“I used to be a woman, and I really am a feminist.” With his full beard, bald head and inked, muscular forearms, Buck Angel cuts a striking figure. The trans porn star is an unlikely feminist ally. We shouldn’t really …
Why do progressives watch porn?
Is it time we started having less nuanced conversations about porn? We’ve all encountered the alternative: the sort of smug, self-styled progressive who maintains that every political controversy can be resolved by sufficiently “nuanced conversation”. The trickier a problem looks, …
Pornhub is screwing its workers
Sex work is work. Accept the proposition; start from there. The next question is: what kind of work, with what compromises? Very good work, if you listen to the porn performers interviewed in Netflix documentary Money Shot: The Pornhub Story. …
The trouble with online safetyism
Epileptics being maliciously exposed to flashing images. Children being bullied via social media. Adults being misled by material about medical interventions. Since it was conceived by academics in 2018, the Online Safety Bill — which returns to Parliament this week …
Mr Deepfakes can make you a porn star
It would be naive to assume that, because you’ve never performed in a porn video, you will never appear in one. In fact, these days, anyone with access to an image of your face can, in a matter of seconds …
A sex room won’t save your marriage
Looking back, I feel profoundly pleased that I was a hottie when I was: after the Pill but before AIDS. The Seventies brought to the masses the sexual free-for-all that the “Swinging Sixties” had only really offered the few. A …
Was the sexual revolution a mistake?
One of the many clashes within the modern feminist movement is between sex-positive feminists and sex-negative feminists, otherwise known as the prudes. The former argue for the virtues of no-holds-barred sexual freedom, while the latter believe that liberal feminism’s focus …
Lena Dunham’s depraved comeback
Lena Dunham made her name pushing back against the extremes of sex positivity. In the second episode of the TV series Girls, which she wrote and starred in, her character capitulates to a sex partner’s insistence that they act …
Pro-porn feminists can’t tell the truth
Should porn be banned? The question would have seemed a perfectly reasonable one during the post-1968 “Porn Wars”, when prominent feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon drafted anti-pornography ordinances that passed in major cities — before being struck …
