Sex

Thursday

Sean Thomas

Why I can’t resist a red-light district

I am writing this on the 17th floor of the Novotel Sukhumvit, on Soi 4, aka “Soi Nana,” in Khlong Toei, Bangkok. For anyone that knows the Big Mango, they’ve already guessed where I am, psychogeographically: from that tell-tale word “Nana.” For those still in the dark, I am on the rude, ribald, rambunctious street that is Soi 4, which is full of tattoo parlors, 7-Elevens, dried-squid-sellers, fake Italian winebars, blaring “British” pubs, slightly dodgy pharmacists, hair salons that do laundry as well – it culminates in Nana Plaza, a multitiered al fresco mall of gaudy and noisy go-go bars that probably constitutes the single largest collection of sex workers on the planet.

Thursday

Cockburn

Kyrsten Sinema was too fun for Congress

More like Kyrsten Sinner? In September, a North Carolina woman, Heather Ammel, filed a suit in county court alleging that former Arizona senator and current crypto lobbyist Kyrsten Sinema had an affair with her husband Matthew while he served on her Senate security detail. That suit has since moved to federal court, so now the whole world knows what Cockburn had long suspected: Kyrsten Sinema was too fun for Congress.  For years, Cockburn heard rumors that Sinema dallied about with her security detail during the end of her Senate term. But the Ammel lawsuit codifies it. “She had concerns [Sinema] was having sexual relations with other security members,” the complaint says.   But that’s not the half of it.

kyrsten sinema

Friday

Mary Wakefield

No sex please, we’re Gen Z

For many years now we have all been agonizing over the fertility crisis. Why aren’t the kids having kids? It’s become a sort of parlor game, the swapping of the various theories. Is it the cost of living? Microplastics? Eco-anxiety? Tight underwear, I heard the other day, and snorted with scorn even as I tipped my son’s stretch-cotton briefs into the bin. But now another, rather more fundamental explanation for the baby shortage has emerged. It’s not just that younger generations aren’t having babies – it turns out they aren’t really having sex at all. The Atlantic was first to properly examine this trend among young Americans, in a terrific piece which gave a name to the phenomenon: the Great Sex Recession.

Gavin Mortimer

The French obsession with Epstein

The ongoing revelations about the rich and famous who rubbed shoulders with Jeffrey Epstein are receiving extensive coverage in France. Print and broadcast media have pored over the details of the deceased sex offender and the famous names contained in the Epstein files, from princes to presidents to pop stars. There is a French connection to Epstein in model scout Jean-Luc Brunel, who was alleged to have trafficked girls for the pedophile financier. He was arrested at Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2020 and was found hanged in his prison cell two years later. But overwhelmingly what the French media have described as l’affaire Epstein is an Anglo-Saxon sex scandal. ‘Isn’t a certain tolerance for infidelity what the French have given the western world, along with great wine?

Tuesday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Why are we so obsessed with Hitler’s penis?

We care about Adolf Hitler’s penis, as a society. Quite a lot, it seems. A British documentary claims, finally, to have solved the mystery of the Nazi leader’s schwanz – was it big or was it small? – and to have proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the famous chant of “Hitler’s only got one ball,” a favorite among British soldiers, wasn’t just an idle insult. The key evidence is genetic: a blood-stained piece of fabric from the Hitler bunker. The documentary filmmakers tested it against a sample from one of Hitler’s closest living relatives to make sure the blood was his. And it was. That meant his genome could be sequenced and then analyzed for genetic clues about his personality, health and, of course, his manhood.

Hitler

Friday

Ani Chkhikvadze

The decline of sex and the alpha male

Not long ago, early in the morning in Washington DC, I walked past a construction site and a man in a yellow vest whistled at me. I laughed but what really struck me was how rare catcalling has become. Even construction workers, the cliché of crude male attention, have fallen silent as have, it turns out, moans of passion in bedrooms across America. According to new research, Americans have lost their libido – and not by a little. Only 37 percent of American adults reported having sex once a week or more, down from 55 percent in 1990. Across generations the pattern holds the same. Even within marriage, sex is increasingly confined to holidays. Weekly sex rates for married couples have fallen from 59 percent in the 1990s to below 49 percent today.

Sex

Saturday

Britt McHenry

Male cheerleaders? Who cares

The most famous cheerleaders in the National Football League once belonged to the Dallas Cowboys. Both fans and haters of the Texas stars affectionately referred to the busty, well-coiffed, smiling gals as “America’s sweethearts.” Today, America’s most-talked-about sweetheart is . . . a man. This week, the Minnesota Vikings announced its new cheer squad on Instagram in a video that quickly went viral. In it, a young male cheerleader sashays in the middle of a dance group accompanying a caption that reads, “The next generation of cheer has arrived.” Shortly after, another male cheerleader said he also was joining the squad.  They sure stirred up the crowd. Twitter fingers went flying faster than a back handspring.

male cheerleaders

Tuesday

Zoe Strimpel

Sabrina Carpenter mainstreams cutesy violence towards women

With a deliberateness that did not escape critics and onlookers, the Carpenter-fed algorithm had suddenly decided to choke us on her sweet and frothy song "Espresso" in such a relentless fashion that we soon ended up drinking it down, begging for more. “Move it up, down, left, right, oh, switch it up like Nintendo,” I and plenty of other people too old for her dire Gen Z, Taylor Swiftian fare, found ourselves singing it anyway, day and night, on its release last year. “Say you can't sleep, baby, I know. That's that me espresso.” Sleep was certainly not improved by the earworm of the song.In fact, I thought at first that Carpenter was a bot because the songs are such calculated, algorithmic pop, from top to bottom.

Sabrina Carpenter

Sunday

Bethany Mandel

The porn reckoning is here

One of the most disturbing pieces of recent documentary journalism follows Lily Philips, a petite blonde Englishwoman and popular OnlyFans creator, on a deeply unsettling quest: to sleep with 100 men in a single day. The footage, produced by YouTuber Josh Pieters and viewed more than 10 million times, doesn’t leave viewers shocked by her “empowerment," it leaves them queasy. Philips doesn’t come across as a liberated woman expressing her sexuality. She looks like the product of trauma. That look of trauma is more easily understood when it becomes clear that her mother is her manager. As a parent, I have a visceral reaction to my children being exposed to pornography, let alone participating in it.

Lily Phillips

Saturday

Emily Smith

Is the ‘OneTaste’ CEO a sex cult leader – or a high priestess of female pleasure?

I first met sex guru Nicole Daedone three years ago when she was performing orgasmic meditation on a colleague from her sexual wellness start-up, OneTaste. Daedone, was delicately touching Rachel Cherwitz, her head of sales, giving her multiple, and very vocal, sexual highs – for 15 straight minutes – in front of more than 100 riveted people in a studio in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district at 7pm on a weeknight. Naked from the waist down, Cherwitz was lying on a raised table with her legs open towards the audience. Cameras and microphones catching her every reaction. The crowd was that archetypal New York mix of wealthy investors, impeccably dressed-for-business single women, and the orgasm-curious of all ages.

OneTaste

Friday

Cockburn

What’s preventing a repeat of the Senate twink scandal?

Gay-PMG Grüezi from Switzerland, friends. A Cockburn spy was recently hoping to enjoy a quiet lunch at an Irish pub in Zurich’s Old Town when he was sat next to a large group of somewhat intoxicated KPMG Switzerland employees. It was quite the liquid lunch, with beers and wine flowing for hours and one staffer suggesting a round of shots, a move that was quickly rejected from the already too-far-gone group. One American employee of the firm was waxing lyrical about KPMG’s alleged hopelessly bigoted management.

twink

Monday

Cherie DeVille

Meet the MAGA porn stars

I’ve worked in the porn industry for nearly two decades — through the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. Yet this year, I have heard more porn stars than ever before vocalizing their support for former president Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. How did the industry of free-speech icons and Democratic donors Larry Flynt and Hugh Hefner skew to the personality cult devoted to a man who helped overturn Roe v. Wade and screwed Stormy Daniels in more ways than one? The answer is complicated.  To understand, you have to grasp what happened in porn throughout the past eight years. Porn wasn’t always MAGA. “The Republicans are still the anti-porn party and the anti-reproductive freedom party,” Adam22, host of the podcasts No Jumper and Plug Talk, explains.

maga porn

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Is Rivals the most outrageous show on television?

By now, television viewers should be inured to watching scenes of sexual congress on their screens. With any number of explicit programs airing over the past few years — given that mainstream cinema has more or less abandoned the sex scene, it is little wonder that it has snuck into the privacy of our homes — watching graphically depicted coupling should be nothing especially remarkable. But even so, the sheer amount of intercourse that is depicted in Hulu’s new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s hugely successful novel, Rivals, comes as a surprise.

rivals

Friday

Gareth Roberts

Where has the erotic film gone?

Sexy time at the cinema is becoming a thing of the past. That’s according to research on the prevalence of vices in top live-action films from film maven Stephen Follows. His study shows that drug taking and violence are as popular on screen as ever in the twenty-first century. Profanity has dipped only slightly, but sex has dropped off a cliff since the year 2000. We used to love what they used to call a steamy blockbuster. I came of age in an era where the “erotic thriller” — 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct — were the box office draws, in which big stars lost their drawers. Comedies like A Fish Called Wanda, Green Card or When Harry Met Sally relied on frisson and fizz for a large part of their appeal.

erotic

Monday

Cosmo Landesman

The tantric sex retreat that wasn’t

When my girlfriend suggested we go away to a tantric retreat for the weekend in the English countryside, I couldn’t believe my luck — and neither could my male friends. Suddenly I was no longer the guy with the weird-wokey-woman, but the luckiest man alive. And all because of that one little word: tantric. Say it and people instantly think: Sting and sex marathons. Strange esoteric erotic practices that produce cosmic orgasms. Now add “tantric” to “retreat” and it conjures up visions of couples doing it, throuples doing it, everyone doing it together in one great fireball of fornication! And all in the name of spiritual growth, of course. If only!

retreat

Thursday

Cockburn

Why did Nathan Wade agree to this CNN interview?

It was the power of love that halted Georgia’s election subversion case against Donald Trump, saving the former president for now from another possible conviction. Now, the emergence of juicy details of the romance — what Cockburn really wants to learn from the case — are being stymied.  Nathan Wade, the former lover of Georgia attorney general Fani Willis and a former prosecutor in the racketeering case, sat down with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday. Collins did her best to draw out the timeline of the affair when the interview was unfortunately interrupted.  What Wade did reveal is that he is still close with his former fling. “We are great friends. We speak regularly. The conversation has changed though,” Wade said.

nathan wade

Thursday

Cockburn

Will Stormy Daniels flee the country?

Stormy Daniels is joining the long list of celebrities who have threatened to flee America because of Donald Trump. Given that Cher, Barbra Streisand, Snoop Dogg and every other Trump-hating celebrity is still stateside, Cockburn is doubtful Daniels will keep her word.  In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Barrett Blade, Daniels’s porn star husband, revealed that the couple will likely leave the United States if Trump is acquitted in his hush money trial. "I know that we would like to get on with our lives,” Blade said. “I know that she wants to move past this.”  Blade added his wife’s future will be uncertain whether or not she wins the trial. “Either way, I don't think it gets better for her. I think if it's not guilty, we got to decide what to do.

barrett blade stormy daniels

Tuesday

Cockburn

Stormy depicts porn star heroism

Stormy Daniels isn’t just a porn star. At the time news broke of her affair with Donald Trump, she was a businesswoman, writer and a prolific director in the adult entertainment industry — talk about smashing the glass ceiling. According to Daniels, she was even complimented by Trump for her towering intellect the night they first met in his hotel room.  All of this feminist heroism — and more — was revealed in Daniels’s new documentary Stormy, which was released on Peacock Monday morning. The documentary chronicles Daniels’s affair with Trump, the hush money payments made during the 2016 election and life after becoming infamous.

stormy daniels

Monday

Charles Lipson

How Fani Willis trashed her reputation

Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis might reflect on the proverb, “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.” She will have ample time to reflect as she watches her career decompose in a Georgia courtroom and state Senate hearing. The old saying is directly on point. The spotlight searches out prominent people and their entourage. If they are caught cheating, they will shrivel under the glare. If they are caught lying under oath, their troubles will be far worse. That is exactly what is happening in an Atlanta courtroom to Willis, as well as her paramour, Nathan Wade, and Wade’s former law partner, Terrence Bradley, who was also briefly his divorce attorney. The spotlight is on Willis because she is prosecuting Donald Trump and a busload of co-defendants.

fani willis

Friday

The Spectator

Trump and Biden’s border battle

President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump made dueling visits to the southern border this Thursday, as the issue of immigration becomes the political priority of millions of Americans. The latest Gallup survey (February 1-20) reveals that immigration ranks as the most important problem ahead of the 2024 presidential election. For context, 28 percent of Americans see the issue as the most crucial one, which is more than the following issues combined: federal deficit (3 percent), crime and violence (3 percent), foreign policy/foreign aid/focus overseas (3 percent), poverty/hunger/homelessness (6 percent) and inflation (11 percent).

biden trump border