Sex

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

Liberté, égalité, nudité: France’s new sexual politics

From our UK edition

Montpellier France is going through a sexual civil war. After the great carnal outburst of the free-loving soixante-huitards, some have reverted to abstinence and prudishness, while others are pushing sexuality to new extremes. The crisis in French sexuality has exposed itself this summer as the clothes have come off. It’s not always a pretty sight, and not just because it isn’t true that French people don’t get fat. Major confusion on the shifting boundaries of corporal and sexual expression has grown into a peculiar conflict, exposing a national sexual neurosis.

Thursday

Katherine Dee

Don’t blame Victoria’s Secret

Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons is the latest in a spate of streaming service exposés that seek to deconstruct the image-obsessed culture of the 2000s and 2010s. Netflix’s documentary about Abercrombie & Fitch taught us that the retailer was racist, fatphobic and potentially brimming with predatory closeted homosexuals. Hulu’s three-part documentary series about Victoria’s Secret teaches us that the company was sexist, fatphobic and potentially linked to pedophilic sex trafficking. Both take issue with the billionaire Les Wexner, who these days is more famous for his association with Jeffrey Epstein than his role in defining mall culture. (His retail conglomerate was also behind The Limited, Lane Bryant, Bath & Body Works and several other retail staples.

Victoria's Secret

Monday

Francesca Peacock

Mary Gaitskill and the body electric

A man bites a woman’s breast with the aim of drawing blood, before taking a cigarette lighter to her stomach. The woman’s lack of arousal at this cruelty causes the man to enquire angrily why she lied when she told him she was “a masochist.” A young secretary is spanked by her boss for mistakes in her typing, before he masturbates over her naked behind. In a conversation between two young adulterous lovers, a woman casually admits to “flirting... like wild” with a man after she discovered he had “broke his girlfriend’s jaw.” These snapshots of masochism, warped desire and sexual depravity made Mary Gaitskill famous when her short story collection Bad Behavior first appeared in 1988.

Gaitskill sex pill sex
tina
Cosmo Landesman

My Tina Brown fantasy

I met my first wife at a party. I met my second wife at a party — and I’m convinced that I will meet my third wife at a party too. As I write, London is awash with parties, so my chances of finding my next wife are looking good. So far, I’ve met a sweet, bisexual marine biologist, a German curator — I’m not sure of what, but then everyone is a “curator” these days — a beautiful art critic who is famously bad in bed and one living legend. Her name is Tina. Tina Brown. Yes, that Tina Brown. Younger readers might be scratching their heads wondering: who’s that? (That’s like when young people say, “who are the Doors?”) She was the editor of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Talk magazine. (Gen-Z readers will be wondering: were they bands too?

Saturday

Casey Chalk

Why can’t a woman be a man?

Sex and gender were supposed to be allies in the identitarian march of the feminist left. But gender, it appears, keeps butting up against the reality of sex. "I will say this and everyone's gonna hate me,” singer Macy Gray recently told Piers Morgan, “but as a woman, just because you go change your (body) parts, doesn't make you a woman, sorry.” (She subsequently apologized for her comments.) Bette Midler also elicited censure for her recent tweet: "WOMEN OF THE WORLD! We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name!" (She later qualified that her comments were not intended to be “transphobic.”) Women, generations of feminists have been telling us, are supposed to be powerful. They’re supposed to be capable.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Why it has to be Kemi

From our UK edition

Have you considered a career in whoring? It can be very rewarding, apparently – especially financially. World’s oldest profession and all that, a job which offers the potential for travel but which can also be done without leaving one’s bed. A chap who teaches children about sex, Justin Hancock, thinks the kids should not write off prostitution as a viable career option. Justin’s various modules and Q&As on a whole array of vices and foul perversions, most of which he seems to like, are published under the name ‘Bish’.

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

The death of the ladies’ man

There used to be a tiny elite of men in London who, whenever their names came up at a dinner party, people would say, “Oh him! He’s slept with everyone!” Women would laugh — and then confess: yes, they had too. In those days they spoke of these men with great affection and even admiration. They were seen as lovable lotharios; incorrigible and irresistible. Men like me, racked with envy, would sit silently with forced smiles on our faces wondering: how did they do it? These men weren’t necessarily great-looking, super-successful or rich. They didn’t have charisma or much charm either, and yet they dated one beautiful woman after another. (One of these men dated both the young Rachel Weisz and Gillian Anderson.) What did these guys have that we didn’t?

lothario
vasectomies
Guy Shepherd

The coming age of the vasectomy

The Supreme Court has overturned the tables that have governed our mating and dating for the past half century. We ought now to expect a real-time rewrite of the sexual social compact. Absent Roe v. Wade, organized women of the world are going to be asking more of men. Women are rightfully angry with men in general, SCOTUS men in particular — and, if you’ve been a free rider on your partner’s reproductive sacrifices, you. Men, it’s time for our best behavior. We ought to expect a sustained pushback across the culture and public institutions. This is not a good time for a man to find himself in front of a family court judge for being delinquent on child support. Things tough at home with the missus? Open your mind and heart to marriage counseling. Work it out.

Taki

The delights of two-timing

From our UK edition

Looking back and trying to choose just one out of those incomparably bewitching women of one’s youth can be tricky. Giselle was definitely one of them – blonde, French, mesmeric, an apparition – but so was Kiki, very white-skinned, also French, patrician and very sexy. They were friends, those two, but they fell out after they chose the same boyfriend. They were also married to men who knew and liked the boyfriend, but back then such things were commonplace, and it was Paris after all. Both ladies are still alive and now quite old, Giselle a widow, Kiki a princess. There were many other beauties, of course, but those two stand out because of the timing: it was one hell of a winter month of sex and switch and switch again. Then the two of them got wise and it was goodbye.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Nancy Pelosi’s Italian job

The price of gasoline in California is averaging at over $6 a gallon. Inflation is 8.6 percent. The nation is reeling after yet another mass shooting, and the Democratic base is furious at their party for being caught flat-footed by the Supreme Court on abortion. How are our nation’s leaders responding? Well, Nancy Pelosi and her ample bosom are taking a waterfront stroll at a private beach club in Italy. The Speaker of the House looked well below her eighty-two years as she showcased her tanned figure in a turquoise-patterned bathing suit. Pelosi and her beau Paul are taking a break from, respectively, suspect stock trading and drink driving at the highly exclusive Alpemare Beach Club near Florence, owned by Italian opera star Andrea Bocelli.

nancy pelosi breasts

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Beware the sex party bores

From our UK edition

You know you’re getting old when your friends start going to sex parties. In our twenties, there were parties, and sometimes people would have sex at them. But they were never known as sex parties. Now we are firmly in our thirties, the phrase ‘sex party’ is creeping into everyday conversations alongside mortgage rates, nursery options and the cost of living. At a country wedding recently, I caught up with an old acquaintance. While we ate our lemon possets, I bored on about mother-hood and she bored on about sex parties. I can’t repeat what she divulged, but the conversation felt strangely familiar. It concerned racy outfits and group sex. The surprising thing about this was that it wasn’t surprising at all.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

It’s wholly impossible to look away: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande reviewed

From our UK edition

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande stars Emma Thompson as a retired, widowed religious education teacher in her sixties who books sessions with a sex worker (Daryl McCormack) because, for the first time in her life, she would like to experience good sex. Her husband was a roll on, roll off sort of fella, she’s never slept with anyone else and her body, she says, ‘feels like a carcass I’ve been dragging round all these years’. You have to admire her courage. I don’t think I’d even have the courage to book a hotel room for two hours in the afternoon. I’d probably pay for the night so that no one would know. Or would a week be safer? Written by author and comedian Katy Brand, and directed by Sophie Hyde, this is a riveting film and an important one.

Wednesday

Cockburn

The Lauren Boebert ‘escort-abortion’ hitjob stinks

Cockburn is no stranger to scandal — if anything he’s an expert in the field. With that cap on, he’s approaching the latest shocking allegations against gun-totin’, Biden-hecklin’ Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert with caution, as they don’t seem to pass the smell test. A website, neutrally dubbed “FIRE BOEBERT,” published a document on Tuesday evening containing the audacious claims that Boebert was an “unlicensed paid escort with sugardaddymeet.com” and that she “had two abortions.” If those allegations weren’t egregious enough, the site, which is run by a PAC called American Muckrakers, declares that Boebert was “hired by a wealthy male client in Aspen, Colorado, who was a Koch family member,” who then “introduced” her to Ted Cruz.

boebert

Wednesday

Sarah Ditum

A flawed utopia: The Men, by Sandra Newman, reviewed

From our UK edition

The problem for feminism is men. Not, specifically, in the sense that men are the source of women’s problems, although the statistics do tend to point in that direction. Feminism’s men problem is that, despite all this, women like men. Love men. One of the lessons of second-wave experiments in separatism is that the idealised man-free existence is always fighting against the gravity of affection. Sandra Newman’s novel The Men takes that quandary and does something clever with it. She imagines a world in which all the men and all the boys and all the trans women and all the male non-binaries and all the Y-chromosome-carrying foetuses are mysteriously spirited out of existence in one strange instant.

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

Is swinging back?

In 1974 I was living in San Francisco when I got a phone call from a man who said, “I’m having a few people over to have sex with my wife, would you care to join us?” Back in the 1970s, people like this were called swingers. I politely declined. To my amazement I was recently invited by a couple in their sixties to go to one of London’s secret swinging parties with them. This one, they assured me, was for the “older swinger.” (I didn’t think there were any still alive!) To swing or not to swing? That is the question I never thought I’d ever face again. It was a kind offer, but frankly I’m too old for those sorts of sexual shenanigans.

swinging
Lara Feigel

A child’s eye view: Fight Night, by Miriam Toews, reviewed

From our UK edition

Writing from a child’s point of view is a daredevil act that Miriam Toews raises the stakes on in her latest novel. The nine-year-old narrator is meant to have written the words that appear on the page. But then there is something inherently risky about Toews’s whole undertaking as a novelist. She has made her name in fiction that grapples with the restrictive Mennonite community in which she was raised – keeping faith with it and betraying it simultaneously. Her masterly Women Talking confronted the community head on, depicting the secret meetings of a group of women deciding how to respond to pervasive sexual violence.

Monday

Zoe Strimpel

Dan Savage has fallen out of love with the left

It was a suspenseful business, arranging to meet Dan Savage, America’s most famous giver of sex advice, LGBT rights advocate, porn-festival organizer and all-round cult figure. He was by turns stern, snappy and apologetic in his emails; he was brisk in his replies and then months would pass with no word. And so I breathe a sigh of relief when Savage approaches the outside table of the café I suggested in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle. He is wearing jeans, bright orange hightop sneakers and layered flannel shirts. He walks softly, with the supple watchfulness of a teenage boy. He also talks softly — a contrast with his more forceful podcast voice — apologizing for being five minutes late.

savage

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

The men who want to be castrated

Seven men were arrested in England last month on suspicion of involvement in a “castration cult.” Led by a man from London who apparently goes by the name “The Eunuch Maker”, the group is alleged to have castrated people and uploaded footage of the dangerous deeds to a pay-per-view platform. I suspect the use of the term “cult” is overheated. Certainly, castration has resulted from deranged theological or ideological tendencies. The Skopty sect in the Russian Empire believed in the removal of male genitals and female breasts on the basis that they represented the two halves of the forbidden fruit. (This must have made it remarkably difficult for the sect to grow.) Members of the Heaven’s Gate cult believed in castration as well, seeing it as a means of achieving ascetism.

castration

Thursday

Max Pemberton

Tina: the drug devastating the gay community

From our UK edition

Something is ravaging through the gay community, leaving death and misery in its wake, yet few are willing to talk about it. If I’d written that sentence a generation ago, I’d have been referring to the Aids crisis. But this time the enemy isn’t a virus, but a substance called ‘tina’ or ‘ice’. It is a methamphetamine – a stimulant drug that is either smoked or injected into the veins. Tina is also called crystal meth, made famous by the Netflix series Breaking Bad. It causes a rapid increase in dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline, which leads to euphoria, alertness, energy and self-confidence. It also triggers an almost insatiable increase in libido. It’s easy to see the appeal. But the downsides are horrific.

Thursday

Nicola Shulman

This be the curse: Philip Larkin’s big problem

From our UK edition

In matters of sex, Philip Larkin was late getting away. On his 23rd birthday, he wrote defeatedly to Kingsley Amis: ‘I really do not think it likely I shall ever get into the same bed as anyone again because it is so much trouble, almost as much trouble as standing for parliament.’ His 2014 biographer, James Booth, adds that Larkin was ‘still effectively a virgin… [and] Amis was puzzled that his friend failed to follow through his pursuit of sexual satisfaction’. There is no join-the-dots explanation for what Larkin called the ‘sex-fear and auto-erotic fantasies’ that beset him all his life. But in the centenary of his birth, it’s time to bring in the anatomical peculiarity incarnating his trouble with sexual fulfilment: his penis.