Sex

Monday

Grayson Quay

What’s driving America’s sex recession?

Young people are having less sex, and not just because they’re getting married later. According to the General Social Survey, the percentage of never-married Americans between the ages of 18 and 35 who did not have sex in the past year rose from around 16 percent in 2000 to over 22 percent in 2021. Why is this happening? There are plenty of theories. In a 2018 piece for The Atlantic, editor Kate Julian came up with five: 1) porn and masturbation, 2) the elevation of other priorities over forming committed relationships, 3) the toxic dynamics hard-coded into dating apps, 4) advances in feminism that empower women to say no to sex they don’t want to have, and 5) an increase in anxiety disorders.

Wednesday

Julie Bindel

Most-read 2021: The Green party’s woman problem

From our UK edition

We're closing 2021 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here's No. 10: Julie Bindel's piece from March on the Green party's muddle over trans rights: At the Green party spring conference this weekend, a motion which sought to introduce a party policy on women’s sex-based rights was defeated. A whopping 289 delegates (out of 521) voted to not include biological females in the party’s list of oppressed groups. All the motion aimed to do was simply add a paragraph to the Green party’s ‘Our Rights and Responsibilities Policy’.

Thursday

Karol Markowicz

Life after sex

Sex is everywhere in America, except in the bedroom — or anywhere else you’d like to have it. This has been going on so long that it’s got a name: in a 2017 article for the Atlantic, Kate Julian called it the “sex recession.” The research she cites found that “American adults had sex about nine fewer times per year in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s.” Nine times fewer a year might not seem so bad, but every other marker of sexual activity was also down. A 2018 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that sexual activity had dropped among men between eighteen and thirty-five and women between twenty-four and thirty-five. Young people were having fewer sexual interactions and also fewer partners.

sex

Monday

Julie Bindel

Women don’t ‘consent’ to their own deaths

From our UK edition

A ruling by the Court of Appeal last week has further enshrined the notion that women can consent to their own death if the man responsible puts forward a defence that she died during ‘rough sex gone wrong’. In February this year, Sophie Moss, an extremely vulnerable woman suffering from a range of mental and physical health problems, was choked to death during sex by Sam Pybus. Although some press reports described the pair as ‘lovers’ there was nothing romantic about the relationship between the two. Pybus would occasionally visit Moss for sex, leaving his wife Louise Howitt asleep. There were no illicit candlelit dinners, no walks in the park, just sex with a woman often so drunk when Pybus turned up at her door that she would have been incapable of speech.

Saturday

Madeleine Kearns

The grim reality of gender reassignment

From our UK edition

Lisa Littman, a doctor and researcher, recently surveyed ‘detransitioners’ — people who thought they were transgender then changed their minds. The majority, 55 per cent, ‘felt that they did not receive an adequate evaluation from a doctor or mental health professional before starting transition.’ Sadly, it seems, their identity issues were more complicated than simply being trans. Many of these individuals are now living with the consequences of medical treatments that failed to help their gender issues and may have caused permanent physical and psychological damage.

Friday

Karol Markowicz

There is no case against Dave Portnoy

#MeToo started with Harvey Weinstein, ‎Matt Lauer, R. Kelly. Big names who did very bad things. Masturbating in plants, desk buttons that locked doors, women being held against their will, rape. But now we’re on to chasing down every woman a famous man has slept with to get a couple of them to say they had a bad time. A piece in Business Insider last week accused Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy of just that. Two women accuse Portnoy of sex they didn’t enjoy. If the era of #MeToo was kicked off with Portnoy instead of Weinstein, it would have been a complete bust. #MeToo caught fire because the accusations against these famous men were so major. The accusations against Portnoy are not. Portnoy has taken the accusations very seriously and has aggressively responded.

portnoy

Friday

Grayson Quay

A little less self-expression, please

If you haven’t seen the pictures of a Kentucky high school’s racy homecoming festivities yet, you might want to just close this tab and go about your day. Still here? All right, but I warned you. The pictures are SFW in the sense that you won’t get fired or anything, but you’ll definitely get some weird looks, so make sure your boss isn’t walking by. Coast clear? OK, here’s the link.

self millennials

Monday

Theo Hobson

Why can’t men write about sex?

From our UK edition

Not long ago I was a regular Tinder user. Having heard that gingers were romantically incompatible, I decided to mix work and pleasure and put this controversial claim to the test. I set up a sort of interview-date with a nice young lady called Laura, a former international gymnast who was working as a waitress, but looking for more permanent work. She sported a lovely glossy dark ginger mane. We weren’t getting on too badly, but not much of a story there. Luckily there was scope for deepening the research: we went back to mine, and a bit of horizontal research definitively established that the alleged incompatibility of gingers is utter nonsense, doubtless put about by jealous eugenicists. None of the above is true.

vaginas
Kat Rosenfield

The woke are abolishing women

Last week, the Lancet medical journal became briefly internet-famous when it published the following sentence on its Twitter account: ‘Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.’ The sentence is a pullquote from a bigger article, but boy does it capture the imagination on its own. Like a Hieronymous Bosch painting, you can return to it again and again, always finding something new and surprising to appreciate. There’s the musicality of it, all those four- and five-syllable words that roll pleasantly off the tongue. There’s the faintly macabre invocation of ‘bodies’, followed by ‘with vaginas’, suggesting a collection of corpses accessorized with (but not necessarily attached to) a bunch of birth canals.

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

When child abuse was avant-garde

Last month the New Yorker published an essay about a grotesque experiment that took place in West Germany in the 1970s, in which young boys who had been taken from, or abandoned by, their parents were placed with known pedophiles. It was no accident. It was quite deliberate. The powerful sexologist Helmet Kentler believed that pedophilic guardianship would foster an open and unashamed attitude towards sex that would preclude the development of fascistic attitudes. As the New Yorker says: ’Kentler’s goal was to develop a child-rearing philosophy for a new kind of German man. Sexual liberation, he wrote, was the best way to “prevent another Auschwitz.”’ A sensible reader could guess what happened to the boys.

pedophilia child abuse

Thursday

Stuart Jeffries

How Foucault was shielded from scandal by French reverence for intellectuals

From our UK edition

Consider the hare and the hyena. The hare, Clement of Alexandria told readers of his 2nd-century sexual self-help manual Paedagogus, was thought to possess both male and female sexes and swapped their roles from year to year. As for the hyena, it was believed to acquire an extra anus annually and ‘to make the worst use of these added orifices’, as Michel Foucault puts it in the newly translated fourth volume of his History of Sexuality. For early church theologians the moral lesson was clear: we must not emulate gender-bending hares or randy hyenas. Rather, sex should be procreative, not pleasurable; we must go forth and multiply, borne by duty, not ecstasy.

Thursday

Grayson Quay

The Brave New World of ‘sex-positive’ education 

The first time I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, I was thrown by the references to children as young as seven engaging in ‘erotic play’. Even in a work of dystopian fiction, I thought, that seemed a little much. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Because now it’s starting to happen in the real new world we live in. Last week, the Daily Wire reported that second graders at a Wisconsin public school have access to an online educational database that contains sexually explicit material. How explicit? One book accessible through the database contains ‘in-depth analysis of anal sex, oral sex, one-night stands’, as well as the use of dildos. Another teaches kids how to use Grindr and other ‘sex apps’.

bottom sex positive selfie

Wednesday

Debbie Hayton

New Zealand’s transgender debate is turning nasty

From our UK edition

New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the right to vote in parliamentary elections. But now, 120 years on from that landmark moment for female equality, Kiwi women are fighting a rear-guard campaign to defend the meaning of the word 'woman'. As well as dealing with the fallout from the pandemic, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government has been busy prioritising a bill that would effectively allow anyone to become a woman just because they wanted to. While Ardern is being cheered on by the transgender lobby, it has fallen to Speak Up for Women, a grassroots campaign group, to speak truth to power. Rather predictably, politicians seem unwilling to listen; worse, some are determined to stop anyone else hearing what these women have to say.

Monday

Phillip Nieto

Did Zack Weiner leak his BDSM tape?

A clip showing a New York City Council candidate gagged and in nipple clamps as a dominatrix poured hot wax on him caused an uproar Saturday. But details surrounding the video's release raise questions that could implicate the alleged victim. The Spectator has discovered the full-length footage of the candidate's BDSM session posted on an anonymous, now suspended, OnlyFans account. In the footage, Weiner, 26, is subjected to various forms of humiliation by a dominatrix in leather chaps, who is his ex-girlfriend. The 30-second scene was posted on Twitter last week by an account named '@smart_mistress', the tweet reading, 'My magnificent domme friend played with Upper West Side city council candidate Zack Weiner, and I'm the only one who has the footage.

zack weiner

Friday

Cockburn

CNN broadcasts BDSM

Did anyone else catch the sordid humiliation porn screened on CNN Thursday? The nine-minute clip featured a MILF-cum-dominatrix who works under the name Alisyn Camerota and a promising new adult star called Jeffrey Toobin (onlyfans.com/jeffreytoobin). It was Toobin's first appearance on the AVN-award-winning network since his eight-month stint in a dungeon. The little-pig-boy, 61, was locked up after one of his cam-shows went awry at his other employer, a top-shelf skin mag called the New Yorker. 'It's been a while,' Camerota begins. 'It has been a while indeed,' Toobin replies with a wry smile. Camerota then 'recaps' where Toobin has been for the last few months, as the two giggle to themselves. https://twitter.com/alisyncamerota/status/1403071356925775872?

jeffrey toobin

Thursday

Peter Jones

A sex education from Aristophanes

From our UK edition

The publication of the new Cambridge Greek Lexicon reminded the comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes of her frustrations at school, when she found that the lexica either translated sexual vocabulary into Latin or otherwise bowdlerised it. So when she read the comic poet Aristophanes, she decided that any word she could not identify meant ‘vagina’. Fair enough, but did her school not teach her that it takes two to tango? For the sexual organs, the poet’s hysterically anarchic inventiveness draws largely on rustic images of agricultural instruments, plants, animals, birds, and food, with military images from land and sea battles added for the male organs. Many of these terms are matching pairs (e.g. ‘bolt’ and ‘bolt-hole’).

Wednesday

Dominic Green

America’s race to the bottom

America has become a nation of butt fetishists. I’m not judging. I’m not calling for a moral crusade; it’s far too late for morality in America. I’m just observing the passing of one dispensation in manners and the establishment of another, like Talleyrand after the French Revolution. The bottom is one of the few areas in which the US can claim to lead the world. California, with its porn and internet industries, saturates the global imagination with images of the callipygous American butt in action. Rap videos, a hybrid of music and porn, teach twerking to the innocents of Asia. Anal sex has become so vogueish that Teen Vogue advises its readers on how to do it. This reflects the pornification of absolutely everything in the names of entertainment and personal freedom.

bottom sex positive selfie
young men
Zoe Strimpel

Why are young men so scared of sex?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition. Subscribe here. I am tired. Men — purportedly single and ready to mingle — have worn me out. Not, sadly, in the way one might hope but in the new, peculiar, nightmarish way of the times. Since becoming single two and a bit years ago, I have romped around a fair bit on the apps: Bumble, Tinder and lately Hinge. Interestingly, the only men who have seemed raring to go — and interesting, educated and good-looking — were under 25. Too young to have become the unwanted dregs, they are also too young to worry that an older woman (I’m 38) will badger them about kids. At first, I was dazzled by the idea of dating younger men. But the reality soon dawned on me.

sexual sex party
Mary Harrington

The sexual counterrevolution is coming

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition. Charlotte is a 23-year-old Harvard graduate. Beautiful and willowy, she grew up in — her words — ‘a super-liberal environment’. You might expect to find her Instagram full of sexy, pouting pictures. But Charlotte has deleted all the bikini photos from her online life. And six months ago, she embraced ‘modest dress’: nothing that exposes her collarbones or shoulders and nothing that reveals her legs above the knee. Narayan is seven years older than Charlotte. He is what matchmaking 18th-century matrons might have described as ‘very eligible’: a clean-living, highly educated and charismatic single guy with a well-paid job in tech.

Friday

Julie Bindel

Disabled men don’t have a ‘right’ to buy sex

From our UK edition

In the latest episode of ‘You couldn’t make it up’, a court has ruled that it is lawful for carers in particular circumstances to assist their clients in paying for sex. The case was brought on behalf of a 27-year-old mentally disabled man who was described as wishing to ‘fulfil a natural desire.’ Since when was paying for access to the inside of a person’s body for one-sided sexual gratification a ‘natural desire’? The ruling, unless successfully challenged, will have major implications not only for carers but for society at large. Government ministers have been granted permission to appeal the decision because it clashes with its aim to eradicate prostitution by way of criminalising the demand for sexual services.