Sex

Tuesday

Genevieve Gaunt

Searching for the one and only is futile, say the sexologists

In a tiny town tucked into the desert an hour’s drive out of Nevada, a legal brothel operates. Its ‘menu’ of services range from less expensive sexual intercourse to the most expensive, ‘the White Whale’, starting at $20,000. Dr Justin Garcia, there with his colleagues doing research, asked the manager, a woman with bright yellow hair and a Minnie Mouse voice, what the White Whale was. She explained: ‘Oh, that’s the full Girlfriend Experience… sex isn’t necessarily part of it, but you’ll get a hell of a cuddle.’ Two new books on the power of intimacy mark Valentine’s Day: The Intimate Animal by Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist and executive

Wednesday

Sean Thomas

An elegy for my libido

I’m not sure when my libido first began to decline. It was probably during the pandemic, so it went unnoticed – like much else. Given that I was stuck indoors, newly divorced, in a one-bed flat, with no garden, and only allowed out to walk for one hour a day in the driving sleet, I didn’t really clock that I wasn’t getting a lot of action. My main concern was not committing suicide through love-grief and loneliness. Also, I cooked several new turbot recipes. Then the tides of plague retreated and that is when I realised. Something in me had changed: and it was the ‘dogs of lust’, as John

Friday

Freddy Gray

Stormy seas, Trump’s revolution & Gen Z’s sex recession

43 min listen

Can Farage plot a route to Number 10, asks Tim Shipman in our cover article this week. He might be flanked by heavyweights – such as his head of policy Zia Yusuf and Conservative Party defector Danny Kruger MP – but he will need a lot more people to pull off his biggest upset for British politics yet. Where will they come from? And what’s the balance he needs to strike between being radical enough to win power but also without alienating significant chunks of the electorate? Plus, as former UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson breaks his silence – in this week’s Spectator – to argue that Europe

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

No sex please, we’re Gen Z

For many years now we have all been agonising over the fertility crisis. Why aren’t the kids having kids? It’s become a sort of parlour game, the swapping of the various theories. Is it the cost of living? Micro-plastics? Eco-anxiety? Tight underwear, I heard the other day, and snorted with scorn even as I tipped my son’s stretch-cotton pants 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

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

France is becoming a nation of sexless puritans

Bring back brothels! It’s not your typical political slogan, but Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has launched a campaign to reopen and regulate France’s brothels for the benefit of sex workers. In an interview last week Jean-Philippe Tanguy, one of Le Pen’s senior MPs, said his party would table a bill to reopen the brothels – known as maisons closes in France – which were closed in 1946. ‘The prostitutes would be empresses in their own kingdom,’ explained Tanguy. Le Pen’s party believes that regulated brothels would better protect sex workers from violence. But some on the left are outraged at the proposition. In an op-ed in the left-wing L’Humanité newspaper, 12

Thursday

William Atkinson

My teenage brush with a micropenis

Like Adolf Hitler, I have been involved in a Channel 4 documentary about penises. I also share a love for watercolours and a partiality for Wagner but that, I promise, is where the similarities end. But back to penises. The Führer’s genitalia – or lack thereof – is a feature of a new documentary, Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator. The documentary makers have examined a scrap of the bloodied fabric from the bunker sofa upon which Hitler blew his brains out and the long – but mostly the short – of the findings are that history’s most evil man likely had underdeveloped sexual organs, including a micropenis and an

Thursday

Rebecca Reid

Confessions of a reformed polyamorist

There is an adage, attributed to author Robert Heinlein, that every generation thinks it invented sex. This often means finding a ‘new’ way to conduct relationships. For my generation, the millennials, this came in the guise of polyamory. Sometimes known as an open relationship or ethnical non-monogamy, polyamory is the practice of dating and having sex with people other than your partner. It became fashionable in the 2010s and is now more popular than ever. Of course, open relationships have existed forever, and I’m sure the French would be furious at any suggestion that extramarital sex was invented by my lot. But we did usher in a specific style of

Friday

Julie Burchill

Celebrity sex isn’t what it used to be

Reading about the break-up of the 19-year marriage of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, I was interested in some comments from our old mate ‘A. Source’ about the possible cause. According to the Sun: ‘Keith put a brave face on Nicole’s raunchy screen roles and all the comments she’d make about her sexuality. But he didn’t react well when people teased him about Nicole getting it on with hunky younger guys, albeit only on camera, and it was a sensitive topic that became a real issue as time wore on.’ It’s true that Kidman – 58 – has made a speciality in recent years of getting her kit off in order

Thursday

Theo Hobson

The Church of England’s muddle over sex and marriage

Whatever you think of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, there can be no doubt about this: she firmly backs the Church of England’s current official teaching on sex and marriage. Indeed, as the bishop who was recently in charge of updating that teaching, it might be the case that she upholds it more completely and sincerely than anyone else. Perhaps some readers would like to be reminded what the Church’s current official teaching on sex and marriage actually is. It is this: marriage remains the preserve of heterosexuals. Homosexuals may have their unions blessed in church. Um… that’s it. That’s all that can be said for sure. What

Rachel Johnson

Jilly Cooper was utterly unrivalled

Jilly Cooper, the last great Englishwoman of my lifetime – after Queen Elizabeth II and Debo – has died. The lights are going out all over Rutshire. During her life, Jilly shone as an author, a friend and a person – the definition of effervescent. You had to meet her only once to become a founder member of the Jilly Cooper Adoration Society. When she wrote her last book, Tackle!, about a rural football club complete with ‘bitch invasions’ and ghastly Wags, I told her that, in a way, she was the beautiful game, only she gave entertainment to millions not by striking a ball but by putting one word

Monday

Rebecca Reid

Has Taylor Swift broken music’s last taboo?

As a woman in my early thirties, it is my God-given right – arguably my duty – to have an opinion when Taylor Swift releases an album. And it’s a role that I’ve always performed without compunction. But on this occasion – the release of album 12, The Life of a Showgirl, my ability to get into the weeds (does ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ represent close text analysis of Shakespeare?) was hampered by my shock at one particularly audacious lyric.  Previous albums have had the the odd raunchy moment. So when, on this new album, she sang ‘His love was the key that opened my thighs’ in a song titled ‘Wood’,

Thursday

Margaret Mitchell

The NHS is to blame for Bonnie Blue

Channel 4’s documentary begins as the ‘adult content creator’ Bonnie Blue (real name: Tia Billinger, 26, Derbyshire) prepares to beat the world record of men shagged in 12 hours. Spoiler: she beats it, raising the bar to 1,057, though she was a bit nervous that no one would show up. You might wish to see her cry – because you despise her, or because you need some sign she’s human – but the worst she suffers is a nasty flu. It does somewhat clarify things to discover that Bonnie Blue had been an NHS financial recruiter Bonnie Blue was prohibited from selling the tape on OnlyFans – the porn website

Thursday

Catriona Olding

I’ve rekindled my love affair with England

Late spring. Sitting in the armchair in the living room, I was chilly and disconsolate. My middle daughter was seven-and-a-half months pregnant and unwell. The pregnancy had triggered two serious autoimmune disorders. She’d been successfully treated for thyroid cancer a few years before, but this new disease was attacking her lower spine; she was exhausted and in almost constant pain. At times she couldn’t pick up her two-year-old daughter. I could barely afford to fill up the car, never mind pay for parking and a flight back to England, and every night lay awake worrying. Beside the chair to the left, a live rock wall, and in front, a wood-burner.

Thursday

Catriona Olding

My first ever blind date

Four of us go for lunch once a month. My hippy ceramist neighbour, Geoffrey, is a foodie and one of the best cooks I know. He was born a few years after the second world war and, along with his brother, who went on to become a Michelin-starred chef, developed an interest in food from his English, Belgian and Italian grandparents and Swiss mother. I couldn’t afford to heat the little painting studio downstairs this winter and have only sold one work since November, so our choice of restaurants has been necessarily modest. The menus include dishes made with items from the end of the butcher’s counter that I, vegetarian

Thursday

Louise Perry

Why OnlyFans has young British women in its grip

The porn star Bonnie Blue offers a straightforward explanation for her decision to join OnlyFans. She was in her early twenties, married to her teenage sweetheart, pursuing a career in recruitment and living in Derbyshire, the county of her birth. As she told an interviewer last year: ‘I used to work an office job, nine to five, sit in rush hour, get given 20 days’ annual leave. And for a while I’d accepted that. I was like “OK, this is what life is. This is as good as it can get.”’ But Blue (whose real name is Tia Billinger) wondered if life might not have more to offer her. So

Sean Thomas

A lament for the lads’ mags

Do you remember the lads’ mags? I do because I worked on them for years. FHM, Maxim, all those gloriously disreputable titles. I helped dream up the captions, the gags, the gonzo reportage, the phwoar-heavy covers. I also remember how they were reviled. Condemned by broadsheets, feminists, academics. Accused of objectifying girls, toxifying masculinity and encouraging men to enjoy cold lager, bare breasts and football gossip. Yet here’s the thing. When I contrast the world of lads’ mags with today’s bleak digital landscape, of AI smut and OnlyFans subscriptions, of performers mechanically coupling with a thousand men, cheered on by Insta-bots, the old magazines, even if sometimes crude or clumsy,

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

The naked truth about life modelling

When I left university, I prepared for a short spell of poverty while I sent off amusing and opinionated articles to newspaper editors who needed the work of smart alecks like me to entertain their readers. My short spell of poverty lasted 17 years. In the meantime, I survived on odd jobs, including a stint as a life model. ‘Starts at ten,’ said Piers, a friend who taught at a college in Kensington. Before my shift, I flipped through Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art in case a life model was expected to know the classical poses by heart. I imagined Piers starting me off with an easy one: ‘The

Thursday

Catriona Olding

Two years without Jeremy Clarke

Two years ago, at five to eight in the evening of Monday 22 May 2023, I ran into the department store Galeries Lafayette at CAP 3000 next to Nice airport, grabbed two black blazers and rushed to the nearest checkout. ‘Je suis vraiment désolé, Madame, mais nous fermons.’ ‘Please, it’s not eight o’clock yet. My husband died yesterday morning – I need a smart jacket for the funeral on Friday. There are no shops where I live.’ Shaking and fighting back tears, I tried on both in front of the two assistants at the till. ‘Quelle?’ They agreed on the first, and with no mirror close by I took their

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Pope Francis, my love rival

To be honest, I felt relief when Pope Francis died. This had nothing much to do with his regular assertion, in contradiction of Catholic doctrine, that all war is unjust. Or his view that Ukraine should have ‘the courage to raise the white flag’ to stop more futile bloodshed which ironically is (more or less) Donald Trump’s view. Or his suggestion that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. Or his more-the-merrier view on illegal immigrants. No. The cause turned not on politics but on the heart. However absurdly, I had come to see the Holy Father as a love rival. My wife Carla, a devout Catholic, was besotted with

Rod Liddle

In defence of virgins

If we were really an island of strangers, as Sir Keir Starmer attested this week, then it might be OK. The real problem is that we have to interact with the bastards, so they cease being strangers and start being people who have a function in our lives. The old cliché had it that in the UK you were never more than ten metres from a rat and this is probably still true, except it’s five metres in Birmingham. But it is also true that you are never more than ten metres from a skank. A foreign skank, a British skank, makes no odds. Someone pig-ignorant and witless but possessed,