Sex and videotape | Education | The GuardianSex and videotape
The first moving images of a couple's sex organs while in use is now available to view on YouTube
Dr Pek Van Andel's MRI sex video has thrust its way into an argument that periodically convulses the public and the courts. The video shows the first moving images of a couple's sex organs while those organs were in use. It gives graphic new life to a question as old as sin: what is pornography?
As used by Van Andel and his team, the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner lets us probe anew, and deeply, this legal and philosophical chestnut.
Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote in a 1964 US supreme court decision that defining which materials are pornographic is hard, but recognising them is easy. Quoth the justice: "I know it when I see it."
Laypersons watching the Van Andel video have a tougher time. During the short time it's been on the internet, around half a million people have taken a look. Many, unaccustomed to seeing medical imagery of internal organs, struggled to make sense of the unfamiliar shapes and motions. Their comments, posted on YouTube, make this clear. For every excited "AGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!", there is a baffled "???"
Some people express confusion. One wrote: "Took me a while to figure it out. I thought the man's torso was his penis."
Another hazarded that: "The dark spots on either side of the 'line' (their skin) are the bladders. The spines are at the outside edges. As best as I can tell it's the womb being bounced around so much."
A third explained: "It's obviously missionary. Anyone can see the spines of the man and woman are on the outsides, which shows they are facing each other."
A number of people do find stimulation, and perhaps even satisfaction, as expressed in this remark: "It kind of loses something with just the white noise audio ... Having said that, I still need a cigarette now."
Van Andel made the video in the late 1990s, but kept pretty quiet about it for a decade. He instigated and orchestrated the entire project at a hospital in Groningen, the Netherlands. He and three colleagues published a monograph in 1999, in the British Medical Journal. (Two co-authors, Ida Sabelis and Eduard Mooyaart, themselves engaged in intercourse in the MRI tube. Several other couples also contributed their all to the project.) A year later, the entire team was awarded an Ig Nobel prize.
Called Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal, the study includes two copies of an MRI midsagittal image of "the anatomy of sexual intercourse". In the second copy, labels and hand-drawn outlines identify the bits that are of medical significance ("P=penis, Ur=urethra, Pe=perineum, U=uterus, S=symphysis, B=bladder, I=intestine, L5=lumbar 5, Sc=scrotum").
Unknown to almost everyone, Van Andel asked the MRI technician to gather all the static images and assemble them together into a motion picture. The result: the 21st century's greatest challenge to easy assumptions about porn.
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize