I’m a white man in my 30s. Thanks to preferences formed in my youth, I’ve been sleeping almost exclusively with black guys for the past 15 years. And though I had a pretty good guess what the term meant, I’d never heard it before. Given its taboo nature, I wanted to be very certain I knew what it meant for him specifically. Did he want me to call him the N-word? Hard “r” or the softer “a” ending? Was roleplay involved? A master/slave narrative, or perhaps a hood-thug/white-savior storyline? 

For Jacob, the answer was all the above. This was my first encounter with a fetish that seems to have appeared out of nowhere and has now become common among black gay men. I’d say that half of my hookups now request it. Proponents believe race play is a form of liberation. Or, they say, it’s an insouciant response to the political pieties of Black Lives Matter and DEI. For the white counterpart, it has its own unique complications. 

I’m not judgmental of anyone’s kink, and I’ve come across a litany of fetishes over the years, so I was willing to entertain Jacob’s request. At the time, I thought it was a one-off. I also believe that the bedroom is probably the best place to experiment with breaking social norms and defying societal expectations. Moreover, the past half decade’s media overload on race has had a chilling effect on black-white relations. BLM and DEI produce a cold dynamic of bureaucracy and activism. But in bed, relations are ineluctably individual and even spiritual, not political. If Jacob wanted it, it made sense to me to give this a try.  

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When Jacob finally came over, I did the best I could with his request, but I felt a ringing disassociation when the words started coming out of my mouth. Nothing is really off-limits in the sex-positive world, but this felt taboo. I was a vile character out of To Kill a Mockingbird, and yet when I looked at Jacob, he was turned on and elated. It was disorienting. It also did nothing for me, sexually, and I let the attempt slowly dissolve, moving Jacob and I back into our normal routine.

It wasn’t a one-off, though. Jacob started demanding this vituperation every time. And I went along with it. It made me feel less like myself in bed, but my belief in the transformative power of kink suggested to me that I should push my own boundaries, too.  

Almost immediately after Jacob made the request, I found more and more men wanting it. I recognize the pattern by this point. Guys I converse with on Sniffies, a gay-hookup site, usually start by telling me they’re very kinky and asking if I am, too. Then they mention race play and assure me that I can call them, you know, whatever I want. 

If I were truly a racist, none of these men would be sleeping with me. So on one level, we both know that the suggestion that I want to racially degrade them is a fantasy — they want it. On a deeper level, what we’re both doing is not degradation, but exploration of a dangerous part of the human psyche, in an environment of mutual openness and generosity. 

Other black men I spoke with — friends, co-workers, and lovers or former lovers — mentioned an array of reasons for the trend, from sex positivity and the increasing acceptability of fetishes, to the influence of porn, with its tendency to become more extreme in order to elicit the same sexual response. People find whatever is forbidden to be a turn-on. According to the progressive script, women aren’t supposed to want to be dominated by men (but sometimes they do). Likewise, according to more traditional scripts, men aren’t supposed to want to be dominated by women (but, again, many do). Blacks aren’t supposed to want to be called racist slurs by whites in 2026. But they do. And while everyone may performatively police their thoughts in public, in the privacy of the bedroom, the thought-policing gives way to desire. 

There was the dancer I met on a Princess cruise who kept referring to my whiteness. I got the hint. After the ship was all in bed, we’d find a corner to have sexual banter, with race integrated, at his request. He wanted me to call him my little N-word (hard r). Next, an artist in my neighborhood also asked for it. We’d been hooking up for a while before he dared to tell me. We were at his place, and when I moaned, “Damn boy,” he told me that he liked the slight Southern flare in my voice. Go further, he told me. 

In one sense, playing the abusive cracker is downright creepy, and not something I ever wanted to do. I’m attracted to black men because I find them masculine and beautiful, but also because I feel safe with them. As a gay kid in the South, I got bullied for being effeminate, and it was often blacks who stuck up for me when my white peers were being cruel. Also, maybe because blacks saw my race first, they seemed to see the gayness less and treated me more like everyone else. Now, decades later, I disliked pretending to be the kind of white person I’d always despised. 

But since it was hot for my partners, I tried to play along. Also, I realized that black guys have enjoyed a milder form of race play for years, considering the many cases of those who self-brand on fetish and dating apps as a “BBC,” a controversial reframing of the lore of the well-endowed black man. Race play has even made it into the mainstream, notably in the Broadway production Slave Play, by Jeremy O. Harris, a gay black man. 

In Slave Play, three multiracial couples engage in race play as therapy for lack of sexual desire caused by racial trauma in the black partner. Harris has said his intention was metaphorical, and in an interview with the comedian Ziwe, he explained that the kind of sexual race fetish he was satirizing wasn’t something he’d personally done or considered particularly realistic. He thought it was “part of our imaginaries via Tumblr and Twitter more so than it was ever a part of anyone’s actual sexual lived experience.” Once the play came out, though, Harris encountered “a lot of black people who do race play and kink intersecting with race.” He found it “exhilarating” to have represented their stories, even if accidentally. 

I talked to some current and former sexual partners to try to understand more. 

Eric (also not his real name), a 38-year-old actor who was once a sexual partner of mine but is now a friend, tells me that he has also noticed race play becoming more prominent, especially on the internet. He believes that the liberal ideal, previously pushed for by all races, is to transform race into a kind of politically correct equality, a process that was turbo-charged in recent years by BLM and DEI. This, he thinks, can feel coercive in its own right. “I think people are moving away from a rigid sense of that identity,” he says, “and have become more like, You cannot police my blackness. I can do what I want, especially with my blackness.” 

Eric told me he’d been tempted to try it himself but hadn’t, because of concerns about how it might impact him afterward. His preference is for nerdy white guys, but he’s not sure he wants to know what imagined racial features make him their preference. “Am I black enough, or am I the kind of black guy they seek?” It’s his relationship to his own blackness that he’s trying to protect, he says. 

When I asked Jacob what he thought about the trend, he got angry. He hadn’t known that his fetish was common, and at first tried to convince me that other guys were “copying” him. Upon deeper reflection, he thought that perhaps the fetish is popping up now because blacks and whites are mingling more. Born and raised in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, Jacob had until recently experienced New York as a very segregated city. As the neighborhood has integrated, there has been more opportunity for him — and everyone else — to meet and explore race through sexual encounters. Jacob questioned his own desires, however, when he learned how common they were. “I think gay black boys have a higher chance of having low self-esteem, racially,” he said. “Is this who I want to be or be validated by?” 

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He wasn’t the only person who took this view. Brian, a 28-year-old black chef, told me, “We’ve all grown up with the same white-savior public heartthrobs.” His implication was that if you see white men as the saviors, it would make sense why you would want them, and you might want to reject your own blackness, too. My friend Ashley, a straight black woman in her 30s, said something similar. When I told her I was hooking up with a guy who insisted on race play, she viscerally responded that “he definitely has some problems.” She went on to say that she could understand why a white man would only be into black men, “because they’re beautiful,” but if a black man was only into white men, it would be “suspect.”

My thinking on the matter clarified thanks to some experiences online. The internet has also in some ways decreased segregation. If race is what gets you going, all you need is a keyboard. X (formerly Twitter) is flooded with porn accounts linking to OnlyFans, where blacks and whites who otherwise wouldn’t meet in person can form parasocial dynamics. One day, I came across a video of a black OnlyFans creator I followed, in which a white boy was calling him the N-word.

It shocked me to be honest — and I hated seeing it. 

I value race play as a terrain where whiteness collides with blackness offline, between people and free of ideology. But once it starts being reproduced and witnessed, the fantasy enters the real world and feels uncontrollable, dangerous, and possibly formative of realities I wouldn’t want to be a part of. 

Brian and I had a tryst with Jacob last summer, and when Jacob tried to integrate race into our play, I disengaged. I didn’t want friends involved. “I didn’t really care,” Brian said afterwards. “That has everything to do with him.” 

I agreed, but it had to do with me, too. I’m not moralizing about anyone’s desires, and I haven’t come to any permanent conclusions, but I don’t engage in race play any more with guys from the past, and I have no plans for the future. I might try it again if I met the right person, but I don’t like feeling like I have to do it, and I don’t want to be tethered to that disassociation. While reporting this story, I asked a prominent gay, black male artist who sometimes shares sexual exploits on social media what he thought of race play. His reply: “Is this your sly way of asking me for race play? be honest [heart emoji].” No, I told him, it was merely an honest inquiry. I’m done for now. 

Rick Owens, the avant-garde goth designer, has legions of dedicated, cultish fans — informally known as the Tribe — who not only admire his careful balance of asceticism and esotericism, but embrace his aesthetic as a lifestyle rather than merely a fashion label. He is beloved by the fashion world too, with admirers including Anna Wintour, Vera Wang, and Bella Freud.

Perhaps the most famous of his disciples, however, is Kanye West, who once described Owens as “a major source of inspiration”. He even dressed his first wife, Kim Kardashian, in his designs: the sheer, cream two-piece ensemble she wore to the 2018 CFDA Fashion Awards accentuated her figure in a way that was both grungy and glamorous. Kanye clung to the aesthetic, but he took it in his own ostentatious direction, dressing his second wife Bianca Censori in ever more revealing outfits, where the clothes became secondary to the performance of wearing them — and ultimately wearing nothing at all. Whereas Owens’s designs always seem somehow fresh and cerebral, carefully balancing nihilism with a sense of mysticism, West’s project increasingly lacks any redeeming sense of subtlety.

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There was a crassness to Kanye and Bianca’s stunt at the Grammys, which was more jarring than the nudity itself. The spectacle was too contrived, too formulaic. If the intention was to titillate, somehow it failed. The stunt seemed, if anything, anti-erotic; it exhibited not deviance or innovation, but just a sense of trying too hard.

It also seemed to pierce the careful equilibrium between exploitation and consensual personal fetish. Soon after, Kanye bragged of “dominion” over his wife, then burst into a series of antisemitic rants and attempted to sell Swastika t-shirts on his website. Fashion and fascism became uncomfortably enmeshed. Whereas Owens once played with dystopian themes, West’s stunts seemed symptomatic of a real personal decline, his wife leaving him days later.

In the backlash that followed, it seemed for a while that Kanye had given kink a bad name. By sliding from a play of domination into full-blown Nazism in a few days, he confirmed the suspicions of BDSM-critics; an enthusiasm for fetish had just masked his more dangerous beliefs and desires. And yet it seemed unfair to conflate the issues too readily; one man’s affection for both kink and fascism did not marry the two.

That same week, I picked up a copy of Anastasiia Fedorova’s book Second Skin, which explains how kink is not just for show or exploitation, but is also a compulsive way to be intimate, to develop oneself, to explore for the sake of exploring. The erotic is “a way of seeing”, and her book is concerned with those for whom fetish is not just a passing fashion or a sly form of manipulation, but a mode of optimistic transformation. “I am not my usual self,” she writes. “I have stepped into unchartered territory, where I can temporarily embody something different.”

It doesn’t have to appeal to everyone: it is not for everyone, and that is the point. In this secrecy there is something rare and therefore covetable. Perhaps this is why the wider culture pays attention and seeks to monetize it; for every counter-cultural movement or community that comes to represent something desired, there is always the risk of dissolution and co-option.

As with Owens’s fashion, it is a challenge to be inclusive and subversive at once, to be successful without one’s aesthetic attracting strange interpretations. In the case of the London kink scene, many of the club nights Fedorova writes about were shut down due to complaints of obscenity, even as the wider culture seemed to embrace a tepid or brutalized version of the same aesthetic. There is a revived conflict over what is allowed and what is not, in clubs and in awards ceremonies, magazines and relationships. Can Censori be naked at a party? Is choking permissible? Can West sell Swastika t-shirts online? Must you scorn the man who licks spit off the floor, must you talk at all? It is apparently all up for debate.

What is accepted or not is constantly being challenged. As the psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues, we learn our romantic scripts not just from the people who have brought us up but also from the communities and culture around us, and even from particular partners. Our wider cultures determine our behavior in sex and love, and crucially what we do and do not allow ourselves and one another. The script can be revised. We need not get caught in repetitive cycles — though many, quite contentedly, do.

When it comes to BDSM, it would be naive to believe that personal sexual practices are contained from the outside world in every such relationship, or that sadomasochistic dynamics cannot be a front for deception and real abuse, or that communication may not always be clear enough to prevent true harm. Played out against a landscape of endemic violence against women and girls, even the most seemingly secure and intimate relationships can be vulnerable to the contagion of the outside world, not to mention the repressed or concealed facets of one another, whether BDSM is involved or not. But it is precisely because we are so influenced by the world around us that we must be honest in exploring our desires, as well as exploring what reviles us and why.

Many of us don’t want to bear witness to another celebrity’s exposure, whether sexual, or political, if it’s not in the script we have passively agreed to. West and Censori broke the social etiquette we were familiar with, and it hit a nerve. When we discuss whether a woman such as Censori could genuinely choose to be a part of a humiliating spectacle, perhaps we are really expressing an irritation that, with the prevalence of visual media, we cannot help but watch it. We, the audience, are part of the spectacle because we can’t stop consuming it. The voyeurism is no longer a choice, and there is no safe word, no exit.

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And this is why, conversely, kink is so popular: it offers a way out, new options, an alternative way to be and feel when the media bombard us with pictures of wars and fires, images that seem like it really is the end of the world. We might not really be free, or safe, but in the right light, in some playful unexpected moment, we may feel that we are free regardless. There may be some fleeting satisfaction in this self-awareness.

“Enjoy your symptom!” writes philosopher Slavoj Žižek. This, to me, seems to be at the heart of the rise of this particularly dystopian, hyper-visible brand of fetishism that characterizes our cultural moment. Owens captures a communal neurosis in a way that has garnered him loyal followers, who have found in his fantastical world a mirror of their anxieties, and a freedom from the real world. The fetishized sickness is a contained sickness, a controllable one — a sort of pain management. In this containment, contagion unites rather than alienates its patients.

In psychoanalysis, the “symptom” is a substitute for one’s instinctual impulse that, through repression, has become displaced and distorted, so that it resembles a compulsion or sickness. Noticing or treating the symptom may give some satisfaction, but it cannot fully cure the deeper issue. And yet we can enjoy the symptoms, in a sense; we can probe the things that attract and repulse us, we can understand ourselves a little better through our fantasies.

Owens presents a fantasy world where what we fear is turned into something not only attractive but shared; he takes the ethos of fetishist counterculture and creates a wider movement. But the key to its success is still a sense of mystery and containment, a holding back; too blatant, and at the wrong moment, the spell breaks. Something must always be left to the imagination; some things must stay repressed for others to be enjoyed.

Responding to its critics, Oakville Trafalgar High School has suggested that its teacher’s attire fell under the protected characteristics of gender identity and gender expression enshrined in Canadian law. It’s a similar argument to the one wheeled out a few days earlier to defend another sexual fetish being assimilated into the LGBTQI+ rainbow — this time by the World Professional Association for Trans Health (WPATH) in its new medical guidelines, widely considered as the gold standard in trans healthcare.

There are several striking things about WPATH’s latest edition — not least the absence of stated minimum ages for surgical interventions on dysphoric minors. But for our purposes, I draw your attention to the chapter on eunuchs. Against initial appearances, this isn’t a chapter on how best to look after someone who has suffered an unfortunate loss in the tackle department. No — being a eunuch is now presented as a state of mind, irrespective of physical state. More specifically, it’s an unfairly stigmatised “gender identity” that in certain circumstances may require supervised surgical correction to mould outer flesh to inner fantasy. Just as our buxom Canadian is supposed to be a woman just because she feels like one, according to WPATH, if you lie in bed at night longing for castration, then you are already a eunuch — and a particularly vulnerable and stigmatised member of society because of it.

To establish the extent of the phenomenon, WPATH points us towards The Eunuch Archive, a web forum with more than 130,000, er, members, and many more unregistered guests. What their chapter conspicuously doesn’t say is that longing for castration is at least in many cases a fetish, something that is abundantly clear if you have the stomach to browse the “fiction section” of The Eunuch Archive. For some men with this fetish, the ultimate arousal — quite literally, one assumes — is to go under the knife. (WPATH notes that “many former Eunuch Archive members have achieved their goals and no longer participate”.)

When first popularised in the 18th century by thinkers such as Hegel, the original concept of a fetish referred to an object from a primitive religion, thought to be imbued with supernatural or magical powers. So perhaps it makes sense that, in the quasi-religious world of contemporary LGBT activism — with its incantations, sacred texts, priests, and magic potions — sexual fetishes should eventually find political protection.

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Whatever the case, there are many who think this is all the fault of “the libs”.  The broad-brush story goes: consider liberalism as a historically embedded, culturally prevalent mood rather than as a carefully worked-out academic theory. Understood this way, liberalism has its own fetishes: “freedom”, “choice” and “consent”. Rather than pronounce on any substantive conception of the good life, it prefers to let individuals find their own versions, and so contains no resources to say what is wrong with people walking about with absurdly large fake body parts or chopping real ones off to get sexual kicks. This view seems encapsulated in the response of soft-porn star Aella to the Ontario incident: “This seems fine to me? It’s the teacher’s body — let them do what they want with it. I kinda feel like you being weirded out is your business.”

But this general complaint about liberalism surely overstates the problem. Most people of even vaguely liberal tendencies would still instinctively endorse some version of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle: roughly, that the actions of a person or group can legitimately be criticised or even restricted where they harm others. This is not particularly technical stuff, nor is it out-of-line with basic social instincts. Who wants to live in a society where the freedom of others is completely unfettered?

Take the commonplace liberal distinction between what happens privately (and so is your own business) and what happens in public (and so is everyone’s business). Many fetishes are by their very nature public — they require an audience, willing or not, to get sexual arousal going. Even those that don’t require this are still all over the internet, discussed by their owners in forums, represented in pornography and erotic fiction, and politically advocated for by advocacy groups like WPATH. Fetishes are everyone’s business these days.

And nor is it difficult to come up with a credible account of the harm involved. Exposing children to visceral emblems of adult sexuality is likely to plunge some of them into strong feelings they are too immature to deal with, as well as potentially adversely disturbing the shape of their own future sexuality. It sends the message that boundaries are not important, and — in the case of the Ontario teacher — is likely to undermine the self-esteem of girls in particular by teaching them that parodic representations of their own bodies are socially acceptable in ordinary life.

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Meanwhile, the decision by an authoritative body like WPATH to treat wannabe eunuchs as having unfairly stigmatised sexual identity, just like any other sheltering under the LGBTQI+ rainbow, has a number of undesirable effects. Most obviously, WPATH’s overtly sympathetic presentation of castration will surely increase the likelihood of larger numbers of males eventually self-mutilating. And apart from making a mockery of genuinely threatened sexual identities, the attempted assimilation of fetishism into LGBT rights makes a popular backlash against the whole of lot of us more likely too. In the old days, the activist’s aim was to demonstrate that gay people are not sexual deviants. These days, activists seem to want to suggest that sexual deviants are just like the gays.

When it comes to understanding the harm, then, angels dancing on the heads of tiny pins this ain’t. The more interesting question is why, when it comes to fetishes, people of liberal tendencies seem so reluctant to apply the harm principle. Why is it so difficult to say critical things about fetishes out loud? It’s particularly puzzling when you compare it to hair-trigger uses of the concept of harm in other areas.

For some, I assume it’s just idealistic naivety about the functional and obsessive way that male sexuality frequently can play out. For others who aren’t ignorant of this fact, part of the reticence may be a desire not to look like a censorious prude in public — a desire which apparently still lingers in many perennially adolescent minds to the exclusion of any other sensible thought. If it’s true that most of us are having less sex than we used to, it figures that some might compensate by trying hard to look like open-minded sexual sophisticates outside the bedroom.

But I suspect that, perhaps for women in particular, there may be more to it than this. The old joke says that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested. Many women have been mugged by men — that is, sexually assaulted — and are likely to be sensitive to the potential predations of the male libido. But equally, many women have been arrested, in the sense of having had their sexual expression policed and controlled. Historical examples abound, as do contemporary ones from countries such as Iran, where last week a 22-year-old woman was murdered by the morality police for not wearing her hijab “correctly”. Perhaps consciousness of the culturally provisional nature of relaxed attitudes towards female sexuality is also part of the background here. Perhaps there is lingering anxiety about where trenchant social critiques of sexual behaviour will end up.

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Yet whatever the reason for the reticence, liberals need to gird their loins for the dinner party circuit or the school gate, and start saying in public and with some conviction that certain sexual behaviours are unacceptable. They need to draw principled distinctions between gay men being afraid to come out to their peers, and men with castration complexes being embarrassed to tell their wives; between women wearing short skirts to parties and men wearing giant comedy breasts to work.

For if they can’t resist these slippery slopes, there are plenty of rabble-rousers out there who are only too happy to seize the opportunity to push gay and trans people all the way down them. A backlash is coming — indeed, is arguably already here, with white supremacists threatening Pride marches in the US and an apparent increase in violent attacks on gay men in the UK. As Mill understood well, public disapproval can be used for good or ill. Now is the moment for liberals to get involved and start endorsing sensible sexual boundaries, before others remove them altogether or set us all back hundreds of years.

What has happened to Lena? That is one of the questions that rushed through my head when, after two attempts, I made it through Sharp Stick, her first feature since 2011. Others included: what is wrong with this film? Is it a test of the inanity of contemporary critics? Or is she baiting us to cancel her? Or has she, all along, been just as idiotic, just as narcissistic, just as myopic as her crudest haters insisted?

I feel insane even describing the film’s plot. The protagonist Sarah Jo, a 26-year-old caretaker for a child with Down’s Syndrome, begs his man-child father to take her virginity (she had an emergency hysterectomy at age 17, which sexually stunted her). This causes her to instantly transform into an infantile nymphomaniac. Soon enough into the sometimes mushrooms-fuelled, sometimes porn-fuelled, affair, the mother — a sharp-tongued and overbearing businesswoman portrayed by Lena herself, in some strange self-hating gesture — finds out. (Actually, she finds out on the floor of the kitchen after she slips in a pool of her own amniotic fluid.) Sarah Jo is fired — and finds solace in an ethical porn star who resembles her ex-lover. (He addresses the camera with words like “I feel so connected to you” and “I admire your commitment to women’s personal expression”.)

Worried she’s bad at sex, Sarah Jo embarks on a journey of self-discovery that involves hanging elementary-school arts-and-craftsy checklists of extreme sexual acts around her room and soliciting men on fetish apps to participate in them. At one point she jumps out of the bushes and screams at the family she used to work for, “I did bukkake!” The disabled child and newborn react with distress.

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The film has received some praise, which has appeared in Instagram ads featuring suggestive photos of the film’s completely conventionally attractive star, Kristine Froseth, who has modelled for Chanel, Armani and Prada. Vanity Fair called it “Supremely Funny”; Rolling Stone claimed it was “both absurd and enlightening” (in fairness, they were running an interview with Lena; to be honest might have been impolitic). But, in a refreshing show of lucidity in the face of a star-studded film that was very diverse — perhaps to clumsily rebuke critics of Girls’s whiteness — most outlets have panned it. To quote The New York Times’s Manohla Dargis: “There’s no point in enumerating all the reasons I dislike it”. 

Perhaps critics feel unusually free to be honest about this awful film because of a perplexing controversy around its creation. Apparently Forseth, who plays Sarah Jo, reached out to Amy Gravino, the autism activist — known for her “Why Autism is Sexier Than You Think” TedTalk — about consulting on the film. Then the creators suddenly decided that Forseth’s character would not be autistic. According to Gravino, though, the character is “clearly” coded as autistic, and the “dehumanising” film participates in the “infantilisation of people on the spectrum”.

Sarah Jo is certainly childish: she’s constantly smearing yoghurt all over her mouth, and a baby-talking bartender has to teach her how to drink as she holds a wine cup with two hands like a sippy-cup. She dresses in the kind of upmarket baby clothes that are now so often found draped on the underweight and affluent. When her sister asks her to stop openly scratching her genitals, her mother asks: “Is it a wiping issue?” And it goes beyond credulity, into broad comedy, for this 26-year-old — adoring daughter of a potty-mouthed, aged-out tart and loyal sister of a viral TikToker who can’t identify the father of her child — to respond to “Can I go down on you?” with (bug-eyed smile, high-pitched squeal): “Down where?!”

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Along with a screener, the film’s marketers sent me Lena’s “Director’s Statement”: it was, I was told, “worth reading”. The last three films I’ve written about have brandished a similar exegesis: is this phenomenon an expression of condescension toward audiences, or fear of their wrath? Appropriately, the Statement revealed that this is an ideologically unimpeachable film: during the pandemic, the chronically ill Dunham came to reflect on her life. In Sarah Jo, she developed a character who experienced her physical challenges — a complete hysterectomy due to chronic endometriosis — and emotional challenges — “often feeling as if life and romance, and womanhood on the whole, are a secret that everyone is in on except for me.”

Contemplating the portrayal of sexually active women in film, Lena thought about how they so often end up either murdered or at least subjected to “a torture of judgment, of questioning, of self-doubt and loneliness and regret over choices that should ultimately just be part of the fabric of self-actualisation in that same way it can be for their male counterparts”. So, she “began to imagine a character whose sexual journey would be totally unique, unmarred by shame or self-hate or the projections of others. She would use sex not to destroy her body but to heal it from a history of medicalised trauma and cultural projection”. Hence, Sarah Jo’s “private and judgment free sexual journey”.

How to portray that? As Lena concludes: “I pushed myself to write this script with honesty and a certain demented purity. When I asked this story what it needed from me, I simply heard Sarah Jo telling me ‘Please don’t try and make me cute.’ And so, I let her rage.”

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I suppose there is a certain “demented purity” to Sarah Jo — but is it truly countercultural to show a woman empowering herself through watching porn and speedrunning through the “categories” with faceless strangers? In a world where yonic prosthetics are advertised on public transport, do contemporary media narratives actually discount female pleasure? Is it all that subversive to show a Scandinavian model begging for another go in up-to-the-minute fashions? Girls, by contrast, was brave enough to show Lena Dunham naked — naked and dismayed.

Indeed, Lena’s brilliance has always been her attention to the disappointments of sexual liberation. I remember seeing her first film, Tiny Furniture, at the local arthouse theatre when I was 17;  amid so many EU-funded multinational WWI dramas and mumblecores about dumpy Portlanders with regrettable tattoos, it was shockingly relevant. Its last scene is one of the greatest portraits, today, of the false promise of hook-up culture: Lena’s character finally seduces the hot guy, which means him pulling down her pants and using her for a few moments in an abandoned drain pipe. 

What happened to that Lena? Of course, she’s always seemed like a terrible person — but her early work portrayed her failures with a clear-eyed precision that cut through the noise. She seemed to know that all her characters were awful. Why is she now saying, “I think we have enough messaging in society, and probably in my 20s I contributed to it, that said, like, ‘porn is ruining sex, and it’s making it so hard for people’”?

Sharp Stick is entertaining in the sense that it offers the rubbernecking fascination of the worst trainwrecks. But the coming-of-age via kink here is so devoid of any plausibility, let alone subtlety, that this seems almost like a dystopian send-up of a 2010s sex romp. If this bizarre, borderline paedophilic fantasy is a failure, though, it’s not a vindication because Lena has always been so awful; it’s a shame because she used to be so exceptional. Either Lena is truly the most brilliant performance artist of a generation, or one of its biggest casualties. 

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Pleasure: a disappointing debut

By Ann Manov

Wherefore this fantasy of frictionless sex, of anonymous encounters with randy internet strangers? Why on Earth would this be the way to heal from sexual injury? I suppose the director of Sharp Stick couldn’t really convince herself either: the film concludes in textbook white knight fashion. Sarah Jo’s saviour is a handsome porn-industry PA who won’t have sex with her without getting to know her (which she’s not interested in). Instead, he goes to epic lengths to “heal her trauma”. In a gesture of saintliness, he shares her fan mail with the ethical porn star she’s obsessed with, who tells her to be “proud of your fucking scars”. Finally, she accepts his love: going off-checklist and allowing him to gently caress her. 

I suppose this is a familiar problem with feminist art: do female characters really want the hyper-efficient, attachment-free anti-intimacy of their masculine counterparts? As Lena bemoaned in her Director’s Statement, women don’t get an Alfie — but do they want one? Even Carrie Bradshaw ended up with Mr. Big, and in Sally Rooney’s latest, a few hundred pages of light BDSM neatly tie up in two couples, plus a baby on the way. The marriage plot certainly originates in a world of primogeniture and patriarchy; but perhaps abandoning all sentiment and sensitivity is a patriarchal fantasy as well.

I don’t believe Lena could resist a little nuance: the free-wheeling mother here is a cautionary tale, as is the sister who, as her mother callously acknowledges at what appears to be an abortion party, can’t bring a baby into the “living realm”. The (lazily repetitive) montage of Sarah Jo and her multitudinous partners is far from alluring; the film’s only erotic scene is the final, tender, vanilla one. 

Perhaps the title, here, is a giveaway: as Sarah Jo says of her sexual quest, it will be like “When I was a kid and the doctor was taking blood and the doctor said ‘This will just be a sharp stick’, and I knew it would hurt more than they said, so I beat them to it in my mind and that was my power”.

“I knew it would hurt more than they said”: this, I think, is Lena’s final assessment of so-called sexual freedom.

Maintaining this division is fundamental to maintaining the belief that a thing called gender identity — and gender identity only — explains individuals’ decisions to transition. It’s a belief in gender identity that allows the broadcaster Natasha Devon to write: “A trans woman is just as much a woman as I am — just a different sort of woman, with different needs.”

Once you accept the existence of some kind of internal, inherent womanhood it becomes possible to argue that physical sex is a triviality that must be looked past. The flesh is a faulty representative of the true self within, and the path to enlightenment comes when you learn to trust other people’s accounts of themselves over your own lying eyes.

With the principle of gender identity in place, you can even argue that it’s female people who are the blithely privileged ones, while male people (who, of course, must not be called male) have the wisdom instilled by disadvantage. The trans writer Julia Serano — who used the term “subconsious sex” in preference to “gender identity” — put it like this:

“Many cissexual people seem to have a hard time accepting the idea that they too have a subconscious sex — a deep-rooted understanding of what sex their bodies should be. I suppose that when a person feels right in the sex they were born into, they are never forced to locate or question their subconscious sex, to differentiate it from their physical sex. In other words, their subconscious sex exists, but it is hidden from their view. They have a blind spot.”

In short: if you have doubts about whether your sex is, in fact, best defined by an immaterial sense of self which you have never personally experienced, then you should stow your questions because all they betray is your own good fortune at not being trans. Lucky you, you must just love your gender role.

And if you suggest that the category we call trans might actually be a mix of several different things manifesting in distinctive ways within certain groups — if, say, you suggest that a woman with a complicated history of trauma fleeing femaleness might not be having exactly the same experience as middle-aged male posing in makeup — then god help you. Above all, never conceive that some instances of male transition might contain something distinctively sexual.

In 2003, the academic Michael Bailey published a book called The Man Who Would Be Queen, a dishy pop-science take on transsexuality (before that term was verboten) based on his own lengthy and sympathetic engagement with the trans community. It put forward the argument, drawn from sexologist Ray Blanchard, that males who transition fall, roughly, into two types.

The “homosexual transsexual” (usually young, gay and effeminate) is attracted to men and seeking to be attractive to men. So far, so much what most people suspected about the motivation for transition. But the second type was a more psychologically complex proposition. The “autogynephile transsexual” was often older, usually straight, tended to have a history of crossdressing — and was driven by an intense attraction to the idea of himself as a woman.

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Does it matter why people experience themselves as being trans? For the individual concerned, perhaps not: when one reaches the point of misery with one’s physical body at which transition seems the only liveable choice, the backstory probably feels very much beside the point.

But for clinicians, studying the reasons for something as unusual as the drive to change sex can be important in helping direct patients to the most appropriate path. Gender reassignment surgery is a drastic process, and it makes sense to explore whether someone’s issues might be resolved by another means. And more than that, it’s just interesting. Humans are strange and complicated creatures. Understanding them is more than a life’s work.

As far as trans activists of the early noughties were concerned, though, this specific thing was not supposed to be understood. For addressing the theory of autogynephilia, Bailey was subjected to a life-ruining campaign of harassment. His professional reputation was assassinated; his family was abused. In her exhaustive and riveting investigation into the controversy, Alice Dreger found that even before Bailey’s critics had read the book, they’d concluded that its contents would be dangerous.

It became vital to establish that the autogynephilia theory was, as Serano wrote, “based on dubious evidence and has never been scientifically substantiated”. It could even, said Serano, be considered sexist — an outcome of “our cultural tendency to sexualize femininity and femaleness in all its forms”. And yet, infuriatingly for the cause, the sex keeps seeping into transwomen’s accounts of themselves.

It’s there is Caitlyn Jenner’s The Secrets of My Life, when she writes about the thrill of seeing her reflection in full feminine dress: “Sometimes I wonder if dressing up like this is the equivalent of having sex with myself, male and female at the same time.”

It’s there is Juno Dawson’s teacherly book The Gender Games, which breaks off from informing readers of the correct way to think about gender to tell us how, when living as a gay man, Dawson had felt “a very conscious urge to get fucked, to be penetrated as a woman would be”.

It’s there, extravagantly, in Andrea Long Chu’s Females: A Concern, which defines the “barest essentials” of “femaleness” as “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”. It’s there in Torrey Peters’ spiritedly indecent novel of queer families and sissy fetishes, Detransition, Baby. (One trans reader’s first reaction to the novel’s compulsive bean-spilling was to say: “I’m upset that the cis are going to read it”.)

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And it’s there in Grace Lavery’s memoir Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. “There’s also the fear that what I write will be used against trans people in some way,” sighs Lavery, before jumping in anyway and describing the desire to be “fetishized… as a slutty girl is” and “assaulted as a girl is”.

Where you won’t find it, on the whole, is in testimonials by trans men. Gabriel Mac, in New York Magazine, concludes post-transition that he is in fact asexual. Thomas Page McBee’s autobiography Man Alive describes a history of terrible abuse leading to nightmarish depersonalisation: “I felt like a marionette, otherworldly and wooden.” The experiences fantasised about by Lavery did not confirm McBee’s femininity but broke the bond between self and body.

Trans men do get horny — the startlingly frank diaries of bathhouse denizen Lou Sullivan are one example, the career of porn star Buck Angel another — but there’s an undeniable sex divide here. Living as the opposite sex can be arousing for male transitioners, while female transitioners often experience it as something more like a respite from the demands of being a body.

This is, or should be, expected. Paraphilias — or fetishes — are wildly more common among male subjects than female ones. But it’s a paradox too. It means that male-to-female transitioners are, on the whole, becoming women in a specifically masculine way; and female-to-male transitioners are becoming men in a way that is characteristically feminine. The change of gender only reasserts the starting point.

Without wanting to traduce my whole sex, women can be sometimes wilfully naive about the force of masculine sexuality — and the range and strangeness of masculine desires. Paraphilias are not only more common in men, but also much more acceptable, on the whole, to men than they are to women. Tell a woman about the weird shit that gets you off, and you run a high risk of leaving her disgusted. It’s that disgust, I think, that leads some women to downplay the importance of sex for male people who want to be seen as women.

But it’s easier to believe comforting falsehoods about a universal gender identity (whatever one of those is) than to accommodate the sticky mess that male sexuality can be. As Debbie Hayton has written in these pages, in an essay entitled “Why I became trans”: “the concept of gender identity has been comforting and politically useful for autogynephilic transsexuals in a society that stigmatises unusual male sexuality”. This feminine coyness creates a strange situation where trans women can tell the dirty truth about themselves until they’re blue in the face, and kind-hearted women of the Natasha Devon tendency will pretend they never heard them.

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It’s why the Marie Claire review of Detransition, Baby doesn’t mention the kinky stuff but does suggest that “cisgender women can learn a great deal about gender, motherhood, and queer identity from Peters”. It takes skill to distil wholesome self-improvement from a novel where one trans woman character declares “I want a man to love me so much he murders me”, but part of the art of femininity has always been the ability to prettify unpleasantness.

It’s not ladylike to comment on indecent things. The proper role of women is to demurely support the masculine quest for satisfaction. Amy Bloom’s superb 2002 “Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses” — which predates current doctrines about gender identity — describes a subculture in which husbands can revel in their feminine side by dressing up.

But they can only do this because their wives are there to do the less attractive but equally feminine work of looking after them. Wives help with makeup; wives advise on clothes. Wives continue to do all the things wives traditionally do. “For twenty years he couldn’t help with the dishes because he was watching football. Now he can’t help because he’s doing his nails. Is that different?” grouches one woman who, despite her obvious dissatisfaction, has still gone along to support her husband on a crossdressing retreat.

The horror at the idea of women bucking their allocated role as support humans explains why some feminist writers have received shocked pushback when quoting the trans women I’ve referenced above. A male writer can self-disclose with impunity, but when a woman draws attention to it, suddenly everyone gets uncomfortable. The quotes must be “out of context” — surely Chu can’t really mean the essence of woman is an “expectant asshole”? And yet that is what Chu wrote, so that is what we must believe was meant.

Is there anything wrong with a weird sexual predilection? In itself, no: what happens between brain and genitals to get the latter going is the definition of a private affair. So there really ought to be no cause for embarrassment about the fact that some trans women have a sexual component to their transition. If the activists keep lying about it, it’s because they’re the ones who are ashamed of it.

Once collected, the milk was transferred into plastic bags which were sealed, labelled and stored in a large freezer, ready to send to other mouths. For this precious liquid, the women were paid 50 cents an ounce, while those running the coercive operation were making a fortune.

Global demand for human breast milk has never been greater. Breast milk banks and peer-to-peer sharing have long existed, for mothers in need, but now it is increasingly being sold for profit. And not just to parents wishing to feed babies. There is a dark side to this trade, as there always is when human body parts and products are brokered.

In the UK, the commercialisation of breast milk is relatively new and was initially philanthropic in intent. Best Milk, one online provider, offered its product to premature, surrogate, adopted or “exceptionally hungry” babies; it asserted that babies fed on breast milk, rather than formula, have an improved IQ, a lower risk of cancer and chronic conditions, and are less likely to develop food intolerances and allergies. The website has now ceased trading.

NeoKare, meanwhile, Europe’s first breast milk processing plant has been going strong in England since March 2020. It offers, according to its website, “safe and screened breast milk products for when a mother’s own milk is not available. Invest in your baby’s future today.” However, at £45 for six 50ml bottles, it doesn’t come cheap. At two months of age, a baby should drink 120-150 ml every 3-4 hours, which means feeding will cost £112 per day. And buying breast milk online comes with risks. In the UK and Ireland, the market is unregulated, which leaves parents vulnerable to buying substandard or dangerous milk for their child. One study from 2015 found that 93% of breast milk sold online contains detectable levels of bacteria, because of the use of non-sterile equipment to express or store the milk. Babies who drink it can be exposed to Hepatitis B and C, HIV and syphilis.

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Parents do have some non-commercial options. The NHS has milk banks — but there are only 13 for the whole of England and Wales. To stop the gap, Dr Natalie Shenker, an NHS-trained doctor, cofounded, with Gillian Weaver, of the Human Milk Foundation (HMF), the only charity in the UK dedicated to supplying breast milk to those ineligible for donor milk such as mothers with cancer. “We set up HMF because we knew that with the closing of NHS funded milk banks, businesses would soon be set up,” says Shenker. “And there are clear potential harms involved in paying a woman for producing milk.”

I’ve seen those harms with my own eyes. As I discovered during that trip in 2017 to Cambodia, those women being milked like cattle were part of a coercive business model developed by pimps in Phnom Penh: these men would advertise pregnant women from their brothels to breast milk and pregnancy fetishists, and then sell their milk mail-order style online.

This is booming international business: I have seen lactation “services” advertised by a New Zealand brothel, and spoken to trafficked West African women in Pisa, Italy, who told me, “Italian men like us pregnant and with our big breasts full of milk.”

Lactation and pregnancy pornography is an upsettingly fast growing genre. Last year’s Channel 4 documentary, Breastfeeding My Boyfriend, shed some light on the phenomenon. Aside from hearing the stories of two couples that practice “erotic feeding,” while livestreaming on porn sites, viewers were also introduced to a young woman that goes by “Milky Mummy,” a mother of three infants, who made £30,000 selling lactating videos online.

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As a result, when breast milk is for sale, it’s not just women who buy it. As Karleen Gribble, an expert in infant feeding tells me: “In wealthy countries, little of the milk that is sold is used to feed babies. Mostly, milk for infant consumption is given without direct payment. Those buying milk tend to be adult men who want it to assist with bodybuilding or for sexual reasons.”

Those poor, desperate women selling their milk for such a pittance in Cambodia had no idea that it was as likely to go to male fetishists and weightlifters as it was babies.

In an attempt to understand why an adult man would buy such services, I spoke to someone who hides behind the pseudonym “Breast Milk Enjoyer”. He told me he was introduced to the concept by the online bodybuilding community, who drink breast milk for the human growth hormone IGF-1 and because it is rich in probiotics. “A friend gave me a bag of his wife’s frozen milk to try, to see if I liked it before making it a staple,” he told me. “It was much sweeter and waterier than I expected, almost sickly. But I persisted and found, it to be an acquired taste which I began to appreciate.”

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Bodybuilders will pay a premium for breast milk from women who eat organic products, avoid seed oils, and eat healthy fats — as it’s unregulated, it can even be sold by individuals on Facebook. One male breast milk aficionado claimed on Twitter that “his women” “are on an elite diet so I know that the quality is head and shoulders above other human breast milk suppliers”.

Breast Milk Enjoyer also tells me that “the online right-wing bodybuilding community, which I am part of, sources almost entirely from wives of men in the sphere or women who are adjacent to it. I am very confident that having these personal links means we are sourcing the breast milk ethically.”  He also insists that his consumption is not sexual. “I very much enjoy it now. It’s not a fetish thing, I’ve just had so much of it over the years that any taboo is broken. Once you go frozen, you must try fresh off the tap.”

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He does recognise, though, that there is an extreme end to the industry — without realising that he is part of the problem: “You have no idea of the state of our inboxes,” he laments. “Women will advertise a full-service milking experience, complete with costumes, for thousands of dollars.”

He can’t see that the commodification of women — whether this be the trade in their breast milk, the renting of their wombs, or the prostitution of their bodies — is always marketed as altruism, when in fact it is all about profit. And exploitation and abuse of disadvantaged women is at the core of all these transactions.

I have seen lactation fetishists refer to the women who provide the milk as “cows” on message boards. In Cambodia I heard babies and toddlers crying from hunger while the milk meant for their mouths was extracted for export. And I’ve heard grown men moan about lactating women clogging up their inboxes. It beggars belief that we are happy to commercialise maternal breastfeeding and let the milk snatchers make their own rules, rather than cracking down on yet another cynical exploitation of women and their bodies.