“We are looking for six performers to join our Company of Dykes for moving installation REIN.” When the algorithm served me this ad, my interest was piqued. Over the decades, many attempts have been made to produce “ethical pornography” just …
Clickbait protestors are conservatives in disguise
In 1958, the French philosopher Guy Debord organised a “raid” on a Belgian conference of art critics. His group, The Situationist International, phoned attendees and read out their manifesto. They scattered it in the street. They posted it to the …
Why chicks still dig Byronic heroes
Two centuries after his death, Byron is still — like Madonna, Napoleon and Chewbacca — a member of the one-name-only club, even if he’s forced to share it with a hamburger chain. At the time, his death at the age …
Why chicks still dig Byronic heroes
Two centuries after his death, Byron is still — like Madonna, Napoleon and Chewbacca — a member of the one-name-only club, even if he’s forced to share it with a hamburger chain. At the time, his death at the age …
The messiness of male desire
In February 2021, the writer Luc Sante was killing the lockdown dead-time by running pictures of himself through FaceApp, seeing what he might look like as a woman. The effect was powerful. Life-altering, in fact. In the app’s feminised image, …
What is Judith Butler afraid of?
Worried about doctors giving fertility-destroying drugs to physically healthy teens? Perturbed by the placing of rapist males alongside female prisoners, or the allowing of any male into a woman’s changing room on his say-so? Annoyed by the sight of hulking …
The truth about Jews for Palestine
At London’s weekly anti-Israel protests each Saturday, one can often find a small group of strictly Orthodox Jewish men — always men or boys, never women. Generally no more than a dozen, they hold signs with wording such as “Judaism: …
Why we need genocide cinema
“I don’t like getting involved in a genocide-off,” said Jonathan Glazer about his film, The Zone of Interest, which offers a chillingly clinical, fly-on-the-wall view of the Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his family as they go about their …
How lads’ mags went soft
“We hired a helicopter, we got hold of a sniper rifle, we shot radioactive wolves…” Writers at loaded magazine used to pride themselves on their wild gonzo journalism and madcap antics. It was, as founding editor James Brown described it, …
Has HRT propaganda misled women?
The menopause is having a moment. Once only spoken of rarely, and with embarrassment, it is now sensationalised in the media. This has been accompanied by a massive increase in prescriptions for Hormone Replacement Therapy, which have more than doubled …
The hypocrisy of the BBC’s misinformation war
In 1999, Glenn Hoddle, the then England football manager, told The Times’s Matt Dickinson that he thought people with disabilities had done bad things in a previous life. Hoddle had spoken before about his spiritual beliefs, and it was a …
Why billionaires are so uncool
“A million dollars isn’t cool,” Sean Parker explains to a jejune Mark Zuckerberg in the 2010 film The Social Network. “You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” This single line of dialogue portended a major shift in global culture. “Cool” …
Big Tech has stolen our children
“Internet addiction” has lived a strange life since the Nineties. In 1995, a New York psychiatrist introduced the term, not to describe a real affliction of internet users, but to parody certain diagnostic tendencies in his field. Then other people, …
In defence of pick-up artistry
To say that The Game has aged badly would be to understate how outrageous it was even in its own time: 20 years ago, just as women had finally become empowered to pursue sex on its own merits, and on …
Bad therapy is stunting our kids
The vast majority of therapists today are women. So, too, are the vast majority of their clients. But the earliest ones were almost all men. And, whatever we think of him now, Sigmund Freud’s ideas on infant development were more …