We reckon that Channel 4’s Sex Box only ticked 7 out of 24 on Bad Sex Media Bingo, better than the previous Monday’s Porn on the Brain which got 13.

There is a Storify of all our live tweeting of the show here.

The show was pretty good on diversity (sexuality, race, disability, body shape, age) although it would have been good to see all the people given equal time and perhaps some older couples and some solos or threesomes. We were also unsure about the format of getting people to have sex in a box!

There was also some good stuff on communication. We liked the idea that asking ‘what are you into?’ should become a habit. Also there was some questioning of the focus on ‘penetrative’ sex with one panelist suggesting we should remove the ‘fore’ and just focus on ‘play’.

However, there was a lot of emphasis that people need to have sex to be happy, and bisexuality was invisible with all the talk about ‘gay sex/relationships’ and ‘heterosexual sex/relationships’. Several times ‘did you have sex?’ meant penetration, and once the person who didn’t orgasm was regarded as not having had sex at all!

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We’re currently seeing a flood of programmes and related articles about sex and pornography, such as Porn on the Brain and Sex Box, as well as the sex advice columns which have become a regular feature in most national newspapers and magazines.

Those of us who work as sex researchers, sex therapists and sex educators, are aware of the vast differences in quality between the different radio and TV shows, and features, on the topic of sex. Many of them are not well grounded in the evidence around sex, relationships and sexual media. Also they often perpetuate problematic ideas about sex which we then hear from the clients and young people who we work with as counsellors or trainers.

For these reasons we decided to put together a bingo card of all the worst common messages that we see in media reporting of sex. We figured that, if people used the card, it might help them to think about the merits of the information and evidence they were viewing and reading about, as well as challenging some of the particularly common myths about sex.

For each square on the card we’ve also provided explanations about why these messages, or kinds of information, are a problem, what impact they can have on people, and how media might report these things in better ways.

Our hope is that this information will be useful to media producers and editors when producing future materials. It will help them to avoid common traps, and to produce more innovative, useful and ethical pieces.

So many of these programmes and articles focus on complaining about other media (porn, fashion, online sex ed, etc.) and perpetuating panic and anxiety about sex. Instead we would like to see media taking a positive role in providing inclusive, well-researched, thoughtful and balanced, education about sex.

You can join the Bad Sex Media Bingo event on Facebook here and follow our twitter @badsexbingo, #badsexbingo

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