In the current media world it’s taken for granted that one thing will always sell, sex. This view is so widely appreciated even musicals such as Avenue Q reference it, with the character Trekkie Monster saying, “In a volatile market, the only stable investment… is PORN!” A current example of sex in the movie world is Jennifer’s body. Released on November 6th and written by Diablo Cody, the Oscar nominated scribe of Juno. The media so far, have shown no interest in Diablo Cody’s involvement with Jennifer’s Body and all of the coverage so far seems to only care about lead actress Megan Fox, who plays a lesbian vampire of some sort and gets slightly naked during the film.

I could go on, stating countless examples in Film, Music, TV and Celebrity culture, where sex has formed the key advertising point to try and drive sales. But I’d like to concentrate on the most recent development which shone a different light on this old subject.

I’m talking about Kandy Rain – the girl group of four former erotic dancers, who became the first act to be voted off of this season’s X Factor on Sunday night.

Why is this interesting? Well, having watched their performance on last night’s show and comparing it with the other acts, they should have probably never got so far on a singing basis for a start, but that’s beside the point.

What Kandy Rain, particularly youngest member Coco Lloyd have had since their first appearance on the X Factor is constant media coverage by the British tabloids, nearly all of which has been exploiting their previous experience in the sex industry. Recent stories have included The Sun revealing that Coco apparently once had sex with a teacher, and in the middle of the story there’s a video of her stripping, in case you wanted to see that too.

Allegedly this is journalism of the highest social interest, and something we all want to know about and because reading doesn’t paint a clear enough picture anymore, we need a video too.  

But with all this coverage about sex and Kandy Rain, they polled the lowest number of votes over the weekend’s live performances and were eliminated, arguably proving that sex doesn’t always sell.

So could this be the first sign of society fighting back against overt sex in the media? Or just another case in which the power of sex has been overestimated.