Carrie Fisher

Was Carrie Fisher really ‘a genius’?

‘People throw the word “genius” around a lot,’ said a talking head on BBC2 this week, ‘but she was a genius, truly.’ If it wasn’t for the heading on this column, I suspect it might have taken you a while to guess the unquestionable genius being referred to here. But then again, for Carrie Fisher: A Life in Ten Pictures, considered analysis and fear of hyperbole would only have got in the way. Not that this prevented the programme from being inadvertently revealing. Granted, if you wanted to know the full story of Fisher’s life – including the fact that she married Paul Simon – you’d have been better off with Wikipedia.

Human sexuality is innately perverse

From our US edition

Many politically correct feminists aggressively dismiss Freud and psychoanalysis in general as outdated. I myself was recently attacked in Austria as an old white man who hasn’t read a book for 30 years. What they are effectively doing is repressing Freud’s basic insight, that of a split or divided subject and of the unconscious — the fact that people in general don’t know what they want and don’t want what they desire.This is why explicit free consent of both partners in a sexual act is not enough to preclude violence. Even if a written contract or a selfie of both partners is not required, the minimum that those who worry about violence in sex demand is explicit verbal consent, as is required by a new law proposed in New South Wales.

sexuality