Sex

Mr Malcolm Layfield, the former violin teacher at Chetham’s music school, will have been celebrating this week after being found not guilty of raping a former pupil. Malcolm admitted to getting young (though over-age) girls drunk and to having sex with them in the back of his car. But he and his lawyer, Ben Myers QC, were keen to stress that the girls were all up for it. The one who cried rape even wore fishnet tights in his presence, for heaven’s sake. So no harm done, eh, Malcolm? All’s well that ends well. Raise a glass of that cheap Scotch you kept in the glove compartment for the kids.

Through some freak accident of PR, I was invited to an event organised by Tinder. If you’re over 40 or have become prematurely married, you might not know what Tinder is. It’s the mobile-phone app that facilitates courtship by allowing people to signal their interest in other users within a certain radius — you can set it to just a mile, if you’re in a real hurry to ‘connect’. It’s the modern human version of mating calls and frog croaks. A million Londoners are said to use it. But Tinder is now under threat. Trendy dating apps such as Happn or Hinge, which present themselves as a bit less nakedly

To the extent that Britain has philosophers, we do not expect them to address issues of any relevance to the rest of us. They may pursue some hermeneutic byway perhaps, but not the urgent or profound issues of our time. Roger Scruton has always been an exception in this regard, as in many others. He has spent his adult life thinking and writing about the nature of love, the nation state, belonging, alienation, beauty, home and England. But even his closest readers may gulp at the relevance of his latest subject matter. His new novel, The Disappeared, is set in the north of England and centres on the recent rape-gang

Most people look back fondly at their sex education classes, remembering the stammering, red faced teachers, the very silly jokes and the endless, irrepressible giggles. The real tragedy about this week’s proposals to teach five-year-olds about sex is that children that small may not see the funny side of it. Generations of policy makers, teachers and journalists have spent years agonising over the question, while generations of schoolchildren have spent the happy hours of the PSHE classes passing notes, thinking up absurd innuendoes and flirting outrageously, eyes shining with laughter. But perhaps the privilege of having whole lessons given over to such cheerful pastimes was only ever to be a

My foray into the world of online dating was short-lived. Within a few hours of my profile going live, a deluge of young men in their early twenties began to bombard me with messages. I was shocked and somewhat delighted. At my age, I had expected mostly sad widowers and maybe the odd divorced equine veterinarian, encouraged by the pictures of me on my horses. To attract a clamour of Ashton Kutchers was beyond my wildest dreams because, although I was now undoubtedly in the cougar age group, I really hadn’t seen myself as a Demi Moore. When I opened the messages, however, any notion that these handsome young men

Imagine that you became pregnant. Imagine that you were entirely dependent upon your husband. Imagine that you became the victim of domestic violence during that pregnancy, and your husband began demanding that you did not give birth to a baby girl. Facing strong social pressure, coercion, or violence to end a pregnancy because you are carrying a girl, is a reality for a disturbing number of women in Britain, according to women’s advocacy organisation Jeena International, which helps women escape domestic violence. To begin tackling this issue, a large group of MPs led by Fiona Bruce have proposed the Abortion (Sex Selection) Bill. This is a short and simple piece