Under what conditions should a person be free to indulge his sexual fetishes in public? This question was brought into stark relief last week at a school in Ontario, where the attire of a male teacher now identifying as a …
MeToo killed Game of Thrones
It must have been some time after the first brothel scene, but well before Jamie Lannister threw a child out of a window after being discovered mid-coitus with his twin sister, that the first audiences of HBO’s Game of Thrones …
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 …
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 …
Who wants a middle-aged Love Island?
Every year on Love Island, there is bad behaviour, misogyny, shouting matches and tears. But it seems the further we get from #MeToo, the harsher and more manipulative the male contestants have become. Unsurprisingly, there has been a backlash: the …
How to save sex
“Is it okay if I touch you?” Half an hour after I’d started chatting with this guy on Grindr he was in my bedroom, beginning a series of questions meant to lead from touching to any number of other acts. …
The problem with being hot
The late Rush Limbaugh once said that feminism was created to “allow ugly women access to society” — a comment all the crueller because it was true. A central tenet of feminism is that a woman’s social value should be …
When did physical approach become scary?
When did physical approach become scary? By “physical approach” I mean what used to happen constantly on the street, in restaurants, in bars, in between classes of all kinds: a person approaching another person to flirt with them or ask …
The dangers of gender-affirmative care
The Biden administration recently announced a plan to ban “conversion therapy” and dismantle barriers to “gender-affirming care” for transgender-identifying children and adolescents. A few days later, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal introduced the “Transgender Bill of Rights” on Capitol Hill which sought …
Middle-aged women don’t want sex
“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple,” wrote Jenny Joseph in her poem, “Warning”. “With a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me”.
She describes a dream of growing old disgracefully, as a reward for …
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 …
The dawn of the New Puritans
It looks like some upsetting combination of a homecoming dance and a wedding. The teenage girls are dressed in polyester facsimiles of the big white poofy gowns they’ve fantasised about wearing since childhood, arm in arm with older men in …
The doctors profiting from trans surgery
I have the strangest feeling that my body has been stolen from me. When I started my transition, I was not aware of any options besides medical treatment to modify my body. Years later, I still ask myself why no …
Stella Creasy’s bourgeois feminism
In his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, Gustave Flaubert alphabetised some of the cliches and platitudes common among the French bourgeoisie during the 19th century. His aim, in his own words, was “the historical glorification of everything generally approved”. Under “Bandits”, …
Russell Brand’s latest addiction
The Opera House, the Winter Gardens, Blackpool: here, in this magnificent theatre, a metaphor as good as any for decline, Russell Brand meditates on the stage, which I think is another metaphor for decline: not of buildings, but of a …