Sex

The alchemy wrought by a young man’s ability to gyrate and croon at the same time is notorious, turning shy mama’s boys from Presley to Rotten into love/hate machines. Something magical happens when someone – however unsightly – sings a song well, allowing him access to a quantity and quality of women undreamt of when he was just walking and talking like a normie. Two words: ‘Mick’ and ‘Hucknall’. The romantic image of the modern musician as tasty but troubled troubadour roving from town to town on his lonesome (except for his bandmates, backing singers, roadies, drug dealer and manager, of course) and taking sensual solace where he may is a powerful one, long propagated by he-sluts who would be intimate with a jack-in-the-box if it looked at them the right way.

This, we are told, is a very bad time to be a woman. When young, we're warned that we are sexual prey, privy to a misogynistic ordeal both on the streets and in the sheets, courtesy of the jungle of app-mediated romance. Despite being slaves to the gym and learning to pole dance, we still can’t win. We are locked in a never-ending hell spiral that sees droves of us as young as 18 racing to the plastic surgeon, desperate to fill our faces with Botox and hyaluronic acid in a bid to look sexier, younger, hotter, fitter, less tired and more like the stars of reality TV. Did I mention younger?  And now a new book, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith, has arrived.

What a year it’s been for sex on TV. As we emerge blinking from the annual glut of televisual entertainment, I can’t get over how far we’ve come. Bridgerton, Babylon Berlin, Lady Chatterley… everybody’s at it, with no period in history so tragic that a few cheap thrills can’t be extracted from it. If you’d have told the teenage me that in my lifetime I’d see a comedian with breasts playing a piano with a penis on television, I’d have very much approved; having seen Jordan Gray do so on Channel 4’s Friday Night Live last year, I wish I hadn’t. Sex on TV has been such a long, strange ride.

Only a mother could love a nepo baby – but there are some professions in which the far reach of the dead hand of nepotism strikes me as worse than others. In such frothy fields as modelling and television presenting, the prettiest face will still usually win out: look at Maya Jama, the new compere of Love Island, daughter of a teenager and a jailbird, who resembles a film star from the golden age of MGM – Fortuna’s apology for Brooklyn Beckham. Nepotism becomes far more damaging to the culture when it sidles out of light entertainment and into newspaper columns, novels and stand-up shows; when it moves the undeserving into jobs which need wit, because wit, unlike cheekbones, is something that can’t be inherited.

‘New year, new you’, or so they say. And as sure as eggs is eggs (particularly for the high protein advocates), new year’s resolutions for many will have revolved around the quest for a new body. I use the word ‘body’ specifically because our prevailing culture keeps finding new and alarming ways to reduce us all, but women in the most dehumanising terms, into mere bodies; bodies that can be chopped, changed, rearranged increasingly even to accommodate the outward trappings of the opposite sex. This manifests itself most completely of course in porn, as it always has, where the cold-eyed camera sees everything of the body and nothing of the person inhabiting it.