A bald fact about this most famous of sex pests is that his appetites were, by their very nature, destructive — bad for society and positively pestilential for women. But the lending of his name to that sainted acronym, BDSM, has brought about a rehabilitation which blows the central problem of this muzzled cult wide open: that it’s not at all concerning for men to want to hurt women in the first place, and that instead of addressing these grim tastes, they should indulge them. The moral crisis of sadism is the engine of two parables of celebrity scandal this month, about author Neil Gaiman and the spidery metal rockstar Marilyn Manson (real name Brian Warner), and their frightening magnetism among vulnerable women. The first emerged in a mega-viral Vulture article with harrowing testimony from one principal accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich. The second came in the form of a three-part Channel 4 documentary, Marilyn Manson: Unmasked, with accounts from fans, bandmates and ex-girlfriends.

If the testimonies prove correct, both Gaiman and Manson saw sexual sadism as a way to challenge boundaries — a positively sophisticated indulgence, and evidence of their cultivation. But as Angela Carter argued in 1978, de Sade himself was no proto-liberator, no feminist libertine. From its roots, BDSM has served the ill intentions of violent men, and it remains predicated on the violation and humiliation of women to this day. Yes, there are exceptions; yes, the “community” is hot on consent. But as Kathleen Stock argued last week, consent is tenuous in a scenario where arousal requires people to suspend disbelief, to pretend someone is in pain or unwilling. The acceptability of BDSM now, couched as it is in flexible doctrines of consent, cows women into compliance for fear of being labelled intolerant — intolerant, that is, for wincing at the tastes of men who only want to fuck women they can frighten or hurt. In this (allegedly), Gaiman and Manson are in esteemed company — remember when Armie Hammer was accused of saying he would “barbecue and eat” a lover’s ribs?

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What feminists get wrong about kink

By Poppy Sowerby

The opening scene of the Manson documentary might begin to explain why sadism holds such sway among certain male celebrities. In Manson’s case, it was part of a pompous artistic endeavor: “Marilyn Manson is about transcending morality and sexuality,” he tells admirers in a backstage clip from early on in his career. Beneath his towering form, two young girls inexpertly kiss, awkwardly writhing for the singer’s delight. Grand statements of creative intent like this always seem irredeemably cynical with hindsight; this clip now reads as a group of perverted prats gassing off in lipstick and leather trousers. But the performativity of Manson’s sadism is important: at one point, his satanic persona is described as having a “WWE feel” — that is, an aesthetic of villainy which belies a careful, risk-assessed choreography. But it was not play-acting: according to one ex-girlfriend and accuser, Manson was able to “hide abuse by doing it during sex”, excusing away violence and coercion as part of exaggerated sexual roleplay. Equally, his cartoonish, evil lunatic persona does the same thing: beneath all this white paint, I am a serious artist. I will hurt you, but it’s all part of the show.

Similarly, Gaiman’s towering popularity in the world of fantasy fiction is contingent on the aesthetics of sadism. His message of sainted victimhood, of the way the young and powerless might prevail over their oppressors (notably explored in his semi-autobiographical novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane) relies on a preponderance of dangerous, monstrous freaks to be vanquished. Coraline, his young-adult hit, is awash with the blacks and reds of BDSM. The villain at its heart, the Other Mother, has hair “as black as coal” and teeth “as sharp as knives”, dark, red fingernails and a “jagged red slash” for a mouth. He could almost be describing Manson. And it’s telling that Gaiman’s alleged private endeavors mirror the strange darkness of his own villain.

An uncomfortable part of the Manson documentary’s “hiding in plain sight” narrative is the naivety of the fans. One interviewee is a woman who, at 14, established a group called the “lunchbox girls”, so called because they mimicked the band’s habit of posing with kids’ lunchboxes. The way she describes her friendship with Manson certainly sounds like grooming — he asked the girls to call him “Daddy”, received underwear pics from a graveyard photoshoot where the teens posed with sex toys and, autographing the girl’s lunchbox, wrote “To Jen, you cum-guzzling gutter slut, love Marilyn”. All of this, as an accuser called Bianca says elsewhere, was exciting rather than skin-crawling for the mere fact that it would have shocked their parents.

That’s how things go when you’re 14; indeed, it seems rebellion drove many of Manson’s young fans to buy into his predatory aesthetics. In one clip from outside a concert, a goth girl, who in another era might have been a blushing teenybopper, shouts “I wanna rape Twiggy!”, referring to another member of the band, Twiggy Ramirez. That she was compelled to say this shows how the language of sexual sadism is connected to rock-and-roll rebellion, and so is ultimately “safe”, part of the performance — an “in-joke”. But by definition, the power dynamics preclude this. If the documentary’s claims are to be believed, and Manson did pluck underaged girls from audiences and rape them on his tour bus, that young fan becomes a symbol of his victims’ vulnerability, and her joke about rape is sickly turned in on itself.

Manson’s own view on the matter is a little more straightforward: in an unearthed interview, he told Rolling Stone: “I’m not into rape whatsoever… I prefer to break a woman down to the point where they have no choice but to submit to me.” In this unbelievable defense, Manson says he cannot be a rapist because he’s not into it — he prefers other methods of leaving women with “no choice”. Little matter that this would seem to be precisely the same thing.

The magnetism of metal or goth scenes for awkward and vulnerable young girls is fascinating in itself and has parallels within BDSM. In each case, women seem drawn to these subcultures for their vague promises of being progressive and alternative, a respite for the marginalized and a way to process darkness. The tour-bus accuser Bianca speaks of a sense of kinship with other teens at Manson’s shows, who were invariably troubled, from “broken homes”. There is a similar black-lipsticked brokenness to Gaiman fans who, just as hypnotized as Manson’s, were taken in by his nerd-centric apparent sexiness, described in the Vulture piece as a “penchant for dressing in black, a shock of unruly black hair, and an erotic power seldom possessed by authors of comic books and fantasy novels”. “Women would turn up to [Gaiman’s] signings dressed in the elaborate Victorian-goth attire of his characters and beg him to sign their breasts,” we are told. One “fell to her knees and wept”. Gaiman’s look — that of the floppy-haired, mild-mannered intellectual — combined with his outspoken feminism was, if the allegations prove true, all part of the act, communicating a certain effete harmlessness.

A world preoccupied with shallowly designating men as “toxic”/”alpha” and “safe”/”sweet” disarms women against the fact that hot nerds are often the worst of the lot, beset as they are by the long shadow of teenaged awkwardness and rejection. Many of those men see themselves as outside of the dynamic of “women and their rapists”; rapists are hypermasculine bullies, but tender loverboys or gangly outcasts would never do that. Manson, conversely, leaps from the pages of a Gaiman novel — a villainous Sadeian caricature. This is not to say that Warner embodies the cruel core of sadism, rather the flatness of its grand claims about breaking taboos and sexual sophistication. If Gaiman’s public face was all children’s charities and comic books, it was equally confected — both men, in light of their respective allegations, were sad, aging clowns whose costumes furnished shameful appetites. In Manson’s case, there is a profound emptiness, a sense of wretched impotence, to his intent to shock for shock’s sake and in Gaiman’s, to his simpering desire for progressive acclaim.

Marilyn Manson, for his part, is no longer shocking anyway: the provocateurs of the 2020s are more about ribald female sexuality than male violence (allow me to introduce our readers to 21-year-old rapper Ceechnyaa, who has gained international fame for the line “I’m peggin’ that man at the back of the bus”). But the inheritance of those Nineties goth sex freaks is still rich, and the cult of violent satanism still has great purchase among young weirdos.

Only last week, a 19-year-old internet forum nerd called Cameron Finnigan was jailed for encouraging a girl to kill herself on camera as part of a Hitler-worshipping satanic cult linked to the Order of the Nine Angles. That same group had inspired 18-year-old Danyal Hussein to kill sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in a London park in 2021. The Order’s tenets, which a brief glance suggests involves Aryans taking over the Milky Way in a galactic empire, are tellingly tailored to sci-fi dorks. Members are encouraged to commit acts of violence and human sacrifice as part of a spiritual endeavor; it is no coincidence that this resonates with Manson’s stated aim to “transcend morality and sexuality”. The O9A, as it’s known, has inspired various metal groups, particularly among provincial Euro-goths, for decades, and satanic aesthetics more generally underpin metal as a genre, if only for its pearl-clutching potential.

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Neil Gaiman and the perils of BDSM

By Kathleen Stock

So, sadism continues to hold sway — and is as dangerous for women as it ever has been. The home of BDSM is not cellophane-sheeted “playrooms” at ticketed, consent-centric sex parties. The true consequences of sadism play out in quiet corners, abandoned buildings, internet forums, Hinge dates gone wrong. They play out behind closed doors — and women really get hurt.

In a noxiously “sex-positive” culture which increasingly privileges the titillation of men above the safety of women and girls, the only solution is this: we must return to stringency on the simplest demands, and jettison kink/casual-sex apologists. Don’t choke me, don’t hit me, don’t frighten me, don’t use me. Be intolerant, be prickly and uncool, if it keeps you safe. After all, a system in which it is fine to strangle a girl you meet on an app, or (allegedly) make a girl who nannies your young son vomit during fellatio then lick it up, is not one which is remotely feminist, even with that golden ticket, “enthusiastic consent”. Obscuring that fact, and keeping the lines between exploitation and experimentation hazy, is essential for predatory men if they are to continue to intimidate women into silence.

In the arts, the thrilling aesthetics of dark, twisted desire will, and should, always belong — think of the electrifying strangeness of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, or the strangled strains of the Velvet Underground’s Venus in Furs. This is no Mary Whitehouse manifesto. But when it comes to the real sex lives of real people, these celebrity stories show us that some men have used the grim utopia of BDSM, and its atmosphere of progressive sophistication, to conduct horrors. So do not be afraid to be disgusted — even if it is at the cost of some weirdo’s grand artistic and sexual mission to, as one of Manson’s school friends glibly puts it, “push boundaries”.

Alongside Gaiman, the main protagonist — also in the Tortoise podcast series which preceded it, containing some of the same allegations — was New Zealander Scarlett Pavlovich, now a mature student in the UK. We first encounter her as someone with a major crush on the performance artist Amanda Palmer, who also happens to be Gaiman’s wife and the mother of his child. Pavlovich is 24 when she first meets Gaiman, having been hanging out with Palmer for two years following a chance encounter on an Auckland street. Hours after arriving at his house to babysit, he inveigles Pavlovich into taking what she wrongly presumes will be a solo bath in an outdoor tub. He then allegedly subjects her to unexpected acts of nudity, digital penetration and facial ejaculation, and tells her to call him “master”.

Next, Palmer invites Pavlovich to live with her at a nearby property, and she enters into a loose nannying arrangement with the couple, albeit unpaid. Over the next few months there are further allegations of traumatic encounters with the lecherous sexagenarian: episodes of unexpected and forceful sex, as well as beatings with a belt, and the unwilling ingestion of various disgusting bodily fluids.

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Bad omens for Neil Gaiman

By Julie Bindel

Gaiman’s penchant for sadism has been confirmed to the magazine by various former partners, with one woman saying he was always “pressing her to do things that hurt and scared her”. Equally, though, the magazine related that “all of the women, at some point, played along, calling him their master, texting him afterward that they needed him, even writing that they loved and missed him”. In a statement on his website, Gaiman wrote this week that he has “never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone”. Though Pavlovich sent texts which suggested compliance with at least some of what was happening to her, she now says it most definitely was not consensual, describing it as rape and assault.

From this distance, it is impossible to say who is right, though the general grotesque opportunism of Gaiman’s behavior seems clear. The arguments about specifics will run and run, and I have no intention of getting involved. I simply point out that ascertaining the truth here is surely complicated by blithe acceptance of a thing called “BDSM”, a practice believed to possess the magical transformative powers of turning scatological acts of torture and degradation into a fun and sexy stolen afternoon.

The author of the Gaiman article, a journalist called Lily Shapiro, nicely sums up the ludicrousness of the prevailing cultural position. Straight after a description of a violent, physically painful encounter, Shapiro explains that “Had Gaiman and Pavlovich been engaging in BDSM, this could conceivably have been part of a rape scene, a scenario sometimes described as consensual nonconsent. But that would have required careful negotiation in advance, which [Pavlovich] says they had not done”. Later, she describes BDSM as “a culture with a set of long-standing norms, the most important of which is that all parties must eagerly and clearly consent to the overall dynamic as well as to each act before they engage in it”.

We are supposed to believe this, Shapiro declares, because there are experts that tell us so: “practitioners, including sex educators like Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy who wrote some of the defining texts of the subculture”, who “have stressed over decades” that active consent “is the defining line that separates BDSM from abuse”. Say what you like about the progressive’s tendency to think the worst of people, but the image of the sadist carefully doing his homework, underlining passages from dog-eared texts before venturing off to buy handcuffs and muzzles, surely speaks to a refreshing strain of optimism about human nature.

The fantasy that violence somehow becomes neutral or even good when accompanied by a resounding “yes” is crazy when you actually think about it; and is also belied by the heavy emphasis in the sexpert rulebook upon obtaining resounding expressions of consent at every stage, making it look more like a liability waiver than a responsible exploration of what participants really want. Meanwhile, back on earth, the whole point of BDSM is to mess around in the borderlands between yes and no; for what else does dominance and submission mean? Strictly speaking, it doesn’t count as either of these things if consent is fully and unambiguously present.

Aficionados might protest that what is sought is a pretense or play of dominance and submission, rather than the real thing — but presumably not too loudly or often, for fear of losing their erections. In order to be lost in the moment, it helps if you can mentally distance yourself from the recollected “yes” and focus only on the present “no”. And that’s not a fact about BDSM specifically, but more about the limits of immersive pretense; no theatregoer transported to Elizabethan times appreciates a mobile phone going off.

This preferred gap between the submissive’s vocalization of consent and the act itself makes the whole process somewhat risky for the sadist, as Gaiman has learned to his cost. Even in the best-case scenario, between these two moments there is likely to be enough time for the other to inwardly change her mind and so mentally retract her “yes” — thereby rendering what comes next as a violation according to BDSM health and safety protocols. And there is a further complication, relating not to the moment of the sexual act, but later. Namely, given the nature of what is often being done, submitting to a sadist (whether in “play” or otherwise) tends to produce certain desires in the submissive person that are particularly apt for later disavowal, after the fog of masochism has cleared.

This is because psychological as well as physical domination is a conventional part of the modern sadist’s repertoire. (For some reason, academia has an enormous interest in these transactions, thereby offering ample proof.) Verbal aggression and humiliation, insults, gaslighting, negging, and other pressuring tactics are all often priced into the erotic buffet along with pain, and here too the thrill apparently lies in pushing boundaries. Yet in other contexts — for instance, those said to involve coercive control — prolonged exposure to such strategies is recognized as likely to undermine a person’s secure sense of self. Some philosophers even argue that a person’s desires are “unfree” and not part of her “true self” whenever they are induced by such underhand and manipulative methods.

If this is right, there’s little reason to think the same tools must operate differently in explicitly sadistic relationships; a fact which leaves the “yeses” of submissive partners especially vulnerable to later retraction in the cold light of day. Perhaps even worse for ongoing mental stability, the gospel according to sexperts says that acts of punishment are supposed to be alternated with moments of solicitous affection from the sadist: what is grimly known as “aftercare”. Unless you are completely dissociated, it’s hard to think of a more deranging pattern of emotional engagement. Shapiro laments in her article that Gaiman didn’t offer any aftercare to victims, but it was surely a blessing.

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How vanilla is your sexual fantasy?

By Kathleen Stock

Delving into the past, and trying to remember what you actually wanted in some particular situation from months or years ago, is usually not just a matter of fishing about for the memory of some inner feeling. Most of us don’t have good memories for this sort of thing anyway. It is much more likely you will try to consider the situation you were once in with fresh eyes, and work out from first principles what was actually desirable about it (or otherwise). And if now, in retrospect, you find the situation you are recalling positively undesirable — if, say, you now realize you were being manipulated and pressured into doing things which, you now see, were really very bad for you — then there is a chance you might now say you never truly desired them in the first place, even though at the time you said (even “eagerly and clearly”) that you did. And you might even have a point.

To be clear: this couldn’t work as a legal argument, and nor is it an attempt to adjudicate Gaiman’s guilt or innocence. But it is certainly an argument against getting involved in sadomasochism in general. More often than not, it is very bad for the submissive in the scenario — not just because it leads her to physically dangerous situations, but also because it tends to put her in a state of mind in which agency is undermined and subsequent choices aren’t those of her true self, however confidently things started out. Meanwhile, for the sadist — and especially the famous one, as Gaiman has discovered — it leaves your good reputation a hostage to fortune, hoping that those with whom you had degrading sex in the past never properly get to know their own minds.

In fact, Gustavson himself — who is due to be sentenced this week after admitting conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm — maintained a now-defunct “Eunuch Maker” website, for men who are or aspire to be “nullos” (short for genital nullification). Not only did the site promote the niche fetish, it featured videos of these procedures for subscribers. Many of Gustavson’s co-conspirators have pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm, their crimes ranging from freezing limbs for removal to the resection of nipples. But legal cases involving instances of consensual castration are becoming increasingly common.

In 2021, Oklahoman newlyweds Bob Lee Allen, 53, and Thomas Evan Gates, 42, were convicted of a variety of offences — including practising medicine without a licence — after they were found to have performed backyard castrations in their isolated cabin. That same year, an Australian named Ryan Andrew King, 28, was given a three and a half year suspended sentence for removing the testicles of two men with their consent in a backpacker hostel. At sentencing, both of King’s “victims” gave evidence that they had “no complaints” with the procedure, with one adding: “I am eternally grateful to Ryan for enabling me to enjoy life.”

Eunuchs, of course, are nothing new. In ancient China, imperial servants were commonly castrated while serving as high-ranking advisors to royalty. In ancient Rome, slaves were castrated in order to remain docile and subservient, their lack of sex drive making them ideal guards for harems. In 16th-century Italy, boys were castrated to preserve their youthful singing voices. The male psyche has traditionally been preoccupied with keeping one’s balls intact rather than lopping them off. The fetishisation of castration, combined with a growing subculture of nullos who have acted out their desires, is an entirely contemporary phenomenon — one worth taking seriously, given that it presents profound challenges to liberal ideals of consent and bodily autonomy.

Online communities catering to nullo fetishists — which have been around since the late Nineties — involve sexualising the submissive role of castrato. Men attracted to these forums post gruesome fantasy fiction and share castration tips. In one fantasy story posted on The Eunuch Archive, a young prostitute in Victorian London knocks to the ground a man they suspect is Jack the Ripper. The Dickensian dominatrix then swiftly removes the Ripper’s penis with a scalpel. In another, slave boys wriggle against restraints as they are castrated like cattle and sold off to servitude.

Focused as they are on the derivation of pleasure from pain and humiliation, nullos are part of the BDSM community — but they are of course at the very extreme end of the sadomasochistic spectrum. Like all kinks, fantasies of castration have complex roots. A 2007 survey of men who posted on The Eunuch Archive found that castration ideation often correlated with a history of child abuse (which may include parental threats of castration), exposure to animal castration in early years and/or religious condemnation of sexuality, and being gay.

Less is known about the self-described “cutters”, who perform the backyard castrations, although the limited evidence suggests they are often motivated by their own sexual preferences for domination and control, probably supplemented by the desire to make money. One survey found that cutters were more likely to present themselves as traditionally masculine, and have histories of self-harm and sexually inappropriate behaviour, compared with their submissive nullo counterparts.

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None of this information necessarily enables the law to decide how to respond to cases of consensual castration. So far, the UK has relied on existing legal precedent, based on the House of Lords’ 1993 ruling on R v Brown — also known as the Spanner case — which upheld the conviction a group of gay men who had engaged in consensual sadomasochistic activities that led to injury. Recorded on VHS tapes discovered as a result of “Operation Spanner”, a police operation targeting obscenity, the activities included whipping, wax play and, much discussed in the tabloids, the nailing of one man’s foreskin to a block of wood — all of which were freely consented to. A 3-to-2 majority upheld the conviction on the basis that the unique harms of consensual sadomasochism were worthy of prosecution, regardless of the consent of all those involved. “Society is entitled and bound to protect itself against a cult of violence,” declared Lord Templeman. “Pleasure derived from the infliction of pain is an evil thing. Cruelty is uncivilised.”

This doctrine, that consent is irrelevant to certain extreme sexual activities, has been adopted wholesale in the UK’s recently passed Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which states that “consent to serious harm for sexual gratification is not a defence in circumstances where a person inflicts serious harm on another”. While one may be satisfied with the use of this principle in the case of Gustavson, it’s a peculiar feature of UK law that one’s consent to a risky activity is dismissed merely because there is a sexual component at play. In a liberal society, we accept that people can consent to all manner of activities that may harm them — from extreme sports to boxing matches to various forms of elective, unnecessary cosmetic procedures. Some, such as Dr Senthorun Raj from Manchester Metropolitan University, have argued that the Spanner case is nothing more than an expression of judicial disgust at unusual activities, particularly those pursued by gay men.

The 1996 Court of Appeal decision of R v Wilson certainly bares out this hypocrisy. In this case, consent was recognised as a defence where a husband was charged with branding his initials onto his wife’s buttocks with a hot butter knife. The court distinguished its reasoning from the Spanner case by categorising the activity as non-sexual and analogous to tattooing, despite the fact that branding is a known fantasy in the BDSM scene.

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The castrated will inherit the earth

By Daniel Kalder

And yet, in 2018 Brendan McCarthy, the self-described “body-modification practitioner” known as Dr Evil, was successfully prosecuted for consensual procedures performed at his tattoo parlour. McCarthy was convicted of three counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm for removing one customer’s ear, another customer’s nipple and splitting another’s tongue — all of which were done with full consent. Relying on the Spanner Case, the Court of Appeal found that consent to extreme body modifications is not a defence to criminal charges. In summing up, Justice Nawaz stated that “the personal autonomy of the appellant’s customers did not justify removing body modification from the ambit of the law of assault.”

One does not necessarily need to sympathise with the nullos or other extreme kinksters to quibble with the current state of the law. I’m of the view that the reasoning of the Spanner case and its recent codification in statute are not fit for purpose, as they wrongheadedly prioritise “social harm” over actual harm. A different model is required, one that understands the capacity for adults to consent to harm but allows some protection for the most vulnerable. Does this mean we should allow live-streamed castration surgeries without any recourse to the criminal law? Not in my view. Even the most ardent liberal understands the need to deter people from self-destructive behaviour and protect against exploitation.

It’s hard to see how the removal of a submissive’s genitals for sexual pleasure is anything other than gross negligence. However, that hasn’t stopped some groups from trying to legitimise the practice. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) recently included fresh guidelines for the treatment of “eunuchs” in its Standards of Care. These guidelines disingenuously downplay the sexual motivations of nullos, choosing to frame their desires as coming under the transgender umbrella — a framing with which most self-described nullos do not agree. Most view themselves as men who wish to fulfil a sexual fantasy.

Before we start going down the road of medically approved nullo surgeries, which already occur to a limited extent in the United States, it’s worth stepping back to appreciate that this kink begins as sexual daydreaming. At least one online survey of nullos found that the vast majority of people who engage in discussions about these desires have no interest in actually being castrated. Once upon a time, keeping unsafe fantasies purely in one’s own mind would have been seen as the sensible and ethical choice.

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The case for the sexual revolution

By Kat Rosenfield

One case I often raise to challenge the liberal sensibilities of my students is that of German cannibal, Armin Meiwes, who was convicted of manslaughter in 2001, after he killed and ate a man named Bernd Brandes — with his full consent. The pair met on a website called The Cannibal Café, which catered to individuals interested in eating a person or being eaten. Most people who hear this story tend to think Meiwes deserves to be punished by the criminal law, regardless of the consent involved — particularly because Brandes was not a well man, having suffered from depression for much of his life and having what prosecutors called “a strong desire for self-destruction”.

In cases of BDSM, it is clear that a duty of care is owed by the “dominant” (or “active”) party in the activity to the “submissive” (or “passive”) party: the dominant has an obligation to protect against unnecessary psychological and physical harm to the submissive regardless of consent.

This understanding of relational obligations had pride of place within BDSM communities under the banner of “safe, sane and consensual” — a motto coined in the Eighties. As a sign of our times, many BDSM groups have now moved away from the ethos of ‘safe, sane and consensual’ in favour of a model of ethical conduct known as “risk-aware consensual kink”, or RACK. RACK reflects a distinctly libertarian approach to BDSM, born out of a sex-positive turn that prioritises consent over considerations of health, safety or dignity. The removal of the “sane” element was justified on the basis it is “ableist” to deny people suffering from chronic mental health issues or severe trauma the pleasures of extreme BDSM. Under this model, many forms of extreme BDSM — from choking till unconsciousness to knife play — are legitimised as “ethical” merely because all participants are well-informed of the risks and fully consent. But the extreme cases filtering into the courts would suggest that this shift in the “rules” around BDSM has been dangerous.

As such, it seems appropriate for the law to define when the dominant’s disregard for the submissive’s wellbeing becomes so abhorrent that criminal punishment in warranted. In the case of Meiwes, clearly, he was aware that anyone seeking to be killed and eaten was vulnerable, yet he chose to end the life of another to fulfil his own deviant fantasies. This is objectionable, despite Brandes’s consent. When it comes to nullos, the actions of self-described cutters in performing unsafe, permanently damaging procedures on others — for the sake of a sexual kink — very much reflects the kind of gross negligence deserving of criminal punishment. The law needs to reflect the traditional, ethical model of BDSM: it would thereby allow for most “safe” forms — while protecting against unconscionable acts of violence.

At the opening, Burtonport’s mayor cut the ribbon. The community expressed pride. But the school wasn’t for children: it offered adult women — paying guests — the opportunity to roleplay as schoolgirls for a holiday.

The story of this strange establishment isn’t just about ooh-la-la play-acting. The house was home to the “Silver Sisterhood”: a female separatist subculture so reactionary they wore Victorian clothing, rejected electric lighting, and refused to listen to music except on a wind-up gramophone. And yet, its members were in some ways 50 years ahead of their time: forerunners of reality-warping contemporary phenomena such as BDSM, cosplay, computer gaming — and also the weird online Right.

The roots of this sect reach back to mid-century counterculture Oxford — and, still further, into the febrile occult subcultures of nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe. There, a group of eccentric scholars and antiquarians began positing a syncretic “Perennialist” or “Traditionalist” doctrine of eternal, immutable, spiritual truth, evident throughout all traditional cultures – but that had been in decline since the Renaissance. The principal exponent of this outlook was the French writer René Guénon (1886-1951), whose The Crisis of the Modern World (1946) sets out his doctrine of modernity as decline.

Where Guénon’s work is relatively apolitical, Traditionalism’s other leading light was the aristocratic Italian writer and one-time Dadaist painter Julius Evola (1898-1974), a pagan monarchist and esoteric race theorist so far to the Right that in 1942 his passport was confiscated by the Italian Fascist party for political extremism.

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Who will stand against Progress?

By Paul Kingsnorth

Traditionalism’s legacy has spread in some strange directions since. Those influenced more by Guénon today include King Charles, for example, and, on the more Evola-flavoured side, Right-wing figures including Trump’s one-time strategist Steve Bannon, and “Putin’s Brain” Aleksandr Dugin.

That legacy also includes the Silver Sisterhood. According to a 2022 BBC interview with one of its founders, who now goes by the name Mary Guillermin, it all began at an Oxford feminist consciousness-raising group in the Seventies, exploring ancient goddess worship. Presumably that was also where Guénon got into the mix; in any case, what emerged was an all-female Perennialist group, keen to put their Goddess-tinged ideas into practice.

This they did this first at Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, where they tried to live as though men and modernity had simply never happened — even coining their own pseudo-ancient dialect, “Rhennish”. This group then found its way to Atlantis House, via a previous social link to the “Screamers”, to pursue spiritual withdrawal from modernity. An American radical women’s magazine recounts the experience of visiting, in early 1984, what sounds like a devout, low-tech pagan feminist sect: “I enjoy praying, wearing skirts among women, living in a structured household with a low technological level, and dissolving somewhat the accumulated patriarchal grime in my brain cells”.

But with money constantly an issue, the group’s commitment to formal hierarchy seemed to offer a more lucrative business opportunity than craft shop and tea room — and thus a disciplinarian retro-roleplay establishment was born: St Bride’s School for Girls. With Guillermin (then calling herself Brighe Dachcolwyn) as headmistress, the prospectus promised a “total experience” of vintage-themed, all-female schoolgirl roleplay. Journalists descended, fascinated by the surreal combination of Victorian dress and lifestyle with discipline so strict as to hint at the fetishistic.

Guests, meanwhile, extolled its immersiveness, with one telling the BBC: “It’s an entire world. It envelops you.” This is the consistent theme in the bizarre history that followed. Guillermin, in her 2022 interview, describes their creation as a key spiritual practice for the early community: a practice she calls “living theatre”.

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Along with exploring the mind-altering effects of action roleplay, the group also pursued another emerging form of world-building: text-based adventure gaming. For paradoxically, despite ostensibly rejecting modernity out of hand, the women of Atlantis House also made pioneering contributions to early gaming, developed by the mysterious “Priscilla Langridge”, a founding Silver Sister who often appeared veiled, and refused ever to be photographed by the press. The two most noted of Langridge’s games were “The Secret of St Bride’s”, published 1985, (you can play it online here) and a “Jack the Ripper” game, the first such creation to receive an 18 certificate.

According to some reports, the mysterious Langridge was a Sixties Oxford theology scholar, who played a key role in developing the group’s founding “Aristasian” religious outlook: a blend of Perennialism and Seventies feminism with both esoteric and exoteric components. The esoteric dimension of this worldview was most clearly set out some years later, in The Feminine Universe, where the probably-pseudonymous author “Miss Alice Trent” argues that very earliest instances of Perennial Wisdom were feminine, because “the original Creator is feminine”.

Since then, though, the world has declined from the primordial eternal truth, and expelled the divine feminine principle from mainstream culture. This decline reached its nadir in “the cultural collapse of the 1960s”, which Aristasians call “the Eclipse”. Everything since that time is referred to as “the Pit”: a hellish apotheosis of patriarchy “in which the Masculine Principle has come to dominate the culture absolutely, extirpating femininity even from the heart of woman itself”.

For its original adherents, Aristasianism was a self-contained esoteric outlook, with a practice of “living theatre”, ritual goddess-worship, and technological simplicity. For those who didn’t go home again, the immersiveness could be too much. One woman, “Sophia”, spent nearly a year as a “maid” in the house, where she was frequently beaten; in the end she escaped and later brought criminal charges against Guillermin for assault.

But by then things were already coming apart for the larger experiment. In 1992, not long after “Sophia” departed, so too did the Aristasians. Amid a dispute over property ownership, two of the previous Screamer owners broke into Atlantis House, where they found a dark, musty interior with almost no modern appliances or conveniences — and in a room upstairs, a row of tiny desks and a blackboard, complemented by willow canes leaning against the wall. According to reports at the time, the house was also strewn with antisemitic and sadomasochistic literature, along with correspondence between Guillermin and then-BNP leader, John Tyndall.

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Even after this scandal-ridden dissolution of St Bride’s, though, “Aristasia” lived on: as reactionary as ever in its aesthetic, and increasingly BDSM-flavoured in its income streams. In 1993 Guillermin (now calling herself “Miss Partridge”) and Langridge cropped up again in Oxford, this time supporting an anti-metric campaign, hosting “Romantia” retro soirees, and offering discreet corporal punishment experiences. By this point, the more exoteric Aristasian mythology appears to have solidified: a kind of female-separatist high fantasy, with anti-technology retro styling and a side order of BDSM. In this world, Aristasia-in-Telluria is the corrupt, earthly imitation of the real world: Aristasia Pura, a parallel universe, world, existing on a different planet sometimes called “Herthe”. There are no men, and the two sexes are blondes and brunettes, respectively submissive and dominant.

Around the same period, the group founded Wildfire Publishing, which produced female-centric BDSM literature, including a title called The Female Disciplinary Manual, which is much what you’d expect. According to press reports of its 1995 launch, at that point there were several full-immersion Aristasian houses dotted around England, where members lived out the Aristasian reality including its practice of corporal punishment.

Certainly, at least one such establishment existed in 1996, when Channel 4 made a documentary about it. Guillermin, now styling herself “Miss Martindale”, features heavily, teaching lessons and disciplining “girls” for minor infractions. At Wildfire Publishing, meanwhile, fantasy, reality, and Perennialist theology found their most effective delivery mechanism yet: not video games, but fetish literature. The 1996 Children of the Void informs readers: “Morally and culturally, civilisation has ended, just as completely as it would physically have ended if it had been obliterated by atomic bombs.” Meanwhile the narrative mixes expositions of Aristasian feminine essentialism and slightly leaden dialogue with a hefty side-order of spanking porn.

It ought to surprise me that mashing up Right-wing reactionary occultism with Seventies radical feminism should produce mystical cosplay seasoned with BDSM. But somehow it doesn’t. Perhaps the extremism scholar Jeffrey Kaplan is right about the “cultic milieu”: that what matters for fringe ideologies isn’t their place on some imaginary political compass, but how far they are from the mainstream. But more than trying to place Aristasia politically, their enduring interest lies in the dedication they showed to testing just how far you can warp reality through force of play-acting.

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“You can call it therapy,” Guillermin said in 2022 of the group’s “living theatre” practice, “or you can call it magic”. Was there really something occult going on? Or were they just kinky weirdos? Guillermin happily acknowledged in 2022 that Jack the Ripper, which despite its 18 certificate focused more on occult and Masonic subplots, was designed for “philosophical education”. And she repeatedly dismissed regular “kink” devotees as “silly monkeys”.

Whatever the original intent, though, the richness of Aristasian experiments in parallel realities collapsed with the ascendancy of the central, technological alternate reality that today structures nearly all of culture: the internet. By the end of the 2000s, Aristasia had largely lost its hold in “Telluria”, becoming an online-only fandom that finally imploded in a dispute over anime. Guillermin now resides in California, where she works as a therapist espousing the same “divine feminine” spirituality as ever.

But perhaps it didn’t fail. For Aristasia’s immersive practices — if not the aesthetic — are now almost as mainstream as the internet. The group was well ahead of the curve in realising the potential of computer gaming for those who dream of other worlds. And multiple reports suggest that Langridge was actually male, implying another type of personal interest in seeking to alter reality through performance.

More generally still, Aristasian “living theatre” anticipated cosplay. Internationally popular today, and usually viewed as a fun, it also attracts a minority who, like Guillermin, treat the hobby as a kind of consciousness-altering magic. Meanwhile, the notion that one can alter the world by “LARPing” — acting as if your version is already true — has become a crucial political concept in a world that appears increasingly unreal.

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Meanwhile, Wildfire Publishing and the broader Aristasian fixation on power, hierarchy and corporal punishment has now become so normalised today that some even claim it’s reasonable to ditch a partner for not being kinky enough. And like cosplay, BDSM also attracts a minority who view it as something altogether more mind-altering.

So Aristasia succeeded beyond measure, in propagating previously mystical practices into mainstream culture. But it failed, just as signally, to have any effect on post-Sixties culture, except in pioneering the virtualisation of reactionary politics. For while the group’s actual links to the Right are ambiguous, the Aristasian route from efforts to do Traditionalism “IRL”, all the way to purely virtual fandom, reflects a broader contemporary tendency among the weird Right. Here, even as the liquefaction of “traditional” social forms seems ever more complete, nostalgic visions of bygone ages flourish: visions that, however, never seem to make it out of the digital realm.

What, then, is the lesson of Aristasia — whether for reactionaries, or anyone else? It is surely an ambivalent one: that the easiest dimension in which to create your own reality is the internet. But this comes at the price of being ever less able to realise your vision in real life. For that, you still need charismatic leadership, quasi-religious doctrine, real-world community, and a willingness to look silly in the eyes of the world. For those who embrace this more difficult path, though, the story of Aristasia offers a backhanded kind of hope: that if you roleplay hard enough, then even in apparent failure you end up shaping the future.

Florence Read: Louise, you have made a case against the sexual revolution. What is it?

Louise Perry: My argument starts from the somewhat controversial recognition that there are some very important physical differences between men and women. Women are the ones who get pregnant; we’re much smaller than men; we’re much more vulnerable to violence in any kind of heterosexual encounter; we suffer all the negative consequences of hormonal birth control.

There are also psychological differences between the sexes, which very strong evidence suggests are at least partially innate. On average, men are much more interested in casual sex than women are, and they’re also more interested in things like watching porn, buying sex — doing all the things that have become much more socially acceptable post-sexual revolution. 

The argument that I make is that even though there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, a culture of sexual hyper-liberalism suits men much more than it does women, in terms of their preferences. The sexual revolution encouraged women to imitate masculine sexuality. And that is not good for the well-being of women.

FR: Aella, you are a porn performer. Do you think that you are imitating male sexuality in your everyday work?

Aella: Yes. A lot of what you said I don’t disagree with. Porn is purchased mostly by men. Men are typically the primary consumers of the content that I create. Female purchasers of porn basically don’t exist. A good chunk of women do in fact watch porn, but don’t typically pay quite as much.

FR: What’s the problem with that? Louise, what is your issue with the male-dominated world of sexuality?

LP: One of the ways in which women are quite different from men is: we have a much lower sexual disgust threshold. It’s much easier for us to get “the ick” in a sexual encounter. Women tend to be much choosier about their sexual partners than men are. There’s a very obvious evolved reason for this: up until five minutes ago, we didn’t have access to reliable contraception, which meant that having any kind of sexual encounter could lead to pregnancy. So it makes sense that women have evolved to be choosy about who they potentially get pregnant from: is he going to hang around, is he going to be a good father?

And the problem with trying to override that choosiness — trying to have sex like a man and trying to regard sex as casual: just a leisure activity without any sort of innate meaning or specialness — is that it forces women to suppress that instinct. It often causes distress. There’s a whole genre of articles in women’s mags about how to stop yourself catching feelings — strategies that you can use during sex to dissociate almost, to not bond with your partner. It’s things like: don’t make eye contact, take certain drugs, get drunk. Just look at the orgasm gap: the fact that most women don’t orgasm in casual encounters; women are much more likely to orgasm with long-term committed partners. Often women talk about casual sex as if you have to run the gauntlet: this is a phase in your life that you have to go through, the hook up phase, on the route to a more committed relationship.

FR: Aella, you’ve described yourself as polyamorous. Do you feel that you are in distress?

A: No, not at all. Polyamory has been absolutely fantastic. But I feel like the crux of the issue is: what percentage of women are having a bad experience of casual sex? Is this thing inherently damaging? People are kind of unskilled at casual sex. I went through a couple of different phases of casual sex, and the first phase was pretty terrible, understandably. No orgasms. But if you are told often that casual sex is bad for you, you’re going to re-parse casual sex as having been bad for you.

I lived in a house full of cam girls for a year. We were very close: we worked together, we talked about our deepest hopes and dreams. And we didn’t hide anything; we bitched about it quite a lot. Fast forward almost 10 years. One of the girls happened to date a bunch of men who really don’t like sex work. And she, in my opinion, revamped her past in order to be like, “Ah, that experience was damaging for me”. And I was like: “Bitch, I was there. I heard you talking about it at the time. There was no hint that any of this was bad for you.” When you enter a culture that’s feeding you this idea that you should feel bad about what you went through, you’re going to reverse develop this narrative.

To be fair, this can happen both ways. A lot of people will try to tell women that casual sex was definitely good for them, and they should feel good about it. Any narrativising, trying to tell women what they should feel, is, in my opinion, bad.

My ideal would be to ask women: do you actually like what’s going on or do you actually not? To what degree are you just trying to conform to other people? I think that’s a message that would result in a lot of people realising that they don’t want to have casual sex. And maybe a lot of people realising that, in fact, they do.

LP: I do agree with you that the power of narrative is amazing, and we restructure our memories according to narrative. There is a phenomenon, though — I don’t know if this necessarily applies to camming — but, a lot of women who’ve done in-person prostitution (particularly the worst end: street-based, brothel-based prostitution) say that, when you’re in it, believing a narrative that it’s okay is the way you survive. It’s the way you get through what is a fairly terrible experience.

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FR: There are many jobs that people do that are unpleasant, and they have to do for money. What makes sex work any different, Louise?

LP: The idea that sex is like any other kind of social interaction — comparable to working in a factory, to shaking hands, to making coffee, going surfing — I call that, in the book, sexual disenchantment. It’s this idea that comes out of the sexual revolution, that all of the religious, bourgeois, traditional norms of the past had to be done away with. The idea of sex having any kind of special status, let alone sacred status, had to be done away with in order for people to shake off the oppressive shackles of the past. And I think the problem with that idea is twofold.

One, I don’t think people believe it in the vast majority of cases. They overwhelmingly don’t behave as if sex is like anything else. There are people who do polyamory well and enjoy it. There are also, on any given platform devoted to discussion of polyamory, people really struggling with jealousy — finding it really, really difficult to suppress that instinct to view sex as being unique compared with other kinds of relationships.

And the problem with trying to pretend that sex is just like anything else: if you can’t have a special status for sex, you also can’t have a special status for rape, which we do in law. We recognise that rape is worse than theft — instinctively, and also in our legal codes. We recognise that sexual harassment has a uniquely harmful effect on its victims.

FR: Aella, do you think that sex is sacred?

A: I agree that for some sections of the population, sex is treated very seriously, and in others, it’s not. My guess is that people are much more flexible along the spectrum than you might think.

I worked at a factory — terrible hours — and then I escaped into sex work, and eventually into prostitution. After I did this, I was shocked that people had placed so much meaning on sex, in a way that prevented me from escaping terrible jobs to begin with. Because I didn’t go straight into sex work because of that meaning that people placed on it. And then when I did, I was like: “Fuck that, that meaning that people loaded up on to sex, prevented me from living basically my best life.” And I know a lot of other sex workers who feel the same way. And I’m not saying that everybody should. I also know some sex workers who tried sex work, and they were like: “Shit, I can’t not have the meaning here”. 

My overall issue here is: people are pointing a laser eye at the non-standard, non-normal, deviant types of sexual approaches than they are at the conservative, socially-accepted ones. You’re correct that a lot of polyamory discussions are talking about jealousy issues, but monogamy also has dead bedroom problems. Both are relationship structures that require some sort of negotiation of your desires, and what you can achieve in your life. And both of them have pretty severe downsides. And as a sex worker, I see a huge amount of the downsides in monogamy, from men who come see me because of failures in their monogamous relationships.

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FR: If you were not there to service their needs, do you think they would turn back to their partners and have a frank conversation about their sex life? Or do you think that you are offering them a way out?

A: I would ask the guys that I saw: “Are you married?” And if they said, yes, then I’d ask: “So why are you seeing me?” The general sense that I got was that most of them had wives that weren’t interested in them anymore. Basically wives that had a bunch of kids, or had health issues, and their sex drive was zero. And sometimes I would ask: “Well, have you considered bringing it up with her? Have you talked with her about it?” And the majority of their responses — I’d say 60 to 70% — were horror. They were like: “I don’t want to destroy my entire life.” It was common for guys to be like, “If I bring it up with her, I think she would leave me.”

A lot of the men had been sexless for ten years before finally trying to find a sex worker. Most men don’t feel great about making their wife unhappy, potentially, to do this. A lot of them are risking damage to their life. Most guys I talked to, I got the impression that they had made at least some effort. Some of them, no — some guys were like, “Fuck it, I don’t give a shit. Our relationship is totally separate from this, and I’m just going to fuck other people, because that’s what I want” — but it was not the majority. In fact, I got the impression that seeing these men actually probably helped save them from divorce, because their other option was leaving their wife because they couldn’t talk. So it was this safe, tiny outlet that allowed them to maintain longer, more dedicated relationships.

LP: Presumably, their wives would have left them if they’d known though. So these were secret encounters. Monogamy clearly has its downsides too, but everything in the whole entire world has trade-offs. I completely take your point that there are some people for whom polyamory is great, there are some people for whom sex work is great, there are some people who are just temperamentally much more suited to non-conventional sexual lives. But I think the other thing that I’m interested in, and which is much more difficult to talk about within a liberal framework, is how this scales.

So one of the things that I write about in the last chapter of my book is the fact that there are all sorts of ways in which societies that have a monogamous marriage system do better than societies that don’t, even though only about 20% of societies on the anthropological record have been monogamous. They tend to be more affluent, they tend to have lower rates of crime, they tend to have lower rates of spousal abuse, child abuse, compared to polygamous cultures.

A: I’m not surprised that this is the case. I would guess that if you compared polygamous cultures to monogamous cultures, monogamous cultures would probably do better.

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FR: Is there an ideal when it comes to how we build our relationships? Louise, do you for example disapprove of Aella’s work as a sex worker? In your ideal society, would OnlyFans not exist?

LP: “Disapprove” is not a word I would use. I think that it is clearly the case that some individuals do well on OnlyFans. Most don’t. I think we agree on the fact that OnlyFans is insanely unequal. The vast majority of women who become content creators are not going to make any real money, and are likely to suffer negative consequences down the track. I think it would be better if OnlyFans didn’t exist. That’s not the same thing as saying that I think it should be banned, because there are obviously all sorts of downstream consequences of that kind of legislation, which might do more harm than good. I think it’d be very, very difficult to ban OnlyFans or similar sites. But I think, on balance, they have a net negative impact on society.

A: Would you agree with OnlyFans if, say, before signing up, a girl got like statistics on how likely it was for her to make various amounts of money? Like, “90% of creators make under $1,000 a month,” or something like this?

LP: I think that would be good. I imagine the platforms would not want to do that, because it’s obviously going to limit their profit-making.

The other thing that I would want a lot of naive young women to be aware of is the fact that even though men are less likely to admit to the fact that they still ascribe to the sexual double standard, they do. And I think that one of the worst consequences of OnlyFans for very many women, which isn’t talked about nearly enough, is the fact that it becomes that much harder afterwards to find a committed relationship, which actually most women say is what they want long term, because men are judgmental about it.

A: My guess is that this is very well-known in women cultures. I’ve joined so many discussion groups where girls are thinking about getting into OnlyFans, or already doing OnlyFans, and a huge amount of that discussion is centred around, “How much is this going to damage my mate prospects? How much should I hide it from my potential mates? How can I do OnlyFans in a way where it’s not going to leak to potential mates?” This, to me, is one of the top things, at least in practice that I have seen women consider. To me it doesn’t feel like an overlooked aspect at all. 

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FR: Doesn’t that suggest we should be driving towards a more sexually open society? Because I suppose if we got into a place where nobody had any taboos around sex work, then we wouldn’t have to deal with that problem.

LP: I think that the nature of human beings is such that we seem to have a very strong instinct towards regarding sex as being special. Men seem to have a very strong instinct towards mate guarding. Trying to dissuade people from feeling this way is a serious uphill struggle. Any kind of political project based on the idea that we can undo human nature is one that’s doomed to failure. I think that we do still basically have minds evolved for a hunter-gatherer life, because that’s 90% of our species’ history.

A: I think that this is probably why women are very into BDSM — because evolutionarily, and historically, you had to be aroused by powerful men in order to survive. But also, to some degree, a lot of it is quite cultural, too. We’ve seen a lot of different sexual structures throughout history. I do think that we have a little bit more flexibility.

FR: Both of you seem to be arguing there that there’s a certain amount of nature involved here and we’re trying to push against nature, and to impose social norms upon it. Is there an argument for letting nature run riot and just allowing people to tap into their most primal selves?

LP: I think the problem with absolute liberation — just allowing people to do whatever feels right to them — is the fact that some people have dark, destructive, horrible desires. Actually, probably a lot of people do. Human sexuality is not necessarily nice and pro-social at all. So you have to think about how you’re going to manage the desires of people when that desire is destructive to others.

The other problem is: one sex is much more vulnerable inherently than the other sex. How you manage that asymmetry is, I think, a question that all civilisations have grappled with. And no one has ever come up with a free-for-all as the best solution, because clearly it wouldn’t actually work.

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FR: Digital sex work might be an answer there, though. Aella is behind a screen: she is, in many ways, invulnerable to male violence, and she is being paid for sexual acts, which she finds pleasurable, I assume. And so, isn’t that a win-win?

LP: Or, a step further, sex robots. Then there would be no ethical issues in terms of consent. It would bypass all of the feminist arguments over sex work that’ve been going on for so long. The focus is normally on the effects on women, though. And I actually think that having a class of men who basically just spend all day indoors, playing video games, and having sex with their sex robots seems like a fairly bleak future for that portion of mankind.

A: It seems nicer if they can have access to real women. I would be sad. I used to do OnlyFans, but to be clear, I’ve also been an IRL prostitute, and have been subject to male violence. But out of all the sex-work forms that I have done, the in-person feels the healthiest to me, for both me and the men. The others feel like some sort of weird, warped version of human interaction that objectifies us both more. And sure, it’s safer to some degree, but you can take steps to be safe in-person. In my opinion, in the healthiest future society, the dominant form of sex work would be human to human, eye contact, skin contact, just like God intended.

FR: What about these sex robots? That’s certainly not what God intended, but it’s a lot safer for everyone involved, isn’t it?

 A: I like the idea of sex robots existing. I think if men can have an outlet that they need that is affordable and accessible to them, this seems good. I’m generally pro people independently pursuing what they want. And if that’s sex robots, then go for it.

FR: But do you think that the skin to skin contact, as you said there, is superior to this kind of digital sex work that we’re talking about?

A: Yeah, absolutely. Because it feels really dehumanising, like I said, for both parties. With OnlyFans, I’m not dealing with a man, I’m dealing with the collection of men. I’m dealing with the statistical likelihood of a man clicking on this thing. It’s very robotic. And similarly, this is encouraging men to treat women the same way. You have like a billion women, and it’s just like cycling through them. You’re not really developing a relationship with any of them.

And again, I am pro people pursuing what they want, in their own time. I’m happy OnlyFans exists. But I noticed it was much better for my mental health to do it in person. It just felt so much better and more fulfilling to be able to touch an individual person.

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FR: There used to be quite high barrier to entry for sex work, if you’re talking about street prostitution. Whereas now, with things like OnlyFans, the barrier has been lowered massively. Is it a good thing that more and more people have access to a sex-work career?

A: Yeah. I know a bunch of single moms or women with health issues — women who are struggling to feed their kids on their own — who said, “Oh, I tried OnlyFans, and it gave me, not even that much money, an extra $300 a month, but now I can pay my rent.” There’s a whole bunch of people for whom their lives are really drastically improved by that amount of money. Typically people who are really disadvantaged in some way. It disproportionately assists the poor, or people I would consider to be lower-class — people who were culturally priced-out of the better paying jobs — which is why I think this worked for me so well. I grew up very, very conservative, no access to education, and so a lot of people are like, “Oh, well you should just go to college and get an education, and then get a job.” For some people, their lives just don’t work like that. And for some people being able to have easily-accessible side income that you don’t need training for, or elite approval or credentials, is incredibly beneficial and life changing. And I’ve known so many women for whom this is the case.

LP: I take that point, although I do think it’s worth emphasising the fact that drug and alcohol addiction is extraordinarily common among sex workers. The OnlyFans end of the spectrum is clearly the much less dangerous, traumatic end of it. But it’s also not representative of the whole spectrum of sex work, some of which is dire. And it’s very, very common for women to end up taking drugs and using alcohol as a way of dealing with the emotional fallout of prostitution. And that means that you’re not actually ending up in a better situation at all: you end up potentially spiralling downwards and getting stuck.

I’m not really a radical feminist at all – I think I can comfortably speak for radical feminists, though, in that they tend to think no woman should be in a situation where she can’t feed her children unless she’s doing sex work. I do recognise that we live in the real world and there are situations where that might seem like the best option. The other problem is that because lay people’s understanding of the sex industry tends to be very poor, it can be very difficult to know how you will find prostitution until you’ve actually done it. So saying at the outset, “I think I’m well suited to this, I think it will be fine. I’ve read through my checklist of warnings, and I think it’s fine,” isn’t actually quite the same as actually doing it.

When you make a move towards normalisation, de-stigmatisation, and presenting this as a perfectly valid career route, you are going to end up with people going down that career route for whom it is an absolute disaster and it ruins their lives.

A: There’s a lot of talk about alcohol and drug stuff with sex workers – which I agree is true, they have much higher rates of drug use. But if, say, we have a world where we dramatically criminalise something like plumbing — like, plumbers are really stigmatised and if you plumb then people are like, “I’m not sure I want to date you”, and if you get assaulted as a plumber, you can’t go to the police otherwise they’ll put you in jail — I would expect the kind of people who would gravitate towards plumbing are people who are unsuccessful in other aspects of their life, and probably have problems with drug and alcohol use. My guess is correlation, not necessarily causation.

LP: I agree with you that clearly the stigma makes all sorts of things worse in all sorts of ways. But also, I’m not convinced that the stigma is an after effect of the law. I think that actually the stigma seems to stick to the sex industry, across time and place. And I think it comes back to this problem of the socio-sexuality gap requiring a prostituted class of women. Most women don’t want to be in that class. It’s very hard to persuade anyone to think that that isn’t a bad outcome for those women and the stigma flows from that.

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A: It feels like you’re implicitly telling women that they should feel bad for these things. I wish I could hear more, “Yeah, some woman are like that and if you’re not, it’s chill.” When you were talking about prostitution I was like, “Well, you should just try it once or twice and see how it works for you, and if you don’t like it, then stop.” If you have a bad experience, it doesn’t seem to me like it needs to be traumatising. But if we treat it with this level of like gravitas, then it’s going to create that trauma in people. And I wish that when I was in a really sex-negative culture, I could have heard more messaging about how it’s okay to be sexually promiscuous if you want to. If I had been surrounded by people giving me the kind of message that you’re giving me, I think I would have ended up with a lot more shame and guilt overall.

LP: I acknowledge that it can seem condescending and judgmental — the anti-porn, anti-prostitution feminism — but we all know that the really brutal attitudes towards sex workers come overwhelmingly from sex buyers. I’m sure there are exceptions, but we know that men who buy sex are more likely to be sexually aggressive, more likely to admit to rape outside of the sex industry. I think the problem with the effort to de-stigmatise, in the hope that we will somehow arrive at a sex industry that really is just like any other industry, is: it is basically based on theory. It’s based on the faith that all of the stigma is causing the problem, not that stigma is attached to the innate problem, which actually has much more to do with the fact that most women find prostitution very distressing and most sex buyers don’t treat the women they buy sex from with proper respect. 

FR: Louise, do you think that you are part of a new movement? Is there a sex-negative movement? You said earlier that you’re not a radical feminist — so what would you call yourself? Are you a conservative?

LP: The key way I guess in which I diverge from radical feminism is I don’t believe in the blank slate. I don’t think that the differences between men and women are a consequence of socialisation. I don’t think that they can be just dissolved away. I think that we have to deal with the existence of these differences on a psychological level as well as a physical level, and kind of progress from there. I’ve arrived at some conclusions which some traditionalists agree with me on — not all of them by any means. I guess maybe this is a materialist form of feminism, in the sense that it’s coming out of the recognition that these material differences exist and we have to make our peace with them.

We are reckoning with these vast material changes. The one that I’m primarily interested in, in my book, is the pill. I don’t accept this idea of the great woman theory of feminist history, where the thing that drives feminist change is particularly charismatic women. There clearly have been charismatic women, but I think the thing that’s driven change for women has primarily been technological — the washing machine, the tampon, whatever you want to name.

And the points, if you look at the history, when you see feminist thinking flaring up, tend to be at the points where you have some important material flux. So you have the internal combustion engine and you have suffrage, and you have the Second World War and the move away from industrial economy and then you have the second [feminist] wave. And I think now, possibly, there is another flare up, and there’s another reckoning with feminist ideas, because we’re seeing the next revolution, which is the online revolution. And it’s really important to be thinking about sexual difference in that space, because it may appear as if we are just these genderless economic units who can all participate in the knowledge economy on a completely even footing and stuff, but actually sexual difference exists. And it will persist until I guess the transhumanists finally have their way.

FR: And Aella, do you feel that you’re an agent of change in this revolution that Louise is talking about?

A: An agent of change? I feel like I just want to defend people like me. It feels, especially in recent years, like I’m fighting against this push of people disrespecting me solely because of my sexual promiscuity and the way that I like to approach sex. And it feels like there’s more shame and judgement about it. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m exposed to different places of the internet or if this is actually a movement, but I feel really protective of it. I’m like, “No, I am okay the way that I am.” And I really want to give that message to anybody who’s like me. Living like me can be a wonderful, healthy and fulfilling and you don’t have to feel shame, or like you need to hide. And so if there’s people like me out there, I really want to take a stand and have a bold, unapologetic ownership of that. And that feels like the thing that I’m fighting for.

The litany of concerns is familiar: that young people today fear catching feelings the way people 20 years older feared getting AIDS. That they are not just less sexually active than previous generations but eschewing physical connection in general, preferring to interact through the intermediary of a screen. That the little sex they are having is fraught and not very good. The birth rate is plummeting, anxiety is skyrocketing. If you were feeling especially catastrophic, you might imagine human beings becoming one of those species, like pandas, who fail so categorically at the whole sexual enterprise that our very survival becomes imperilled.

The path we beat to this point runs from the sexual revolution in the Sixties, to the purity-obsessed Nineties, to the hookup culture that reigns today. And here we find ourselves in a peculiar moment, in which the average young woman in search of romance sits around analysing the text messages of her current hookup like it is a cipher from the Zodiac killer. Does he like her or not? It’s an emotionally naked question that it is still taboo to ask, even if you’ve been literally naked together a dozen times.

At the heart of all this lies the eternal puzzle: what does a woman want? Sigmund Freud spent a lifetime plagued by his inability to solve it. Countless writers, from Russian classicists to pickup artists, have attempted to to tackle it. But now Louise Perry, in her new book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, takes a novel approach to the conundrum of wanting, and wanton, women: what if it’s the women themselves who are answering this question all wrong?

Observing the sexual marketplace — the anxiety, the unhappiness, the decline of intimacy and the rise of porn, the growing prevalence of strangulation as part of the sexual repertoire of ordinary couples — she sees not just a crisis but a broken promise. Sexual liberation was supposed to be, well, liberating — freeing women to pursue their desires free of shame or stigma. That the present state of affairs makes so many of us miserable instead is proof that the movement has failed us: women, she claims, have been sold a bill of goods.

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Perry isn’t the only one to question whether women are being ill-served by the total dissolution of the old rules surrounding physical intimacy, or to see the sexlessness of GenZ as an attempt to correct for the curse of having too much freedom. Katherine Dee predicted a backlash to sex positive feminism among the young people who “feel rightfully burned by America’s imbalanced relationship with sex”. Washington Post columnist Christine Emba released a book, Rethinking Sex, in March, which treads similar territory to Perry, albeit from a different angle. (Emba was raised evangelical with all the sexual suppression that entails, then “ping-ponged a bit, from purity culture to a rebellion against it to something in between”.) This isn’t your grandmother’s sexual moralising — no Bibles have been thumped in the making of this ideology — but the New Prudes nevertheless reach the same conclusions as the old ones. Sex is meaningful, and deep, and dangerous, and no amount of pretending otherwise will make it so.

Perry’s most compelling chapters make this point via evolutionary psychology, the hard-wired differences that once ensured the survival of the species and now lurk, like easily-enflamed vestigial organs, against the backdrop of contemporary sexual mores. Given our limited gestational capacity and the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, women evolved to be exceptionally picky about who we have sex with; men, who are technically capable of fathering as many children as times they manage to ejaculate, have a similarly strong evolutionary imperative to do as much indiscriminate screwing with as many women as possible.

Of course, biology is not destiny; of course, innovation throws a wrench in things. Against 200,000 years of evolution, the advent of birth control is a formidable foe — but as a species, we’re still in the infant stage of learning how to live (and love) having thrown off the shackles of reproductive biology. The sexual revolution and its attendant technologies have given us a world of commitment-free, casual sex, aka the ability to “have sex like a man”, whether you are one or not. Perry argues convincingly that this has not been a gift to women.

But what perplexes her, and where the book falters, is that women themselves often refuse to see it that way.

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Like the generations of prudes before her, Perry struggles to comprehend the notion that women might want sex, even enjoy it, on its own merits. The Case Against the Sexual Revolution argues openly that Some Desires Are Bad (this is the title of Chapter 3), yet cannot quite bring itself to levy this judgment against women; instead it suggests that women suffer a form of false consciousness when it comes to the pursuit of the kind of sex Perry considers not good for them (of the slapping and choking variety, for instance). They don’t really want this, she insists — and she attributes the fact that the woman themselves might disagree to “more or less subtle coercion”, fuelled as much by the dynamics of the sexual marketplace as pressure from individual partners.

The problem, per Perry, is that sex is something you do with other people. Everything a man desires, from the mundane to the pathological, creates a vacuum that requires a woman (or, in one much-riffed-upon hypothetical, a raw chicken) to fill it. It’s a remarkable vision of sexual economics, one that places women permanently and exclusively on the supply side; that they might have desires themselves is not only dismissed, but simply never even considered.

Versions of this idea have been advanced before, usually by social conservatives, often with a misogynistic bent. In the Victorian era, a sexually desirous woman might be diagnosed with nymphomania and put in a sanatorium; more recently, she’d be slut-shamed and derided for her lack of self-respect. But The Case Against the Sexual Revolution takes a different angle: women in this view are too infantilised to be condemned. Brainwashed by the notion that anything goes as long as it’s consensual, they unwittingly “promote paedophilia” by engaging in schoolgirl role-play fantasies with a partner or encourage violence by allowing (or even inviting) partners to tie them up and spank them. Perry bemoans the consent-focused framework of our present-day sexual landscape that “does not allow space for moral intuition” — which is to say, prevents women from realising that what they want is actually, in some greater cosmic sense, wrong.

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On this front, the book’s most scathing criticism (and an entire chapter) is saved for BDSM, which surged into the sexual mainstream in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey. Ironically, the popularity of Fifty Shades is perhaps the greatest example in recent memory of women’s demand-side power in the economy of sex, a fact which Perry acknowledges.

“Here’s the troubling thing,” she writes. “A lot of women loved it.”

More than anything else, to find women’s affection for Fifty Shades “troubling” seems a failure of imagination. Perry sees the mainstreaming of BDSM as beneficial primarily to abusive men who can now beat up women under cover of consent, and secondarily, to the purveyors of leather sex toys who are doing a booming business selling accessories. But she cannot fathom that it might offer something to women, too, especially in the MeToo era.

It is surely not a coincidence that Christian Grey became the heartthrob du jour at the same time as the fear of finding themselves at the wrong end of a sexual assault charge has turned many young men into consent-seeking automatons, nervously asking their female partner’s permission every time they want to shift the position of their hands. (Friends who have encountered one of these sexual interrogators in the wild report that there is no greater mood-killer.)

The obsession with consent as our sole framework for sex (which is roundly and compellingly critiqued throughout The Case Against the Sexual Revolution) has thrust women into the role of sexual gatekeepers, required to know exactly what they do and don’t want. As Katherine Angel has noted, this is ostensibly freeing for women “since it emphasises women’s capacity for — and right to — sexual pleasure”; but in practice, she suggests, it simply creates a new form of pressure: in this brave new world, women are expected to signal the okayness of the encounter by maintaining a state of unrelenting enthusiasm throughout.

Under those circumstances, is it any surprise that many women’s greatest fantasy is to just let someone else be in charge?

On the other hand, BDSM can provide a framework in which the usual script vis-a-vis who holds the power can be flipped to women’s benefit. In a post-sexual revolution world where so many old rules and taboos have ceased to apply, and mere consent has proved inadequate for replacing them, perhaps a community full of people who are happily playing with those power dynamics to everyone’s mutual enjoyment could offer some insight into making it all work. But Perry bemoans that “only” 34% of men in the BDSM community consistently preferred a submissive position (it’s not clear that this makes them worse, not better, than the heterosexual male mainstream).

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As always, the desire to redraw the lines of sexual ethics so that certain behaviours and desires are simply out of bounds is fuelled by good intentions. There’s no denying that the current wild west of dating apps, hookup culture, and near-zero taboos has left a lot of young people — women, but men, too — deeply unhappy and unable to connect. It is also clear that years of conflating male desire with predation has taken its toll on young women, and not for the better: having been told that trustworthy men simply do not exist and that seeking one out is a fool’s errand, they might be tempted to fall into bed with men they don’t trust, with all the calamity that entails.

So when Perry instructs her hypothetical reader not to sleep with any man who wouldn’t be a good father to her children, she’s trying to reintroduce the desperately-needed notion of intimacy to a population that has been taught to see it as frightening and impossible — and to save young women the pain of blindly trying to navigate a miserable minefield full of cads, jerks, and sexual swindlers.

It’s a noble impulse, but ultimately misguided: it is impossible to protect any one person from sexual disappointment by policing the sex other people are having, particularly when they’re enjoying it. And while The Case Against the Sexual Revolution argues persuasively in favour of measures to reduce sexual violence, it errs towards conflating criminal violation with the ordinary ups, downs, and disappointments of the dating marketplace.

“Young women are forced to learn for themselves that freedom has costs, and they are forced to learn the hard way, every time,” Perry writes. And indeed, learning the hard way — which is to say, by experience — can be one of the more painful parts of being human. But what is the alternative to learning for oneself that the freedom to make choices comes with the possibility of regret?

The only way any woman — any person — can know what she wants is to occasionally bump up against the boundaries of what she doesn’t. And given the choice between learning the hard way and getting no education at all, women have always known which they prefer — whether someone else thinks they should want it, or not.

Since signing on with a mainstream publisher in 2012, she’s sold over 150 million copies of her books worldwide. Last week, she released Freed, the final part of a retelling of the original Fifty Shades novels from the male love interest’s perspective. Again, James is following Meyer here, whose Midnight Sun (leaked in 2008 though not officially published until 2020) is the masculine take on the Twilight story.

Following, and, as usual, going further. Where Meyer contented herself with one volume of perspective-shifting, James has gone for a do-over on all three of hers; and where Meyer’s books sustained an atmosphere of age-appropriate repression and Mormon-appropriate sexual repulsion (Meyer is LDS), James went the whole hog-tied way into BDSM. James took the characters and relationships from Twilight, and rewrote the story to suit herself. “All my fantasies in there, and that’s it,” she said in 2012.

Edward Cullen still met Bella Swan, only now he wasn’t a 103-year-old vampire, and she wasn’t a depressed high-school virgin with a maddening tendency to bleed. He became an emotionally repressed (and very handsome) billionaire; she became a shy, klutzy (but beautiful!) student. In Twilight, Bella’s love helps Edward learn to control his instinct to suck her like a Capri-Sun; in Master of the Universe, Bella teaches Edward that there’s more to sex than trussing a woman up with cable ties and lovelessly banging her senseless.

Eventually Edward was renamed “Christian Grey” and Bella turned into “Anastasia Steele”; the whole thing was reworked and presented as an original fiction, and the cultural phenomenon we all know and masturbate to/hold in contempt was born. And there is so much contempt for James. Deriding her is as much of a compulsion for large chunks of the public as paddling Ana’s pert behind is for Christian. Feminists said she glorified abuse; BDSM-ers said she made BDSM look bad; conservatives said she was corrupting public decency; the sneery tag “mommy porn” was invented to describe her work.

And everyone, but everyone, said she couldn’t write. “In fact, if I were a member of the Christian Right, sitting on my front porch decrying the decadent morals of working American women, what would be most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena… is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level,” wrote Katie Roiphe in a 2012 article for Newsweek asking why the collective female libido seemed to have achieved a consensus around submission.

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Part of the strangeness of the reaction to Fifty Shades — both the passion of its fans, and the dismay of its detractors — is that it’s nothing very new, and nor would James ever pretend it was. As much as it owes to Twilight, and to the collaborative inventions of fanfiction, it’s also part of the grand tradition of the bonkbuster, which dates back to the 1970s. And the bonkbuster has always loved a bad boy: the caddish Rupert Campbell-Black, of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles, would make no better of a boyfriend than Christian Grey.

But bonkbusters also tended to celebrate variety and adventure for their heroines, not only sexually but professionally. Anastasia Steele is a retreat from that: a one-man woman whose eventual career is a gift of her wealthy husband (he buys a publisher for her run) and who gives up her surname when she marries him. After all the benefits of second-wave feminism, it seemed like what straight women really wanted was not to have it all but to give it all up; and they wanted it enough to buy James’s fantasies not just once but twice over.

Retelling might, in fact, be too strong a word for what James has done in her Christian-narrated novels. Comparisons of Master of the Universe and Fifty Shades suggest the shift from one to the other was not that extensive after all (Master of the Universe has been almost totally erased from the internet now); similarly, when you look at the original trilogy and the new one side-by-side, there’s often very little difference to detect.

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For example, the first time Christian gets Ana off, he does it by playing with her breasts in a “slow, sensual assault”. This continues until her “whole body sings with sweet agony”, at which point she tells us: “He kisses me, deeply, his tongue in my mouth absorbing my cries.” From his perspective, this is a “lascivious assault”, which ends when “I move quickly to kiss her, capturing her cries in my mouth.”

Where we do get new information from the Grey version, it’s mostly reassuring confirmation that he was always secretly concerned about Anastasia’s consent (take that, feminists worried about BDSM/BDSMers worried about being confused with rapists!), and childhood memories of his mother that help to explain his emotional remoteness. It’s not exactly Rashomon, but then, being Rashomon would be very much against the spirit of Fifty Shades. Nobody came here for the fracturing of reality into multiple perspectives, thank you very much.

The grand fantasy of Fifty Shades isn’t really the spanking or the restraints or any of the other delightful perversions that Christian introduces Ana to. It’s that a woman could know a (billionaire, handsome) man completely and, by loving him, redeem him. Through all the business in the Red Room of Pain, Ana achieves the ultimate in vanilla: straight, monogamous intimacy. To that end, nothing could be hotter than the revelation that Christian and Ana were having almost the exact same subjective experiences all along.

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I don’t share a lot of the moral concerns about Fifty Shades. Yes, much of what occurs between Christian and Ana would be deeply alarming if it happened in a real relationship, but prissy fussing about how it misrepresents consent overlooks the fact that this is happening in a fiction. People who enjoy submission are also enjoying a fiction: it’s necessary to believe in your own resistance in order to extract the pleasure of being possessed.

So however careless Christian appears to be about Ana’s boundaries, readers know that she ultimately wants to be totally his; and they know also that her surrender becomes a way of mastering him. Even writing as infelicitous as James’s has a huge advantage over visual pornography when it comes to sex, in that it can show us its characters from the inside, and fulfil the part of the fantasy which is about feeling rather than simply doing (or being done to). If there’s danger in Fifty Shades, it’s not the sex so much as the romance.

To love someone is always to be slightly at the mercy of the unknowability of the other. Ana is able to overcome that with what the rewrite trilogy now confirms is perfect understanding. But in the real world, there is much that women are never going to comprehend about the men they love, however much they prostrate themselves in the effort — and much that men never make any effort to understand about the women who love them. More than horsewhips and hemp ropes, it’s that gulf of sympathy that leaves real-life people hurt.

Intriguingly, while reporting on the sexist horrors of Tinderland, Sales was using the app herself, by her own admission addicted to it. In her compulsive new memoir, Nothing Personal, she admits that as the proofs of her Vanity Fair article arrived in her inbox, she was messaging the young Abel, an exchange that would lead to his appearance at her Manhattan apartment a few days later — and a multi-year involvement that friends came to call a “situationship”. This description wasn’t to do with the age gap, but with the “casualisation” of dating. As Sales stresses, the barrage of choice offered by internet dating has “made marriage and committed relationships look less attractive and less necessary, especially for straight men”. Her entanglement with Abel was never going to be a relationship, then, to the dismay of a smitten-but-realistic Sales.

It’s become received wisdom that apps — the delivery devices of hook-up culture — encourage a kind of callousness that is particularly damaging to women, for whom purely transactional sex is more likely to be a downer. Tinder’s founders are archetypes of the Silicon Valley “tech bro”, who dress up poor treatment of women as sexual revolution. But despite this, something surprising is happening: the inversion of powerful truisms about women’s age and sexual desirability.

Until recently, it was a basic assumption that women age out of the fray, our peak time of sexual desirability being our late teens and twenties. This idea was sharpened by a raft of inaccurate studies in the 1980s suggesting that after 30, women’s fertility sinks like a stone. In Bridget Jones, published in 1996, the heroine ­is a “spinster” at 32. Even in 2014, dating and relationship “expert” Katy Horwood wrote that women in their thirties must “either compromise or dust down your spot on that shelf”. Just last year, Made in Chelsea star Ashley James told how she had a “meltdown” on the eve of her 30th: “I didn’t feel old enough to be… well, old. I wasn’t married, I wasn’t even in a relationship.”

James felt she had “run out of time” and remembered hearing people talk about women who were single at 30 as being “left on the shelf”, their “looks fading”. Part of the problem, perhaps, is the fact that older men have continued pursuing younger women.

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Now, however, the middle-aged woman has become a prime target for younger men, not only for sex but in some rarer cases for relationships too. Sales never has trouble getting matches on Tinder, and the age difference between her and her lovers was dramatic: about 25 years. She’s not the only one. High profile examples include Kate Beckinsale, who at 43 was caught kissing 21-year-old comedian Matt Rife; at 45, she dated 25-year-old comedian Pete Davidson. This reshuffle has also become a trend among ordinary folk.

Why have young men switched the focus of their sexual energy on to middle-aged women? The most obvious explanation is that life is imitating porn, where the Milf (“Mother I’d like to fuck”) has seen a stratospheric rise. In 2018, Milf porn was the third most searched for category. As Sales writes, this is in part thanks to the “megastardom” of Lisa Ann, the 49-year-old porn actress who became “the world’s most famous Milf” after the release of her 2008 satirical video about Sarah Palin: Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? Lisa Ann combined character with beauty, and an upbeat image of the pornographic potential of mature female sexuality.

There is, of course, something empowering — even thrilling — in the age reversal; the sudden realisation that being a woman in your late 30s, 40s or 50s does not mean sexual invisibility, but rather its opposite. “It wasn’t only the swiping I was getting addicted to, but the attention of all these excited young men,” Sales writes. But when I interviewed her recently for a radio documentary I’m making about singleness, she was keen to stress that however many young men were desperate for sex with her, the experience should still be seen in terms of an overarching misogyny.

The examples offered in Nothing Personal certainly chronicle some appalling behaviour, from the rude to the threatening. As well as more respectful missives, men routinely sent messages — “I’m thinking we do a few tequila shots, I do some coke on your ass, pull your hair back and bend you over while listening to Zeppelin IV on vinyl” — and, even worse, desires — including for rape simulation — clearly influenced by porn.

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Of course, older women have many obvious attractions: they are more likely to be confident and solvent, for instance. But the Milf idea thrives because it links to a kind of power-play integral to BDSM, which has become one of the most popular genres of sex. Older women are more likely to initiate sex, and in a kink-mad era in which the more transgressive something is the better, this role reversal no longer seems to challenge traditional masculinity. Instead, it is simply shifted into the category of “hot”.

The Milf figure also caters to complexes born of the chaotic conditions of the contemporary erotic-romantic landscape. Justin Lehmiller, who has researched the sexual fantasies of American men, found that men keen on Milf porn often suffer from relationship and attachment anxieties, and see a sexualised maternal figure as a source of comfort. “They’re worried that their partner might leave and they need quite a lot of reassurance,” says Lehmiller. Most young men on dating apps do not appear to be thirsting for a “partner”, but for men frightened of sexual rejection, which can be immediate, it’s not hard to see why an older woman — and especially a mother — might seem more sympathetic and more attractive.

When it comes to men their own age, then, young women seem to be drawing the short straw sexually (older men still prefer younger women). Their relative immaturity and inexperience seems to be held against them, and they are perceived as more likely to put the pressure on long-term commitment. Older women are (misleadingly) seen as lower-maintenance and more straightforward — or, Sales might add, as easier punching-bags. But if 20-something men are turning away from 20-something women, the feeling may well be mutual: young women are deeply frustrated with their counterparts, and seem to be looking to date older men instead.

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There is nothing romantic, or particularly feminist, then, about the sudden emergence of middle-aged women as sexual hot property on dating apps; older women are treated no better than the young. And all women are struggling to find long-term partners in the current landscape. Still, as an alternative to the complete invisibility, or worse, mockery, that used to surround single women over 35, being a 43 or 53-year-old with the option to be inundated with sexual attention from gorgeous 25-year-olds is surely preferable.

It makes a nice change from being pummelled by narratives about decline. In the Eighties, for instance, the apparent cliff-dropping of fertility was used as a way to jab at women pursuing careers. After the feminist gains of the Seventies, as Susan Faludi argued in 1991, the following decade saw a “firebombing” of women, and the “backlash” continued, more subtly, for decades. In the media, everything from the burned-out “superwoman” to “the spinster boom” and “the infertility epidemic” were, Faludi pointed out, held in opposition to the virtuous, happy, stay-at-home, married Mom.

Nobody much, at least on the apps, seems to be thirsting for a virtuous Mom now. And Milfs, especially older Milfs, are past their fertility peak, and in some cases their window altogether. This suits today’s young men, who, as well  being unschooled and uninterested in commitment, seem oblivious to women as potential mothers of their children.

Flexibility and the ability to move frictionlessly through the world have come to be prized in all areas of life. The direction of travel in romanceland, to some extent, reflects this — dating has evolved to offer maximum freedom and minimal cramping of style. In this sense it suits the Milf as much as the younger man. Many 50-something women, including Sales, are busy, with parenting commitments and demanding jobs. Young whippersnappers who can deliver sex on a plate and nothing more might therefore appeal.

The trouble is, sex gets complicated. Sales isn’t the first woman to catch feelings during a fling; as Erica Jong realised back in the Seventies, there is — for women anyway — no such thing as the truly zipless fuck. Today’s dating scene may be convenient but, like the fast food hurried to your door by Deliveroo, it’s also often unhealthy.

Here is one such scenario: imagine a man goes to a supermarket and buys himself a whole dead chicken. He takes it home, has sex with it, and then eats it. No one else ever finds out. Did he do anything wrong?

Haidt has several other scenarios concerned with sexual morality. Is it ok for a brother and sister to have sex, if they use multiple forms of contraception, and no one else knows about it? Or, to use a real scenario, is it ok for a man to consent to being eaten by another man, for the purposes of sexual gratification?

The psychologist reports that his participants’ responses tend to be affected by their political allegiances. Social conservatives generally give swift, confident answers, because they are able to appeal to values like sanctity and authority. For them, having sex with a dead chicken or a sibling obviously violates religious or traditionalist moral principles and is therefore unacceptable. End of story.

Liberals have more difficulty: they want to say that the acts are wrong, because they are instinctively disgusted by them, but the scenarios are designed to prevent any appeal to J.S. Mill’s harm principle: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

In the chicken example, for instance, it is difficult to identify anyone who has been harmed by the man’s behaviour, since the chicken, being dead, can’t be harmed, and other people, being ignorant of the act, can’t be harmed either. The man is simply exercising his sexual autonomy, which means that, as Haidt puts it, “if your moral matrix is limited to the ethic of autonomy, then you’re at high risk of being dumbfounded by this case.”

Not everyone is dumbfounded. The American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, for instance — a key figure in the sex-positive feminist movement that emerged in the 1980s — would, I imagine, be unbothered by the chicken scenario, just as she is unbothered by unusual sexual behaviour in general. “Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a shoe?” Rubin writes, “in Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously”.

Rubin is radical in her liberalism. She famously rejects the idea of “good” or “bad” sexual behaviour, interpreting such moralising as inherently oppressive. To her mind, sex does not need to involve either love or commitment, and it certainly needn’t have any connection to marriage or reproduction. The only thing that matters to sex-positive feminists like Rubin is whether or not all parties are able and willing to consent to a particular sex act. All other sexual morality must be discarded — indeed, one group that was influential early on in arguing for the destigmatisation of commercial sex made the point crystal clear with their choice of name: COYOTE, “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.”

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Within the last 40 years, sex-positivism has been remarkably successful within academia and the media, to the point that it is now the dominant ideology among liberal feminists, who are themselves the dominant feminist sect. The moral minimalism that comes from holding only to the principle of consent results in certain policy positions.

For instance, the neutral or even positive attitude that liberal feminists take towards transactional sex leads them to support the decriminalisation or legalisation of porn and prostitution, including pimping, as long as all participants consent. BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Sadism and Masochism) is also permissible, according to the principle of consent — in fact, some argue that BDSM relationships are preferable to “vanilla” ones because explicit discussions of consent are (supposed to be) front-and-centre within the community. A rejection of traditional sexual morality or “Old Tired Ethics” also encourages a positive attitude towards casual sex, polyamory, fetishes and more.

On university campuses sex-positive liberal feminism is currently the order of the day, along with its various trappings. At the beginning of term, freshers are given a lecture on the importance of consent and sent on their way with “I heart consent” badges and tote bags. The rule they’re taught is simple enough: with consent, anything goes.

But while threesomes, nipple clamps and butt plugs may now be acceptable topics of conversation on campus, there still remains a frightening taboo: the fact of innate, average differences between men and women when it comes to sexuality. The research evidence is clear — we know that men, on average, prefer to have more sex and with a larger number of partners, that fetishes are far more common with men, that sex buyers are almost exclusively male, that men watch a lot more porn than women do, and that the vast majority of heterosexual women do not orgasm during casual sex and mostly say that they would prefer a committed relationship, if given the option. All in all, the evidence demonstrates that the acts that sex-positive feminism encourages are acts that men are much more likely to enjoy.

These differences make perfect, intuitive sense when you reflect on male and female reproductive roles. Of course the group of people left literally holding the baby are going to have evolved to be pickier about mating partners, and of course the other half, who are able to pass on their genetic material painlessly and in a matter of minutes, are more likely to have a preference for sowing their wild oats.

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The uncomfortable truth is that, up until the arrival of reliable contraception — about five minutes ago, in evolutionary terms — sex was much riskier and costlier for women than it was for men. And as Mary Harrington writes in these pages, “ignoring our animal nature in favour of an abstract vision of egalitarianism has ended up disproportionately harming women”.

But you can’t say this in sex-positive circles, where a belief in the blank slate mandates that any differences in male and female behaviour be explained as solely a consequence of socialisation. So when inexperienced young women are encouraged by liberal feminism to behave exactly as men would like them to, and find themselves feeling used, violated and miserable — as they often do — they have no way of understanding what is happening to them, or recognising that the system is rigged.

This cognitive dissonance can lead to some strange places. Last week, there was the predictable social media outrage after liberal feminist writer Heather O’Neill wrote: “If you have sex with someone knowing full well it is going to be a one time thing, but the other person believes they are embarking on a relationship, I don’t think you can really consider the sex consensual. (Although this opinion gets me into trouble at dinner parties.)”

O’Neill was widely mocked as an extremist and a fool. I think she’s wrong to stretch the definition of “consent” to breaking point, but I have some sympathy for her viewpoint. Many liberal feminist women are sincerely unhappy with the sexual status quo, but they struggle to reconcile their unhappiness with their ideology. And since the only moral principle left standing under the reign of sex-positivism is the need for consent, this principle must be put to work in order to explain away their feelings.

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O’Neill is correctly identifying a problem — the fact that horny and unscrupulous men (“fuckboys” in contemporary slang) will regularly manipulate naive women into casual sex that leaves the women feeling wretched. Such sex isn’t illegal, since the women do say “yes”, but it’s unpleasant and unkind. It’s immoral, in other words, but this is not a term that liberal feminists feel comfortable using, given its icky associations with religious conservatism, and so the only vocabulary left available to O’Neill is that relating to consent.

Liberal feminists have got their premises wrong. A moral system based solely on consent is inadequate because the presence of consent is such a very, very low bar — an absolute bare minimum requirement, not an ideal. Given the profound importance and complexity of sexual relationships, a much larger and more sophisticated moral system is required to determine what good, not just legal, sexual behaviour looks like, and the Gayle Rubins of the world are not best placed to describe it.

Liberal women are being asked to rationalise away their moral intuitions — to believe that a punch to the face can be a sign of love, that “catching feelings” for a sexual partner is something to be resisted, and that consent is all that matters. When it comes to sex, the ideological toolbox put together by liberal feminism contains just one blunt, useless implement. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t up to the job.