys always ask people what they do with their bodies, instead of asking what they don’t – and why not? And how are we to deal with the peculiar fact that most sex exists only in memory; or, these days, on mobile phones.



‘The word consent is on many lips’ Photograph: Alamy

My latest foray into this minefield – entitled Excuse Me, Would You Mind If I Asked You a Few Personal Questions About Sex? – is currently on display at the Wellcome Collection in London. The installation takes its cue from the pioneering scientists and statisticians whose work is documented in the collection’s larger show, The Institute of Sexology: Freud, Stopes, Mead, Masters and Johnson. It basically does what they all did: asks total strangers a lot of embarrassing questions. The idea is that you sit down at the end of the sexology show with a questionnaire, answering whichever of its 25 posers you fancy, then drop your answers into a padlocked box. This gets emptied once a week and a team of readers and myself select some of the most thought-provoking (and of course anonymous) thoughts about the nation’s sex life for immediate publication on the gallery walls.

One woman wrote: 'There is no glass ceiling over your bed'

The response has been extraordinary: more than 10,000 people have seen fit to add their thoughts. As a result, I know now that Dr Alfred Kinsey was right when he observed that, when it comes to sex, no one should ever assume anything about anybody. A perfectly routine set of responses will suddenly reveal that a female respondent doesn’t understand why people are so down on rapists – or that she just hates giving blowjobs. An otherwise confident-sounding moraliser will confide that the only thing he’d change about his life would be to make his wife fancy him again. Another male respondent will admit to fantasising about travelling back in time to bring relief to uniformed servicemen on leave during the second world war – which would be touching coming from someone from the pre-Wolfenden era, when homosexuality was illegal, but is surely something else entirely when the respondent is an internet-age 35-year-old.

Sometimes a single voice will ring out a welcome note of optimism and sanity. A married cancer patient told how positive her experience of sex has been during chemo; another woman memorably reported how her mother educated her as to the importance of multiple orgasms during an episode of The Antiques Roadshow. And another, asked what piece of advice she would like to give her younger self, wrote: “There is no glass ceiling over your bed.” Personally, I’d like discussion of that statement to be on the national curriculum.

The questionnaires are being archived in the Wellcome Library. By the time the installation ends, I reckon we’ll have over 20,000. I hope some future sexologist or statistician will mine them in an attempt to construct a snapshot of London’s sex lives. I wonder if they’ll read the data as I do. People seem more aware and more respectful of trans lives than ever before, and trans people themselves seem freer to speak. The word “consent” is on many lips, for many reasons – step forward Jimmy Savile and EL James. More people seem empowered than threatened by the erosion of heterosexual norms, while unabashed female pleasure is seen as a right and as a threat.

A lot of people complain that work leaves them too little time for sex. Others are very specifically angry about the influence of porn on young men. Disappointment, frustration and confusion are universal and multi-gendered – though, to my immense relief, what this myriad of anonymous voices reveals is one huge contemporary certainty. Far from being something best left to priests, pornographers or politicians, sex is something people want to think about for themselves. My own advice to my younger self, now that so many strangers have told me what they are really up to, would be simple: when we have sex, we’re not looking for plumbing – but for meaning.

Would You Mind? is at the Wellcome Collection, London NW1, until 20 September. Neil Bartlett’s novel The Disappearance Boy is published on 30 July by Bloomsbury Circus.





