On Saturday 10 March, the Edinburgh Evening News splashed 'Whipping Up a Storm' across its front page alongside the image of an amply bosomed, corset-clad dominatrix flourishing a whip.
'Protests over "degrading" erotic festival across city' tutted its subhead, unironically.
Journalists David McCann and John-Paul Holden then reported how an 'X-rated arts festival featuring bondage workshops and a fetish dungeon' with voluntary degradation is planned for the city centre this summer.
Potentially it could attract hundreds of fans.
Readers who had not already wet themselves laughing dissolved entirely at what followed: 1 shopkeeper, 1 Conservative city councillor and 1 Church of Scotland spokesman fear that the event might draw 'a seedy element to the city'.
McCann and Holden next cited unsourced concerns that families might be put off visiting nearby areas with a consequent effect on trade. Presumably, they were unaware of or unworried about the effect on families and trade of front-page Miss Whiplash images in newsagents across the capital.
On page 2, their piece helpfully reported exactly where such seedy elements should head for, and where families might be repelled from: 'end of night parties' at 5 venues including Broughton's Voodoo Rooms on West Register Street and White Space on Gayfield Square. In other words, places where there is practically no chance of families being repelled or needing to change their travel arrangements and spending patterns.
The whole story is clearly a sensationalist storm in a specious teacup.
However, that did not stop the Evening News promptly wallowing in pompous waffle. Its page-11 leader essayed a more lofty and philosophic tone. Its author claimed not to be shocked, even generously warned against prudishness, but then concluded that 'it is hard to see this addition to Edinburgh's festival calendar as being a positive step for the city'.
Where does the Edinburgh Evening News stand on sex?
Spurtle decided to investigate. We used Google to combine the search phrase <Edinburgh Evening News> with a number of other terms – 25 comprising what you might think would be a local Edinburgh newspaper's bread-and–butter issues, and 23 describing a variety of sexual subjects.
We wanted to establish how many times they coincided. Any correlations would suggest areas of more or less special interest shared by the Edinburgh Evening News and the online community.
Our findings appear in the table at the foot of this page.
Readers may draw their own conclusions, but among the more remarkable points to emerge were that the Edinburgh Evening News appears to be more closely identified with <pole dancing> than with <education cuts> and <Transport and Infrastructure>; similarly, more with <sex industry> than with <youth unemployment> and <Health, Social Care and Housing>.
<Education, Children and Families> and <wheelie bin> fail to match appearances for <raunchy>; <City of Literature> and <World Heritage Site> trail in behind <sauna>; whilst even <Council Tax>, <tramworks> and <Holyrood> cannot match the number of results for <coprophilia>.
City of Edinburgh Council Party Group Leaders may wish to start flogging their PR teams.
The most popular sexual correlation associated with the Edinburgh Evening News was <X-rated>, whose 497 million results exceeded by 496,999,996 those for the <Leith Walk Traders Association>.
Interestingly, the findings suggest a disproportionate correlation between the Edinburgh Evening News and those very activities it piously claimed on Saturday are 'extremely distasteful to the vast majority of people'.
These revelations will probably not surprise critics of the paper who consider it a nasty-minded, opportunistic little tabloid with prurient fixations. However, the Spurtle would not advise anyone to base their opinions on our admittedly unscientific quest for understanding. We are nothing if not fair.
On the other hand, we would strongly suggest that, in future, Edinburgh Evening News staff should carefully examine their own editorial preoccupations before presuming to lecture the rest of us about sex.
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