“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 …
How porn breeds paedophiles
“Mainstream, freely available porn gives men permission to go that step further,” says Michael Sheath. “It’s what normalises the sexual abuse of children.”
Sheath, an expert in child protection, can rattle off the titles of mainstream pornography as well as …
The new feminism is misandry in disguise
What has feminism ever done for the emotional lives of men? There is a story that says thus far, very little indeed. Its main character is a generation of so-called Lost Boys. Betrayed by a feminism which overstated their privilege …
The impotence of the porn industry
Just north of the Strand, behind where the Australian High Commission now stands, there used to be what the press called “a fetid, miserable lane”. One of 19th-century London’s more disreputable districts, it housed the poor, the criminal, the prostitute …
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, …
The forgotten victims of online child abuse
It took two days before Carly Peters found out why she got “the knock”, and when she did, she was physically sick. It’s been two years since Natalie Smith’s knock and still she struggles when her six-year-old daughter asks: “Where’s …
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 …
The Tories deserve to lose Tiverton
“We love tractors,” says an old man by Tiverton market, sunning himself on a bench. He gives a filthy laugh and I hear pride in it: he sounds like Sid James. Tractors are why I am here, at least tangentially. …
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 …
Why old-fashioned Tories turn to porn
A great deal of discussion following the resignation of porn-watching Conservative MP Neil Parish has concerned sexism in Parliament, where the working culture is apparently a hotbed of pervy remarks, “noisy sex” in offices, “sex pest MPs” and vomit-spattered champagne …
The sly sexism of Left-wing men
It’s a year since Sarah Everard was abducted, raped and murdered — and the London Mayor this week called for men to lead a “fundamental cultural shift” to help end violence against women. Sadiq Khan said the problem was not …
Why Twitter is so awful
When I began writing for UnHerd, I was a nobody with an anonymous Twitter account. That’s less the case now, which is nice in many ways. But there’s a lovely facelessness, and freedom to reinvent yourself, that I miss about …
The death of intimacy
The sexual entrepreneur keeps a spreadsheet of every encounter she’s ever had. It’s populated with all kinds of information: how much they talked, the different positions they tried, whether it was the first or second or fifth time, and, of …
