How much interest, frankly, would you normally have in experimental Spanish theatre? What excitement would you generally expect a visit from them to create in the press? Yet this week an obscure group of Catalan postmodernists claimed several British newspaper front pages.
A second cultural poser. How much fuss would a children's novel by Melvin Burgess normally create? He's a respected writer - a Guardian and Whitbread winner - but he could walk down a street beside JK Rowling and the camera wouldn't leave her face. Yet the publication of his 13th novel has encouraged stories, editorials and a denunciation by the children's laureate.
The explanation for the sudden hardening of these artists' publicity profiles is, inevitably, sex. The members of Spanish Equity who form the group La Fura Dels Baus would remain known only to readers of What's on in Tarragonna if they had not brought to Hammersmith XXX, a dramatisation of the imaginings of the Marquis de Sade which features apparently simulated intercourse and sequences in which people are pulled out of the audience for oral sex.
There have been suggestions - the premise for newspaper disgust - that the intercourse is actual, but real sex would break the law (an unlikely risk for the venue to take) and theatre, it is always worth remembering, is about pretence. And, from all accounts, XXX fulfils the rule of most erotic theatre: anyone who gets an erection probably deserves one for what they've had to sit through.
Melvin Burgess's novel, Doing It, has encouraged similar media arousal. Provocatively illustrated with a condom on the cover, the book is aimed at teenagers and is a catalogue of shagging by adolescent boys. Although Burgess avoids the language or detail of adult pornography, the book has suffered the inevitable accusation that teenagers who read about sex will be tempted to do it.
This has always seemed an odd argument. In the adult world, explicit literature and films are more often a compensation for people who aren't having sex than a goad to people to take off their clothes. And it seems reasonable to suppose that similar rules would apply to adolescent literature. Also, those who have publicly objected to the Burgess novel need to answer this question: if reading a book about sex encourages sex, then how bright is it to give it so much free publicity?
This illogic - offering huge signposts to places you want people to avoid - lies behind all media morality campaigns. Mary Whitehouse may have been an idiot, but at least she seemed genuinely not to understand that her campaigns vastly increased the audience for what she designated filth. Today's tabloid moralists, though, know perfectly well that, in posing as God's policeman, they are actually moonlighting as Satan's publicist.
If the rightwing press seriously wished to rid the world of sexually explicit theatre, films and novels, there's something very simple they could do. The idea of quarantine is tragically a very topical one, but it gives puritans a useful clue. In future, bare arses and faked fellatio should be treated like Sars, ruthlessly prevented from reaching the population.
Next time a Catalan mime troupe lands at Heathrow waving giant dildos and videos of ejaculation, the artistic police should wave them through, turn their backs and close their eyes. Let the show play only to the few more libidinous arts consumers who would naturally be inclined to buy tickets. When another "most shocking novel since" or "first anal penetration in non art-house movie" pants out from a press release, quarantine it until the threat of interest has passed. It's the one policy which actually might make the world a cleaner place.
They won't do it, of course, because the Spanish theatrical exhibitionists and the Daily Mail group are, while affecting to have a fist-fight, actually holding hands. The promotion of sexual shows and the promotion of outrage over them both follow from an understanding that sex is what sells best: penetration leads to market-penetration.
It's God or Darwin or Freud (take your choice) who is to blame for this. For reasons of the race's continuation, human beings are wired to find the idea of sex exciting. Ideally, we'd be involved in it but, barring that, would settle, at a push, for reading about people watching the Spanish at it.
Sometimes, made uncomfortable by this biological fascination, we choose to disguise it as outrage, but pornography and censorship are reactions to this disabling inner drive. For this reason, the day that the pornographers go on strike would be a sad one for the moralists and vice versa. The Mail is giving the masturbators of Hammersmith a hand, but neither side can help it.
