It’s a thought perhaps shared by the author Katherine Rundell, who won the Bailie Gifford non-fiction prize for her 2022 biography of the poet John Donne. She said in an interview afterwards, having rather fallen in love with Donne’s lusty, dirty Jacobean verse: “I do think a lot of the visions we have of sex and sexuality today are profoundly depressing. You tap them and they ring like money.”

That’s certainly true of British porn star Bonnie Blue, who lined up 1,000 men to have sex with her in a deeply profitable stunt that has also profited her parents, who are on her payroll. Yet intercourse with a legion of men in a day isn’t sex so much as an endurance marathon: where you’re the track and endless strangers are running over you. I wonder how much erogeneity those strangers experienced, having waited like nervous schoolboys queuing up to aim their pee at a target on the wall. It’s not half as fun an image as that created by the humourist Dorothy Parker, way back in 1934, who said of the Yale prom that “if all the girls who attended were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.” 

Now she’s back leering suggestively at the camera while dandling a newborn on her lap; it hardly stirs the loins. If Bonnie Blue can plausibly be accused of having so much sex it loses all meaning, most of her generation is, perhaps, not having enough. The numbers here are stark, with one recent poll finding that just 30% of Gen Zers had lost their virginity. Another found that almost 30% of those aged 18-24 had not had sex at all in the previous year.

Philip Larkin might have claimed that sexual intercourse was invented in 1963, between the lifting of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. But when was it uninvented? When did it die? Was it when Marvel conquered the cinemas? As the film director Richard Linklater said in an interview with The Times in 2024: “Superheroes don’t have sex. They don’t have genitalia, frankly.” Or was it when the political gap between young men and women became a gaping abyss, perhaps crystallised on the day that Andrew Tate, currently facing charges of rape and sexual trafficking, was described by Nigel Farage as “an important voice for men”? 

If Tate became popular online, technology could also be responsible in other ways. Perhaps real intimacy is too scary for a generation who have never really been left alone with their imaginations, always having a device to look at instead, and who have always been seen in those devices themselves. Too much of one’s own reflection is never good. Bonnie Blue is from a generation deeply concerned about their looks; girls who are rarely seen without a full face of make-up, having grown up watching YouTube tutorials of how to plaster themselves in industrial quantities of slap every morning. 

I mean, the last time I saw my 14-year-old without her enormous false eyelashes and thick foundation — honestly, months can pass between sightings of her actual face — I immediately took a photo of her. When she protested, I explained it was important for me to have a reference to give the police in case she goes missing. (She responded that even in a hostage situation she will never be seen without the lashes, so I suppose it’s good that they give her an impetus to escape?) 

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By Kathleen Stock

But whose fault is this really? Because I have to admit that my daughter was photographed every single day of her early childhood. I always had an iPhone in my hand, and if she asked to see the picture, there it was. There was no waiting for weeks to develop a blurry camera film. So isn’t it pretty rude of us to ask her generation to forget about their image and stop being so vain — when we’ve been the paparazzi all along? We didn’t even need a long lens to see them on their beach lounger; we’d plastered the close-ups of their childhood holidays all over social media before the plane had even landed at Heathrow.

Still, at least now that my daughter has a smartphone herself, I seem to be alone among my fellow parents in not tracking her every move via GPS. My generation, it seems, are not content with being paps; we’re stalkers too, knowing where our kids are at all times, even once they’ve gone to university or fully moved out of the house. It’s not the greatest conducement to developing a private life, is it — your mum being able to see if you’ve been a dirty stop-out; your dad able to track your walk of shame all the way home. How are our children to develop an erotic hinterland if we never leave them alone? 

Not that the situation is necessarily hopeless. For at least one prominent Gen Xer has shown herself more than happy to teach the kids how it’s done. In the last month alone, the actress Gillian Anderson has published More, the second in a series anthologising women’s sexual fantasies, and released a film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, in which she stars as an older woman who teaches a younger woman to experience sexual pleasure. All this after Anderson’s hit role as the sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in Sex Education, a Netflix show beloved by teenagers around the world for the way Anderson’s on-screen son secretly shares her tips with his classmates. 

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By Poppy Sowerby

And, beyond TV, Gen Z and Gen X really do seem to be meeting in the middle (forget Millennials). I’m certainly not the only single middle-aged woman who recently dabbled in the dating apps, and found men in their twenties only too happy to swipe right. When I struck up conversations, and even went on dates with them, I was fascinated to know why. (They should never have dared approach a journalist; I see everything as a potential interview.) 

More than one told me that with women their own age, they worried about saying the wrong thing, whereas they were so unlikely to even be able to impress someone of my generation that it almost took the pressure off. It seemed that anxiety towards their female peers was fuelling their interest in women who were not their peers — as well, no doubt, as the desire to learn something about sex from someone more experienced. 

One 20-something bloke even told me that he had been on a recent date with someone his age who sat down in the pub and immediately asked him where he stood on Israel and abortion. It didn’t feel like a conversation so much as a test: one he now didn’t want to pass, whether he turned out to share her views or not. “But people your age are so much more open-minded,” he added, with a hopeful look in his eyes.

Niblett’s big idea is to herald in what she calls a “summer of sex”, instructing the general public in the art of having satisfying, mutually respectful erotic experiences. Perhaps assuming that the Right needs more help with this than the Left, she appears to be spinning her campaign towards Reform and Restore voters in particular: “it’s about taking control of our patriotism, about taking control of our Britishness, and not feeling ashamed”. Accordingly, she has named the project “Yes Sex Please, we are British”, which ironically sounds like something only a foreigner could have made up. In fact, though, it’s a riff on a Seventies sex farce featuring Ronnie Corbett — probably a little niche, even for Rupert Lowe fans.

The details of Niblett’s project sound unlikely to get the national pulse racing. Or as Aristotle percipiently noted in a different context, one swallow does not a summer make. She plans to team up with a fellow sex positivist — the equally improbably named Cindy Gallop — to replace the pornographic stereotypes in people’s heads with images of “real people” having sexual contact. In other words: don’t picture the slick thrustings of Pornhub, think Matt Hancock smooching in an office. Gallop is the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), a website where, according to its own hype, you can “watch real world sex videos in all their loving, hot, and messy humanness”. Niblett apparently enjoys visiting the site herself — “It’s a turn on, it helps you masturbate, helps you cum”, she elaborates to the reporter, somewhat unnecessarily — and says she is looking to facilitate engagement between its founder and government ministers.

Gallop, meanwhile, is a 66-year-old entrepreneur who recently told the Telegraph she is proud of the fact that she “regularly and recreationally” sleeps with younger men. It was apparently in the course of these amatory adventures that she had a Eureka moment, in the traditional sense. She started to notice that the young men with whom she was sleeping had various misconceptions about sex, based on hardcore porn consumption. And lo, the idea for MLNP was born.

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In a spirit of inquiry, I signed up for the free version. I can’t say I enjoyed the experience much, though perhaps it was because the clips I was watching were only three seconds long — you have to pay to watch full videos, and I didn’t. Generally, the site looks like an updated Readers’ Wives section. If you like brutally natural lighting, concentrated facial expressions, low-energy writhing on well-worn Ikea furniture, and occasional grunts interspersed with the sounds of the Heathrow flightpath, this might well be the place for you.

Participants write their own blurbs to lure viewers in, and several seem to involve references to childcare: “This is just a short video we made while finding some time in the morning while the children were still asleep”; “We’re again using the time our toddler is napping to get as much of each other as possible”. Another theme is the outdoors: “Witness as Tausha’s body responds to Trevor’s touches. Hear her moans echo through the forest, listen to the birds respond to her primal tones”. I did as instructed and think I might have heard a startled woodpecker, though it was quite hard to tell.

Of course — as Niblett’s fellow MPs have been quick to point out — this is all a right Carry On, and a distraction from current political priorities: wars, looming food shortages, systemic state failures resulting in the murder of children. As Kemi Badenoch pithily put it in the Commons, “it gives a whole new meaning to fiddling while Rome burns”. Stung by the criticism, Niblett has apparently now changed her PR strategy, suggesting yesterday that the campaign is for the benefit of “old people” who “want to have sex”. Presumably Badenoch’s Spads are brainstorming double entendres about the triple lock as I write.

But what is also frustrating is that Niblett and Gallop identify a real problem, though the solution they propose is hilariously empty. It is obvious that porn use, among other modern malaises, is infecting sexual behavior to the detriment of both women and men, but the solution cannot be yet more porn — for this is indeed what MLNP provides, despite the disclaimer in its title. True, there are no webcams or teary-eyed women retching, an undoubted plus; but the mere absence of something awful scarcely counts as a valuable education.

Part of the problem is that images of people enjoying one another say nothing very complicated. Not being made of words, images tend to be simple like that. Gallop grandiosely claims that each of the videos on her site “is an object lesson in consent, communication, good sexual values, good sexual behavior”. But that’s like saying that a photo of Kew Gardens is an object lesson in how to grow roses. In fact, though, what we are supposedly seeing demonstrated onscreen at MLNP — respect, mutuality, loving concern for the other, or whatever — is the end result of a process that is still a complete mystery to many.

Since the sex you have with others is a product of the wider relationship you have with them, a sex education worth its name would require making substantive moral judgments about good and bad relationships — and not just in the bedroom or on the picnic rug. Yet beyond the usual platitudes about consent and better communication, this is something both Niblett and Gallop are very unwilling to do; and it’s a reluctance shared with nearly everyone in the so-called “sex education” space. Niblett insists in her interview that she is not “saying that anybody else’s preferences are wrong”. And in a 2009 Ted talk, Gallop states: “this is absolutely not about judgment… this is not about good and bad”. She even professes herself a regular watcher of hardcore porn. Her big revelation is that for every possible sexual proclivity, there will be some that like it, and some that don’t; and if you don’t like something, it is OK to say so.

But secondary schools, women’s magazines, and soap operas have been harping on this basic point since at least the Eighties. Announcing it yet again is not going to change a thing. In fact, the average person who assents to a hated sexual practice knows perfectly well that a firm “no” is always available; but they don’t want to use it, and not necessarily because they are feeling open-minded. A rival explanation is that they can’t think of any persuasive consideration against the practice in question; and, in this regard, mainstream culture has done nothing to help. On the contrary, it has made nearly every kind of sexual behavior immune to serious critique, as long as accompanied by the transformational fairy dust of adult consent.

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Saying that something is only bad if you don’t like it, but fine if you do, is a particularly unconvincing argument. It doesn’t even work well for wine tastings, let alone human relationships. It makes your likes or dislikes of certain things seem like they must be built on sand, and scarcely worth defending. Feelings of disgust become “preferences” rather than helpful reactions of ethical discernment. You lose the capacity to articulate what in other circumstances would be a perfectly natural thing to say: “No, I’m not bloody well doing that, because it expresses nothing but contempt for me; and you are a creep for even trying”.

A real sex education must be, partly, a moral education, and moral education involves judgment by definition; yet modern moralists have a kink for being non-judgmental, as their preferred phrasing goes. Accordingly, they treat sexual activity as utterly unlike any other sphere of human behavior: as bizarrely insulated from everyday attitudes like hatred and resentment, even when the actions undertaken are obviously hateful and resentful. In no other context could you slap someone hard in the face, choke them, pull them around on a lead, or intentionally cause them to retch, yet still claim later without embarrassment that you “respected” them hugely throughout.

Since only radical feminists and religious types seem willing to contest this absurd narrative, vacuous platitudes from the likes of Niblett and Gallop about “better communication”, “freeing people from shame” and, of course, “increasing consent” will likely continue unabated, circling vaguely around the real ethical dilemmas of sexual interaction but never actually engaging. In a 2019 interview, Gallop talked of plans to start a business called ConSensual: not, as you may have first feared, a sex education site aimed at Conservative Party members, but rather a “safe social sexting app, which both enables you to sext completely securely and improves your sexual communication in your relationship (I have this all planned out in the pipeline, I just need investors)”. Imagine a Cindy-avatar in kinky boots, cheerfully reminding you that if someone calls you a filthy, disgusting whore, that’s perfectly fine, as long as you happen to like it; but absolutely not if you don’t! Personally, though, I think I’ll just stick to WhatsApp, plus my usual practice of avoiding sexting people who clearly loathe me. And that’s a bit of sex education the world can have for free.

Emerald Fennell seems to have approached Wuthering Heights in a similarly improving spirit. I must say I haven’t read Emily Brontë’s novel myself — though I was assured that wouldn’t be a problem when it came to following the film, and may even confer an advantage when it came to enjoying it — but I’m guessing the stable-room bondage scene, depictions of public masturbation, and corpses with erections were all Fennell’s tasteful additions.

In fact, a little research suggests that whole epochs within the novel hit the cutting-room floor in the journey from bookstore to screen, with characters ruthlessly conflated or excised altogether, so as to accommodate all the steamy sex scenes that Brontë thoughtlessly forgot to arrange for her protagonists.

On the promotional circuit, Fennell has repeatedly emphasized the deep impression the novel made on her as a teenager, and her film contains touches overwrought enough to bear that out. As has been noticed, the film unfolds more like a fan-fictionalization of its source than an adaptation: the surrounding structural architecture of plot and character developed only to the degree that they can be taken for granted as a stable context for erotic wish-fulfillment. Even the title, which comes wrapped in coy little scare quotes — “Wuthering Heights” — seems an attempt early on to manage expectations. Though, of course, it’s not as if simply pleading guilty at pre-trial is a way of absolving yourself of a crime.

There is a peculiar cultural assumption that plumbing the detail of one’s sexual fantasies inevitably yields stark or revealing information about the self. To “explore” — like Sally Rooney and swathes of prestige TV — the dark allure of BDSM, and the supposedly psychologically complex interplay between affection and violence, is taken as a surefire way of advertising one’s artistic sophistication.

If Wuthering Heights achieves nothing else, it should be to put that particular misconception to bed, as it were. The inclusion of a BDSM scene seems a gratuitous, and slightly feeble, provocation. And if conceived as a quick-fix way of infusing Cathy and Heathcliff’s melodramatic love story with a sense of psychological depth — well, it fails.

Long stretches of the film consist of exactly the sort of breathless, derivative, fleeting encounters you might expect it to on the assumption that you were not watching Wuthering Heights, but something operating at a somewhat hazier degree of removal: an attempt to depict the erotic shadow cast by the book in the mind of a half-remembered adolescent reader.

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Zadie Smith has nothing to say

By John Maier

We watch while, as if on an endless reel, Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie chase each other pointlessly across windswept moors. There they grapple with each other. Kiss. Lick each other’s faces. Breathe meaningfully. Look searchingly into one another’s eyes. The weather being what it is, they are forever getting caught in the most torrential downpours, and neither of them ever thinks to bring an umbrella or to wear clothes that don’t quickly go transparent.

They cry and mewl and pout at each other, break for a costume change, and then do it all again, striking postures of indignance and hurt as they growl about their feelings and heave their respective bosoms. They stand stoically by Cathy’s father’s grave, the wind tearing camply at her black veil, then, practically within sight of the funeral party, reunite with animal intensity. Occasionally in fits of love-stricken anger Robbie will beat her girly fists on Elordi’s manly chest. When all other ways of communicating their profound bond have been exhausted, they stick their fingers in each other’s mouths.

Throughout, there is virtually no suggestion of the existence of a wider social world, the whole film instead an unrooted universe of total mutual self-absorption. The effect is a flattening realization of the montage of imaginative sexual fantasy. Sitting there, watching it, was like re-enacting the closing scene of Cinema Paradiso, except that instead of the touching variety of rescued black-and-white embraces, it’s just Elordi and Robbie sniffing and licking each other’s faces again and again.

Fennell’s attempt to not merely adapt a book for the screen, but somehow conjure up the imaginative impact it had on a teenage reader, faces considerable challenges. Polemicists of a cultural-declinist bent may be tempted to say this is because of the greater imaginative richness of the reading experience. But actually, some of the obstacles are to do with its comparative impoverishment.

There is something deceptively shallow about the contents of imaginative simulation: the kind of activity one gives might give way to in reading a novel or idly embellishing the romance of its protagonists. The internal spotlight of wandering imaginative attention makes fantasy feel rich from the inside, but it is a richness that relies on an illusion: a mistaken impression that one’s mind’s eye “sees” in more detail than it really does.

Many people are surprised to learn that vision itself relies on a similar cognitive trick: while the brain generates the illusion that the entire visual field is in focus, in reality the fovea, the central one or two degrees of the visual field, is tiny, equivalent in area to a thumbnail held out at arm’s length, the rest of the visual field implicitly filled in by a process akin to a simplifying inference.

Whether because of their inherent shallowness or otherwise, many of us come to realize it is a naive mistake to expect others to be as attached to our fantasies as we are. It is notoriously boring to hear others describe their dreams. In the same way, attempting to depict an object of fantasy can destroy its deceptive, impressionistic power. Most people are familiar with the dissatisfied feeling that a character played on screen is not at all how they imagined them — even if it is not always easy to put your finger on just how they depart from the under-specified but perfectly cast original.

Imaginative fantasy, then, has a propensity to crash-land when realized in the flesh. That propensity may only be greater when it comes to the kind of romantic escapism Fennell has tried to make flesh in Wuthering Heights. Writhing with Heathcliff on the moors, licking and gasping and striking a pose: from the inside of the teenage mind, these may grip one as the very heights of erotic profundity. Flattened onto the screen, they can seem like withering lows.

Of course, it’s not as if film, the standout expressive art form of the 20th century,  is too limited a medium to evoke romantic fantasy in a viewer. But to do such material justice probably requires something other than Fennell’s trademark style of campy overstatement, of which the lavish aesthetic and anachronistic latex costumes are only the most obvious manifestations of a general inability to exercise creative restraint.

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Some films can be almost novelistic in their tendency to invite an imaginative contribution from the viewer. Writing in 1972, the screenwriter Paul Schrader coined the term “transcendental style” for the peculiar effectiveness — the near-meditative quality — that was sometimes achieved in films of Ozu, Bresson and others, many only then being screened in LA for the first time. Schrader’s theory was that these filmmakers had learned to direct in such a way as to trigger introspection. The characteristic technique was to withhold — something akin to the intelligent use of empty time and space.

Into that space the engaged viewer is forced to contribute something of his own. Made to “add their own egg”. Of course, Fennell might argue she was trying to make a very different kind of film to those Schrader was watching; nevertheless, her Wuthering Heights stifles imaginative engagement in the very act of attempting to control it. Hers is a film in which all of the eggs are added on the viewer’s behalf — not least when Cathy is made to crack half a dozen of them into Heathcliff’s bed as an early provocation, and Elordi kneels there, plunging his fingers gormlessly into the gooey mess. (As ever no prizes are on offer for guessing subtext; there wouldn’t be enough to go round!).

The idea that information might be strategically withheld to creative effect is not a distinctively cinematic insight, of course. At the sentence level, Hemingway’s theory of prose seems to have been that there was imaginative danger in over-specificity — that it is in general an illusion that, as one modifier is piled on after another, resolution increases. Better to take advantage of an intelligent reader’s tendency to make an imaginative contribution of his own. Emerald Fennell, on the other hand, prefers to make films where all the adjectives are left in — italicized, underlined and in scare quotes too.

No doubt, in the contemporary attention economy, the natural tendency is to favor Fennell’s lurid approach over more hands-off alternatives. As Matt Damon and Ben Affleck recently recounted in a widely publicized interview, it is now de rigueur for Netflix to helpfully suggest that a film’s characters verbally reiterate the plot at least three of four times, and that large set-piece action scenes should be used to “grab” the viewer’s attention in the first few minutes.

Perhaps naturally suited to the cultural moment, Fennell has never shown any temptation to act on the maxim that less is sometimes more. “I will not stand for this grotesque performance a moment longer”, shouts Nelly at a bed-ridden Margot Robbie towards the end of the film, and it is difficult for the audience not to share the sentiment. The risk, in the end, in simply “grabbing” your viewer’s attention, and training it on the banal contents of an adolescent fantasy, is that you unwittingly reveal how shaky and under-developed those materials can be.

Despite today’s headlines about officers being sacked or jailed for illicit relationships with prisoners, none of the underlying dynamics are new. Across the 16 years I spent in custody, I saw it all first-hand, from furtive tenderness to outright corruption. But if base human impulse will endure until our jails turn to dust, the prison environment has changed. With austerity undermining the workplace structures that once controlled interactions between inmate and guard, hormones — and self-interested cynicism — are now far harder to constrain.

A recent surge in misconduct cases has dragged prison romance into public view. The media focus has fixed largely on women, partly because several cases have been unusually sensational, from the explicit footage to relationships that fused emotional dependency with criminal compromise. The HMP Wandsworth case, where an officer was jailed after being filmed having sex with a prisoner, illustrated how quickly fantasy, contraband and security failure can collapse into public scandal.

The figures reflect this trend. In the year to June 2024, a record 165 prison staff in England and Wales were dismissed for misconduct, a 34% rise on the previous year. The offenses ranged from inappropriate relationships to smuggling phones and drugs. Across the wider Ministry of Justice and its agencies, dismissals for misconduct have more than doubled since 2022. Increased detection doubtless plays a role here, but so do the cumulative effects of structural degradation. Ironically, the very contraband used to sustain secrecy — mobile phones — has helped expose wrongdoing so publicly that the state has been forced to respond.

In truth, though, this is about far more than a smuggled iPhone. There was a time, after all, when such relationships were contained by experience. Older officers understood prisoner behavior instinctively. They spotted manipulation early. They knew when a conversation lingered too long, when grooming had begun, when a colleague needed to be rotated off a wing. Their presence acted as the prison service’s immune system. I remember one senior officer who ran the wing I lived on. He was firm, sometimes abrasive, but effective. “It’s his train set,” a fellow prisoner once joked, and in a sense it was. He understood the environment and how to keep it stable.

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That authority wasn’t abstract. One officer I knew, who become involved in an intimate relationship with a prisoner, was working under exactly this kind of robust leadership. Once the early signs were identified, there was no slow drift, no tolerated ambiguity. She was removed from the wing and marched off-site within hours. As it was relayed to us later, a superior told her simply: “This job is not for you.”

These protections were stripped away after 2012, when ministers replaced a planned privatization drive with “public sector benchmarking”: doing more work with fewer staff. From 2011 to 2017, frontline officer numbers fell by roughly 30%, and the service has never recovered.

When that senior officer I knew took redundancy, some were glad. Within a year, though, the cost was obvious. The atmosphere loosened. Boundaries blurred, and with them the everyday authority that had kept the wings stable. What followed was a power vacuum, one swiftly filled by violent criminals, organized gangs and Islamists. Authority, in other words, isn’t withdrawn from the landings, nor does it disappear. Rather, it’s ceded: to those most willing to impose it, arbitrarily and often violently.

And for every experienced prison guard who retires, their replacement is almost invariably worse. I saw this first hand, as landings were filled with inexperienced recruits, some barely out of college, and all with minimal training and weak supervision. A vicious circle soon followed, as staff with little life experience were dumped into some of the most brutal environments in the country. I witnessed this shift personally, when a new female recruit arrived on my wing. She was keen and professional, but inexperienced in reading her surroundings. That is not a criticism of her; it’s an obvious risk when 22 year olds are stationed on wings holding around 100 men, and where they’re routinely left to patrol landings alone. High on the third floor, the guard was dragged into a cell by a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder, with no colleagues to assist her. Intervention came only after other prisoners heard her screams.

By late 2023, the scale of this collective inexperience was stark. 41% of prison officers had fewer than three years on the job, compared to just 2% a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the proportion with over 10 years’ experience had fallen from two thirds to less than a quarter. Knowledge that once passed informally between generations of staff — how to read a wing, how to set boundaries — had largely disappeared.

As my memories from HMP Gartree imply, secret relationships between inmates and guards have always existed. Falling in love is human nature, more so in the cramped psychological conditions of prison. Jail distorts ordinary emotional patterns. It compresses isolation and allows human instincts to slip their usual restraints. All this is doubly true for prisoners, starved of intimacy and connection, with deprivation turning small acts of kindness into oxygen.

Yet seasoned criminals hardly forget their methods at the prison gate. They cultivate familiarity, test boundaries — and wait. Once a line is crossed, leverage follows. A favor today becomes expectation tomorrow. Then exception becomes routine, and emotional access hardens into material extraction: contraband, prohibited communications, the “one-off” that last for years.

For officers, particularly young women placed on volatile landings with predatory men, environment and emotional reflex combine with dangerous force. There is the urge to nurture, easily triggered by displays of distress or vulnerability. There is the pull of charismatic alpha males who command status among dangerous peers. And there is flattery, the illusion of being uniquely trusted, understood or “liked”. Some slip into the role without quite knowing when the ground gave way. Others exploit it knowingly, sometimes for financial gain.

Whatever the reason, falling into crime, especially when your duty is to maintain professional boundaries and protect the public, is a choice. Yet when these forces collide with inadequate supervision, thin staffing and relentless exposure, they harden into risk — and the consequences can be severe. Intelligence leaks. Contraband circulates more freely. Debt and violence intensify. Informal power shifts. I have known officers disclose offenses, identify informants or pass on sensitive information, sometimes to ingratiate themselves, sometimes out of hatred for a particular crime. The consequences were predictable: prisoners attacked; debts enforced through beatings; men removed from rehabilitative pathways because trust, once broken, could not be restored.

Of course, not every case crosses the threshold into criminality. Some drift into genuine emotional partnerships. A small number of staff resign to continue relationships openly once prisoners are transferred. In lower-category prisons, this drift has sometimes been rationalized rather than challenged. At HMP Warren Hill, where I was held for over two years, one such relationship involving a charity worker was tolerated on the basis that it acted as a “protective factor” ahead of release, provided it remained “non-intimate”.

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Still, just like in the real world, many of these staff-inmate relationships founder, and when they do, officers tend to suffer more. If the breach involves improper contact but no contraband, the (often female) officer is removed, barred and sometimes shamed in the press. The prisoner, however, may face little consequence beyond a file note. When criminality is involved, the imbalance widens further. Messages, footage, and entry logs usually sit with the officer. When it collapses, it does so brutally: prosecution, reputational ruin, shattered families and the realization that the promise of love was often as empty as the cell she now occupies. He, practiced in the art of concealment, may simply continue serving his sentence, his network and status enhanced.

His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service has acknowledged part of this reality, expanding its Counter Corruption Unit from 2019 to detect and disrupt wrongdoing. The rise in dismissals reflects that effort. But enforcement alone cannot repair a degraded system. This, too, reflects a wider failure across Britain’s criminal justice system: risk is managed procedurally rather than structurally. Scandals are treated as isolated lapses rather than symptoms of institutional weakening. Responsibility is pushed downwards onto individuals, while the conditions that made failure predictable remain largely untouched.

Honest reform would begin by honestly diagnosing the problem. This is not just a morality tale about individual weakness, but the predictable result of stripped-out experience, supervision and authority. From there, the authorities must re-professionalize the job. That means restoring experienced staff on wings, and ensuring training addresses the ethical and psychological hazards of prison work, all while rotating staff off high-risk landings. The watchword here should be prevention — not punishment.

Aligning incentives with reality is crucial here. Stabilizing violent, drug-saturated prisons is skilled, risky work. Until pay and progression reflect that, the service will continue recruiting for numbers and losing experience. And finally, the Ministry of Justice should improve design and culture, not just detection. Better sightlines and smarter CCTV both matter here, as do schedules that discourage isolation.

Ultimately, this is not about romance or scandal. It is about safety. Yet until prisons are rebuilt as safety-critical institutions — properly staffed and properly supervised — the same quiet patterns will persist: the light footsteps on the landing, the whispers at the door, the lines crossed just out of sight. And the consequences will not remain inside.

***

Variety is the spice of life and all that. Last Thursday I was at Channel 4, attending the premiere of porn star Bonnie Blue’s new documentary, followed by a Q&A with the woman herself. The next day I was in the Cotswolds to give an after-dinner speech at “Scrutopia”, the annual summer school run in memory of conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. One of these events was much more fun than the other.

In the flesh, Bonnie — real name Tia Billinger — was burnished and svelte, giving every sign of being genuinely happy with the career that has made her millions. Her gimmick is to have sex on camera with what she calls “normal men”, not porn stars, then make subscribers pay to watch — and for six months, she has allowed the documentary-makers to follow her around. Gangbangs are her self-professed kink, including an infamous one in January allegedly involving 1,057 men in 12 hours. This proved too much for OnlyFans bosses, who refused to air the footage much to its star’s frustration. Instead, she has persuaded Channel 4 to show excerpts. The accompanying voiceover calls it “an unofficial world record”, as if waiting for Roy Castle to arrive with a certificate.

Along with journos and TV types, members of the Billinger family were in the audience for the screening, including her proud mum and gran. We all watched as their girl got penetrated by various portly naked men, touted for virgins at freshers’ fairs, and did jigsaws and crafting projects as downtime. “My brain works differently, I’m not emotional,” she says to camera at one point, and I believed her. Filmed at the end of her mass orgy, she lies down on the condom-strewn floor and does a comedy starfish.

I’m afraid I laughed. Blue/Billinger is quite funny in a Carry On Up the Algorithm sort of way. Asked during the Q&A whether she ever “hit the wall” during marathon sex sessions, she replied that “the only walls that get hit are mine”. She is good at bathetically juxtaposing the outrageous with the mundane: “I would love you to rearrange my insides somewhere near Oxford Circus”, goes a typical TikTok advert for one of her events. She also says she is looking for male participants whether they are “barely legal or barely breathing”, and that they should hide any wedding rings for the cameras.

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With a cool business head, she explains that the provocation is deliberate: the more wives and mothers rant angrily about her, the more husbands and sons go searching for her online. Making money like this is far more fun than her previous job in finance recruitment for the NHS. Yet she also likes to think of her content as educative, teaching men to have better sex. “I am basically a community worker,” she declares somewhat implausibly, before masterminding a sex scene in a classroom. Frightened-looking young women, awkwardly dressed up in school uniforms, say that they hope their unpaid participation will drive more subscribers to their own tiny porn accounts.

Also involved in Thursday’s presentation were the Channel 4 backers, visibly confused about what sort of film they were promoting: heartwarming story of feminist empowerment or hollow-eyed nightmare. (On camera, Blue says it is the former: “If anything I’m the image of what you [feminists] have been asking for for years”.) The anxious commissioning editor got a laugh when he fulsomely thanked “Kirsty from legal”; while director Victoria Silver seemed to struggle with Blue’s cheerful sociopathy, switching incoherently in the Q&A between praise for female autonomy and sad head-shaking on behalf of her teenage daughter. At one point, she told the audience that “all of us” should “park” our judgmental responses to Bonnie: she’s just out there doing her thing.

But part of Blue’s thing is to resist others’ attempts at humanization. At one point in the documentary, she gets banned from the OnlyFans platform altogether, for announcing that she next intends to film herself displayed in a clear glass box in central London, bound, gagged, and open to all-comers to penetrate as they wish. “Do you consider yourself an artist?” a pretentious American journalist asked her after the credits had rolled, perhaps keen to frame her as the new Marina Abramovic. Replied Blue with derision: “Oh my god, that’s far too intellectual a question; what is it you think you’ve just watched?” Another questioner noticed that some subscribers seemed to crave emotional connection, and asked her what men who paid to watch her might be “grateful for”. The frank answer came back: “my holes”.

We don’t really need to wonder what Roger Scruton would have thought about all of this, because in 1986 he wrote a book called Sexual Desire which told us. In it, he sketched a Platonic ideal of sexual arousal: of erotic desire involving mutual recognition and communication of pleasure between you and your partner, ecstatically directed towards an irreplaceable particular person in all their specificity, rather than towards a mere selection of body parts, or some pictures on a screen. Sexual desire in this ideal state is individualizing, not objectifying; it is a “cooperative enterprise” between two people, discovering new aspects of the mysterious other; it is sacred and full of awe. It is the absolute opposite of hundreds of men standing in boxer shorts and balaclavas, waiting for a few seconds of bodily contact with a woman they have never met; or of thousands of spectators, home alone with credit cards out and flies unzipped.

Scruton — someone I knew a little through our shared interest in philosophical aesthetics — did not write from a religious point of view. His arguments in Sexual Desire were all secular. Still, he was very clear that sex is always a moral matter, and seemed confident that any sexual impulse falling short of his demanding interpersonal conception must be relegated to mere perversion. I used to find this endearingly idealistic, assuming that he had probably got an exaggerated idea of love’s redemptive power from listening to too much Wagner. Now though, I think he was probably right.

For while it seems clear that something has gone hideously awry with Bonnie Blue’s general approach to sexual matters, if you take modern morality at face value, then it’s hard to say exactly what. Was it when she passed a certain number of penetrations? Was it fine at 10 men, but not at 11? Would it have been better if she had spaced out the bodily collisions a bit, with a few hours between each? Or if she hadn’t filmed it for others to watch?

Faced with the unsatisfying arbitrariness of these proposals, Scruton’s more tempting answer beckons. Things went wrong the moment Blue decided to treat her fellow human beings as depersonalized objects, and to let them treat her like an object in turn. This was just as wrong the first time she did it, as the 1,000th. The awkward thing about this answer is not that it is unsatisfying; it is more the way it forces most of us to say “Je suis Bonnie Blue” too.

Contemporary theories of sexuality urge us to go beyond feelings of love and desire for particular special people to the “true”, more basic nature of sexual contact. They reduce sex between humans to a blind urge to reproduce genes, or to a repressed version of childhood attachments, or to animal lust untrammeled by civilizing religious impulses, or whatever the modern story is. Via such narratives, we are supposed to think of human relationships as fruitfully extracted from the world of familiar subjective appearances, and given up to the pitiless objective gaze of the scientist, sexologist, or psychoanalyst, so that the “real” story can emerge about what we are doing when we long for another person.

But as Scruton saw, in trying to strip the world of enchanting sexual appearances to get to the supposedly real urges “underneath” the appearances, we just replace beautiful appearances with uglier disenchanted ones. As he wrote:

“… to see human beings as objects is not to see them as they are, but to change what they are, by erasing the appearance through which they relate to one another as persons… It is to create a new kind of creature, a depersonalized human being, in which subject and object drift apart, the first into a world of helpless dreams, the second to destruction.”

It’s almost as if he’d been watching Channel 4.

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Having a lovely time around the dinner table at Scrutopia, I chatted to serious young men about expectations placed upon them. One of them brought up the dangerous practice of sexualized choking, made popular through exposure to violent porn. He said that, just like most women, most men don’t like it either, but sometimes feel they are expected to do it, and may even be reluctantly complying out of embarrassment. It seems like a horribly dark version of the Abilene paradox: nobody wants to go to Abilene, but everyone thinks everybody else wants to, so they all unhappily troupe there together. Except that this time, a woman is involuntarily strangled instead; and here too, it turns out nobody was ever having any fun.

Blue — who perhaps needless to say, is a big fan of being choked — would undoubtedly say this issue is to be solved by more vocal consent. It was a point she came back to repeatedly when questioned on Thursday night. But having to read out an ever-growing list of internet-approved acts you positively don’t want to participate in, every time you get into the bedroom, does not seem to me a liberating state of affairs for anyone. And for every future dead, strangled daughter who once watched a Bonnie Blue video — or whose sex partner did — it won’t be much consolation for her family to think she nominally had a choice.

Scruton was the sort of social conservative who positively fought for the beautiful and noble things in our culture, trying to safeguard their presence before they disappeared entirely. If the rest of us are too jaundiced to manage that, we should at least try to fight off the obviously ugly and degrading. OnlyFans has recently been valued at $8 billion. It’s all very well saying you won’t be looking into the abyss; either way, the abyss will end up looking into you. Do we really want to have to decline balaclavas in the bedroom on a case-by-case basis? Do we really want sex as a pay-per-view circus with Bonnie Blue as ringmaster-in-chief? I suggest we get our disapproving judgments out of the carpark and back on the road.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was using a well-rehearsed psychological trick to seduce women. If a slightly awkward young man approached you in the late 2000s, or early 2010s, and told you that the little speck of gunk in your eye was cute, he might have been a pick-up artist, and his trick of choice might have been a “neg”. This was short for “negative feedback” — meant to both compliment and demean at the same time, in the hope that you’d seek his approval. In answering my host’s question about Joy Division, I was already doing just that. We ended up dating for two years.

During that time, the pick-up artist surprised me by how open he was about the psychology behind his art — PUA for short. He unpacked some of the vocabulary and discussed some of the favored ploys: negging, comparing hand sizes, showing off card tricks, and, above all, appealing to fate. The more you call upon any universal system — astrology, tarot, destiny  — the less personal agency women have to take in making an impulsive or risky sexual decision. He introduced me to some of his pick-up friends too. “When done right,” one of them told me, “PUA should be like make-up. It should enhance rather than cover. It should be invisible.” I was being given a privileged glimpse of what lay behind the curtain. I felt like a trusted ally. That, in hindsight, was part of the pick-up.

These young men would all have read The Game, one of the most infamous books of the 2000s. Neil Strauss, its author, had ghostwritten memoirs of Jenna Jameson and Marilyn Manson, but PUA proved to be his most controversial topic. Strauss immersed himself in what was then a nascent subculture. Having rebranded himself as “Style”, Strauss attended a bootcamp led by an arch-seducer known only as Mystery, whom he managed to befriend. Strauss joined the pick-up community, imbibed — or rather, got drunk on — its teachings on body language, dress and conversation starters, and put these lessons into practice. Ostensibly a memoir of that period in Strauss’s life, The Game was also a manual, promising men secret tips on how to get any woman into bed. Published with a Bible-black leather cover, the book was a bestseller, catapulting Strauss to the status of talk-show celebrity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was wildly popular among certain types of young men — including those I met when I was 18. Perhaps also unsurprisingly, the publication did not win Strauss friends in the women’s liberation community. The feminist blogosphere accused Strauss of advocating for anything from objectification to rape to merely being a pig, making The Game subject to one of the first digital-era moral panics.

It is now 20 years since the book’s publication. In the era of Andrew Tate, the initial backlash seems almost quaint. I was struck, on rereading The Game this year, by Strauss’ success in making the story feel more charming than sleazy. Our narrator is quick-witted and happy-go-lucky as he leads us through a simple story of boy-meets-girls. He picks the reader up, preempting their reticence with jokes, anticipating their frustration with vulnerability. It worked on me.

Strauss himself came to disavow pick-up, hosting a funeral for “Style” in 2013 ahead of his marriage to the model Ingrid de la O. (They are now divorced.) In hindsight, he got out in the nick of time. Social media was not only changing the face of dating, but of feminism as well. Young women became more organized and vigilant; consent classes and thinkpieces sought to stamp out any remnants of PUA. Apparently innocuous behavior, like staring or giving compliments, suddenly acquired menacing undertones, and neither men nor women could feel safe. Strauss’s former colleagues, still in PUA, fared badly. In 2014, Julien Blanc, a PUA instructor, was denied a visa from the UK after it was argued that his interpretation of pick-up veered towards the coercive. The movement naturally dwindled, and its methods began to appear antiquated. Why bother women on a street, or in a bar, when they are more likely to be on an app?

While PUA might have shrunk in practice, it continued to lurk in spirit — Patient Zero for digital-era misogyny. It was PUA forums that popularized the “red pill” meme, adapting terminology from The Matrix. Swallow the “blue pill” and you’ll share the unchallenging majority view that men and women are roughly the same and that neither is, or should be, in charge of the other. Choose the red pill, and you’ll see the world as it apparently really is: men and women are fundamentally and irrevocably different, female sexuality needs to be controlled rather than enabled, and there is nothing worse or more humiliating than being involuntarily celibate. Incels, and their occasional acts of violence, are another offshoot of the red-pill view. It’s almost tragic that Andrew Tate looks like a gritty reboot of Neil Strauss: a badly re-articulated echo that is angrier, shinier, and more ambitious and famous.

Today’s discourse about The Game tends to focus solely on its gender-wars aspect. But these critics seem not to notice that the book’s principal focus is homosocial: on male relationships, male approval, and male identity. These men kiss women and think about what their friend might do in that situation. One pickup artist tells another that while kissing a woman, he was so preoccupied in focusing on imagining what it’d be like for his friend to kiss her, he forgot what the kiss was like altogether. The pick-up artists imitate each other, get ready  for nights out, and they go out together. In the end, they even live together. In the book’s climax, Style and his comrades decide to launch Project Hollywood — a house of pick-up artists. Here, the squabbles become so all-encompassing that the pick-up artists seem to forget what they thought they wanted all along, which was to get laid.

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The phrase “intrasexual competition” is usually used to denigrate women as petty and duplicitous, always looking to slyly damage each other. But in The Game, men are constantly fucking each other over. They steal each other’s targets and squabble with the gossipy urgency of fourteen-year-old girls. Despite this ostensibly being a book about women, the real romance story is between Strauss and Mystery. They fight; they get back together; they fall out of love and get jealous. Their dynamic has much more feeling and commitment than any of the relationships depicted with women. There is a queasy reverberation of the famous adage: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a man picks up a woman in a bar and no one is around to witness it, did he even pick her up at all?

Rereading The Game again, I was also struck by how much of a role magic played in their stories. Perhaps it made sense that I was dressed as a magician’s assistant when I met my first pick-up artist. Unbeknownst to me, I was entering the domain of the fantastical and magical.

The pick-up artists learn card tricks, read palms and perfect their mind-reading routines. Mystery outlines plans to become a professional magician as an exit route. Attempting to peacock, he and many of his fellow PUAs dressed in frilly shirts and furry hats: the universal dress code of the magician. As well as playing conjurors’ tricks, they often spoke to women about mystical magical concepts: not just horoscopes, but “the stars”, “auras” and “healing energies”. For women, there is nothing more enchanting than someone knowing you better than yourself.

But magic is more than a modern way of getting women into bed. It is the folk-underbelly of religion. Tradition without the infrastructure. And seduction is magic. It’s what draws two people together in a way that feels natural, easy, but is also rare and urgent. Many of the pick-up artists were clearly deeply unpleasant; but a lot of them wanted genuine enchantment, I think, even more than they wanted to simulate it. Yet we want our magic without magicians, for the existence of a magician undermines the validity of the magic.

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One of the main criticisms that feminists, and women in general, make of PUA is that it’s just another magician’s con: a form of lying. And perhaps it is: but when it comes to dishonesty and sex, where do we draw the line? Persuading someone into sex isn’t a crime — but at what point is someone pressured, or tricked?

In the post-PUA era, “consent” has come to mean that we want all the facts available before we make a decision. But there’s still no consensus on which facts are relevant. Women wear make-up, but we’d be hard-pressed to see this as a form of lying (though in China, a man successfully sued his wife for not disclosing that she had extensive plastic surgery after seeing the birth of their ugly children.) People also lie about their jobs — does that violate consent? In Israel, people have been successfully prosecuted for pretending to be brain surgeons, or even pretending to be Jewish in search of sexual conquest. And what about alcohol? Alcohol can cause the hard edges of the world to blur handsomely. In that attractive mist, we might find our lips gravitating towards those of a stranger, only to wake up the next morning and regret our loosened inhibitions. We pad our CVs, we pad our bras: is any of this so dishonest as to make a connection no longer consensual?

An encounter is magical, rather than a lie, when the fantasy is shared between the two participants, when both sides want to believe in the power of the moment, and get swept away in the mutual frisson. That is what the seducer should aspire to, and it is timeless.

But The Game still feels like an artifact. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. The well-worn opening of The Go-Between rang through my head when I was reading the book. Today, if awkward young men went to the smoking area of Fabric to proffer their business cards to a group of Goldsmiths freshers, they’d be cruelly giggled out of the club. I almost feel retroactive sympathy — and then I remember how reductively PUAs thought of the women they’d hit on.

Back then, and up till some point in the 2010s, people used to go out to bars to flirt and be flirted with. Were we more likely to believe in magic then? Magic needn’t be True Love, but the sparks could come from someone who asked you for a lighter in the smoking area of a sticky bar. But sometimes I think that millennials and Gen Z are now too cool for magic. It’s become old hat, like Santa Claus or the concept of a “dream job”. By “magic”, I mean the spark. The capacity for good faith between the sexes. The pick-up, and then letting the chips fall where they may, and maybe, within that, finding love or something like it. We might call this new attitude street-smart. We might call it cynicism.

It’s not that we no longer believe in magic. It’s that magic itself is less present in us. Why? Many try to proffer their pet issues. Maybe it’s men and their lowered testosterone or their addiction to pornography. Maybe it’s women and their sex-positive feminism, their sex-negative feminism, their hormonal birth control, their academic superiority over men, or the fallout of the #MeToo movement. Maybe it’s something else: dating apps, capitalism, socialism, or post-Covid atomization. With all these competing diagnoses, it’s hard to imagine what a cure may be, or if we indeed believe a cure is even desirable.

Everyone cheered. Daedone was the charismatic founder of OneTaste, a business which hoped to provide “one billion orgasms” to women and believed the sexual force of orgasmic mediation would change the world. It was the same year they had launched the “Nicole Daedone Intensive”, a course that cost $36,000 and involved hearing some of Daedone’s advice and being given a few assignments. There was a tacit understanding that devotees would “do whatever” they could to pay. Daedone considered herself a sexual prophet, but there was a slow distrust building in her community. Based on the surrounding tactics of Silicon Valley, her start-up scaled, going global, and as her sales tactics grew more vicious, followers were leaving who felt violated and sexually exploited.

“When you can own your ultimate taboo,” she told the cheering crowd that day, “what can anybody do to you?” It was a line delivered with the confidence of someone who believed she was untouchable. Even after the FBI began investigating her and her face appeared in a scathing Netflix documentary, Daedone continued hosting public demonstrations in Los Angeles. But last June, the taboo couldn’t save her: she and her chief sales executive, Rachel Cherwitz, were convicted on forced labor conspiracy charges — found guilty of coercing followers into sex and work by exploiting their deepest vulnerabilities.

Such exploitation seems obvious in retrospect. Beyond the crazy amounts of money OneTaste asked for, there was the strangeness of the practice itself: women lying half-naked, legs butterfly-open, in a room full of strangers, while men, often strangers, stroked their clitorises according to a ritualized technique. Not only would this transform the energy of the receiving woman, but she was supposed to transmit that energy to whoever was watching. You were told off if people in the room didn’t feel you. Often these were rooms full of men, showing up for a free demo session. 

A new book, Empire of Orgasm, written by the Bloomberg reporter, Ellen Huet, who first exposed the company’s inner workings, reveals the depth of Daedone’s deeper philosophy towards sexual relationships. At times, the philosophy bordered on rape apologia. Men were encouraged towards the practice of “skillful violation” and women towards “aversion practice,” which means having sex with people you don’t want to for spiritual growth, or vice versa. Many of her followers were survivors of sexual abuse, as was Nicole, and she taught them that “arousal” was the cure for trauma. Nicole said once in a lecture, “If you want to know the real way to deflect rape, it’s to turn on 100%. Because then there’s nothing to rape”. Physical violence and domestic abuse was encouraged because of the “yin” and “yang” of male and female energy. Whatever was needed to preserve your “Divine Feminine”.

A young lesbian couple at the center of the trial were split up, made essentially indentured servants, and forced to become the sexual “aides” of Reese Jones, the Silicon valley venture capitalist whose millions funded OneTaste. He was also Nicole’s boyfriend. This happened regularly to women who joined. Daily blowjobs were assigned to many women as “aversion therapy” to “help their spiritual growth”. When colleagues fell out, they were told to take off their trousers and receive “the practice”. Nicole persuaded a man in chronic agonizing pain to leave his girlfriend, a key witness who later sued OneTaste for sexual assault, by instructing him “to give his money to the feminine”. Devotees gave tens of thousands to pay for Daedone’s courses, often going into extreme debt and falling out with family members. Daedone told them money was a “scarcity hex”. Such grim stories are rife within the OneTaste universe.

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But not everyone is convinced of Daedone’s malevolence. A fervent group of followers — “Team Nicole” — remain steadfast in support of her. They showed up every day to the trial. In fact, the certain fans’ behavior, like harassing the judge, superimposing a swastika on the Justice Department’s logo, posting a witness’s bikini photos online, and making faces in court, was considered so zealous that it might have impacted the conviction itself.  They seem to have put this behind them, and continue to post to Daedone’s 40,000 followers on Instagram. This week alone they’ve posted five of Nicole’s teachings about erotic power, and a video where Nicole refers to “some very public, challenging, things happening in my life”.

They post advertisements for a new, more low-key iteration of orgasmic meditation called “women over dinner” and for the new OneTaste organization, “Eros platform”, which shares regular videos of Nicole and Rachel’s teachings. Women who “stand with Nicole” host podcasts on the page. They describe themselves as “erotic artists” and “erotic nuns”. Nicole is still front and center on the “Eros Platform” website; and they still host regular OM demos and courses. In their description of Nicole there is no mention of her conviction, but sometimes, on Instagram, they post direct dispatches from Nicole in prison. When Charlie Kirk died, Daedone wrote in praise of a man “tried by fire to purify his heart”. The caption had the hashtag #eroticjustice. 

Why do these people still believe nothing was wrong? Huet offers a compelling reading of the mechanisms of coercion; how intimacy, trauma, and longing were used to bind people to Daedone long after the harm had become undeniable. But there is another answer that feels harder to face: Big Tech has warped our idea of sex and freedom so completely that nothing about OneTaste seemed, to its believers, to cross a boundary. The cult logic didn’t feel like a cult logic; it felt like a natural extension of what the digital world had already taught them to expect from desire.

The arguments Daedone and Cherwitz offered in their defense were straight out of the Silicon Valley playbook. When arrested, they hired the same lawyer who had represented Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, and Keith Raniere; but unlike those men, Daedone and Cherwitz insisted they were being persecuted for innovating. They once sold themselves as sexual liberators, framing their orgasmic gospel as a kind of feminist therapy in the wake of Me Too — yet now they cried “cancel culture” and portrayed themselves as victims of a prudish, censorious state. Money from OneTaste loyalists funded sympathetic coverage in right-wing outlets lamenting the “criminalization of sex”, and their lawyers insisted to the New York Post that the government was punishing consensual acts because it feared female pleasure.

It was the same rhetorical maneuver deployed across the tech-sex economy whenever regulation or scrutiny arrives: any critique becomes moral panic; any boundary becomes censorship; any evidence of harm becomes an unfortunate side-effect of progress. And the unsettling parallel isn’t just rhetorical but literal: as Silicon Valley was building its world, OneTaste was building its own. They grew in tandem, in the same location, guided by the same ideological currents: frictionlessness, optimization, disruption, the belief that human attachment is a system that can be hacked. While tech platforms were reinventing connection and desire at scale, just a few miles downtown, OneTaste was constructing an embodied version of the same fantasy: that sexuality could be engineered and sold.

Many of OneTaste’s first joiners were Silicon Valley engineers. Huet points out that “in this spiritually optimized culture, it wasn’t weird to meditate; it was weird to have never tried it”. Non-monogamy was everywhere, and you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing someone reading The Ethical Slut. “Against that backdrop”, she writes “a mindful clitoral -stroking practice wasn’t strange at all. Orgasmic mediation for a richer, more connected, happier life? Sure, why not?” 

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One journalist for Gawker, who went to OneTaste’s 2015 conference OMX realized as much. “Everyone is interested in doing fun things with their bodies,” she wrote “but the impulse to systematize, replicate, package, sell and build an ideology around it is uniquely Silicon Valley”. OneTaste turned orgasm into a subscription product, Silicon Valley investors treated it like another life hack, its followers believed they were buying transcendence. Tim Ferris, the king of the life hack, wrote a chapter about OM in his book, The Four Hour Body. Sex, in this form, could be both optimized and commercialized. For men and women alike, women’s bodies became tools for personal upgrade; the site where higher living might be extracted and optimized. Sex, in this formulation, wasn’t intimate or relational; even if it was spiritual, it was still a system that could be monetized. And once you start looking at sex in these economic terms, you realize OneTaste wasn’t an aberration at all. It was simply one branch of a much larger project: the slow remaking of desire by the ideology of tech.

Because if Daedone built a Silicon Valley for the female orgasm, the male counterpart has been growing in plain sight. The corruption isn’t confined to a single cult but runs through the entire tech-sex ecosystem: porn platforms built for infinite scroll, OnlyFans’ gig-ified intimacy, the roboticized fantasies of the consumer-sex industry, and the loneliness that digital life quietly enforces. All of it culminates, in its most grotesque form, in the world Harper’s recently reported on: the universe of gooning.

Daniel Kolitz’s “The Goon Squad” reveals a community of men whose lives revolve around masturbating to online porn in pursuit of “goonstate”: a condition of total psychic collapse, a kind of orgasmic ego-death, achieved only by edging for hours or days. It is, uncannily, the same promise that Daedone offered, transcendence and becoming more than human through orgasm — even if the route there is vastly different. One gooner porn producer told Harper’s, “we humiliate them for the fact that gooning… is their sex life now. We encourage them not to have sex anymore, and to spend the rest of their lives spending money on femdom clips”. It is an unsavory annihilation. As OneTaste wraps its pursuit in the language of surrender and female empowerment; gooners frame theirs as a kind of spiritualized self-destruction. Both, however, are children of the same parent ideology: that the body is a machine whose ecstasies can be pushed to their furthest limit, and that the limit itself is the point.

Huet, wary of the word “cult,” offers a definition anyway: groups that “present an overarching belief system that proclaims itself the singular answer to all the big questions. Non-adherents are to be pitied, avoided, feared”. It is a neat description of OneTaste. It is an even neater description of Big Tech.

If Daedone’s conviction offers any clarity at all, it’s only that her empire was just a preview. A small, garish shard of the overwhelming technological machinery that now governs the world’s desires. We talk about OneTaste as if it were an outlier, a freakish aberration in the sexual landscape, but the truth is far harder to face. Daedone didn’t invent a new darkness, she made disturbingly visible what Silicon Valley had already been teaching us — that intimacy is a product, that bodies are interfaces, and that desire is a system to be optimized and scaled.

Gooners chasing ego-death through endless tabs of porn; influencers selling pseudo-intimacy on subscription; AI girlfriends engineered to be tireless, compliant, and always online; sex itself stripped of reciprocity and rebuilt as a productivity tool. All of it belongs to the same world that OneTaste was built on. Big Tech didn’t just corrupt our sense of privacy, or community, or attention. It corrupted our sense of what sex is for. 

Daedone’s downfall makes an easy morality tale: a manipulative guru, a predatory pseudo-feminist brand, a group of traumatized followers. But just as disturbing a story is the one Huet’s book gestures toward: that OneTaste wasn’t a deviation from the world Silicon Valley was building, but a mirror of it. A prototype of the future of sex. A reminder that the extremes we fear are often just the logical conclusions of norms we already live inside.

Her latest release, Life of a Showgirl, is all rescues from loneliness, hopeful love after long dark nights of the soul, joy at being really loved for the first time, and dreams of ditching the celebrity life for suburban motherhood.  And then there’s the dick song. Wood is surely the most polarizing number on Life of a Showgirl. One listener declared it the best on the album; another said: “I miss who I was before Wood”. I think Jilly, author of immortal lines such as “Penis Grigio”, and “his leaning tower of pleasure”, would have laughed merrily at “The curse on me was broken by your magic wand”.

But Wood is not a dick song like Cardi B’s WAP is an “Ask for a car as you ride that dick” song. It’s not about transaction, but astonished, delighted pleasure. Swift has swapped the mood of romantic yearning, which led me once to characterize her as a distant descendant of the Gnostics, for a kind of winking, sexually-replete smut that wouldn’t be out of place in the Rutshire Chronicles.

But far more than fan accusations of “tradwife propaganda”, what’s truly revolutionary on this song is the pivot from yearning to “ah-matisation”: a radio-friendly version of “dickmatisation”, a colloquial term for the trance state supposedly induced in women by very good sex. An “ah-matised” Taylor Swift marks the end of the era Jilly Coper began: one in which lust was always privileged over loyalty. This age, which Jilly had a hand in crafting, saw the eternal tension between sexual desire and lifelong loyalty normatively resolved in favor of desire. Now, though, after two decades of making transitory and sometimes broken-hearted lust and yearning into music, with Life of a Showgirl Swift has created a hymn of praise to a delightedly lustful “happy ever after” — an album that expresses both a promise of and hope for lifelong loyalty. But will Swift be able to preserve this newfound “forever” from her own content-hungry fans?

I don’t care what the culture mavens say: Jilly Cooper and Taylor Swift are, in their respective genres, storytelling greats. Cooper’s oeuvre has already outlasted most of the dreary literary fiction published over her lifetime, while searing as indelible a mark on the psyche of every middle-class Englishwoman of a certain age as Swift has on those millennials and younger. Likewise, Swift’s songwriting captivates so widely because she is, like Cooper, a storyteller above all else. Each of her songs captures a mood, a character, and just enough narrative to sketch a scene, into which the listener can pour their own experience.

The central concern of both storytellers is love and sex. But they approach this from opposite ends of the same age of sexual liberation, and diametrically opposed personal situations. Until now Swift has been famously, chronically single; but Cooper was already married when she began writing. And the real accolade for “tradwife propaganda” should go not to Swift but Cooper, for the non-fiction book that was her first publication. How To Stay Married, published 1969, is full of tips that wouldn’t be out of place in today’s cartoonish “tradwife” discourse. “If you amuse a man in bed, he’s not likely to bother about the mountain of dust underneath it” is perhaps true, as far as it goes, but today it’s not fashionable to say so unless you’re an influencer with an online course in “Embracing Traditional Gender” or suchlike to sell.

But Cooper’s interest in marriage from her very first writing days underlines the core preoccupation of her life’s work, and (from the opposite direction) Swift’s: the tension between desire and lifelong commitment. Cooper’s characters tend to be charismatic, rich, ambitious and highly sexed. Everyone is always cheating on their spouses, and either having screaming sex or screaming rows, or sometimes both at the same time. And yet even the most obnoxiously arrogant, horny heroes and heroines generally get their “happy ever after”: even the uber-rogue Rupert Campbell-Black, whose heart is captured by the innocent and angelic Taggie O’Hara.

And yet if Cooper’s books glamorized the riotousness of lust, her life celebrated loyalty. She married a man she first met when she was seven and he ten, and remained married to him from 1968 until Leo Cooper’s death in 2013. They hung on through an early affair of hers, and also after his mistress revealed their eight-year affair, a disclosure she said was prompted by Cooper boasting about her perfect marriage. Who knows, maybe this experience shaped her portrayal of the one occasion when Campbell-Black does cheat on Taggie, in Mount! (2016); a far more ambivalent depiction of infidelity than is the rambunctious norm for her fiction. Taggie’s grief and sense of betrayal is vividly evoked. But eventually Rupert is forgiven, as was Leo.

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In Cooper’s fiction, then, sex is a chthonic, joyful life-force, as well as one that can cause havoc. Her fiction celebrated this riot, even as her own life was characterized by unswerving loyalty to the marital bond, including in the face of the devastation that followed from Leo ah-matising someone else for a few years. But by the time Swift was born in 1989, the sexual revolution was well-advanced, with Cooper’s literary assistance: she had already published Riders and Rivals, two of the three most famous Rutshire books. Taylor Swift grew up amid the sexual mores writers such as Cooper helped to normalize: a new, more libertine set of norms, where an ever more anything-goes attitude to commitment left lust and passion as increasingly the only reliable markers of meaningful connection.

With the possible exception of 2008’s Love Story, most of Swift’s storytelling takes place against this backdrop. Most of her songs are infinite variations on the theme of lust unstructured by loyalty. Her gift for capturing those “relatable” flushes of lust, fleeting experiences of romantic uncertainty, excitement, hope, or bitter disappointment, have made her a billionaire and global pop sensation. But in becoming the only reliable marker of meaningful love, Swiftian desire seems to have lost its simplicity. Instead, it’s chronically overlaid with second-guessing, anxiety, and the scars of previous relationships. Is it going to be forever, or is it gonna go down in flames? Can I tell him how I feel? Or is it too Delicate? The upbeat songs are mostly just the ones about an exciting first meeting; implicitly, getting to know someone always ends in heartbreak.

Except apparently not always. You are, Swift tells us now, “starving till you’re not”. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what’s allowed her to stop overthinking her love life, and just feel, is the prospect of stability with her “forever night stand”. That is: with a partner who promises to be there not just for “magic, madness, heaven, sin”, but for the long haul. Swift’s two decades of chronically-single musical unhappiness made her relatable to countless fans; now, complaints about “tradwife propaganda” cash out as anger at her implying that “pledging allegiance to me, myself, and I” was only ever a way of coping with not having found her prince yet.

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And this is, indeed, at least from a liberal feminist point of view, a deeply reactionary sentiment. But if it’s Taylor Swift’s truth, and now musical inspiration, they’ll just have to cope and seethe. Or perhaps, in the case of her married fans, relate to a different side of her. Perhaps a more interesting question is: what will “forever” do to the future musical output of someone whose extant corpus is so strongly associated with heartbreak?

Here, Jilly Cooper’s example might reassure: her writing career only began after her marriage. Swift herself has already expressed pleasant surprise at discovering she wasn’t in fact less creative for being less miserable. Maybe for Swift, emotional security will result in more, not less, creativity as well as more satisfying ah-matization. But the overall arc of Cooper’s personal life also hints at what is needed to sustain this: both steadfastness, and — sometimes — a willingness to not say things. Half a century on from How To Stay Married, she told the Mail she’d got almost everything in the book wrong — except that, in the case of affairs, she still believed it best to forgive your own spouse, and not to “blab” about the misbehavior of friends. But even aside from the ethical debate, is this kind of studied discretion even possible now?

Cooper was born in 1937, not long into the TV era. Swift has spent two decades as an object of online parasocial fascination for millions. Is it even possible under these circumstances to preserve space for private intimacy, or to ask people not to gossip? To complicate matters further, her storytelling has to date drawn deeply from her personal life. But she can hardly expose her husband as she might an ex-boyfriend. Celebrities who turn their marriage into content often end up, in due course, no longer married.

I wish Swift a marriage as steadfastly lifelong as Jilly Cooper’s. But in those slightly less hyper-mediated times, readers mostly contented themselves with obsessing over that of Rupert and Taggie Campbell-Black, and left Cooper’s comparatively alone. Will Swift’s fans grant her the same courtesy? Or will they demand more details about what, er, comes after Wood?

If so, let us hope Swift doesn’t oblige. I do not want to find myself reviewing her new album Penis Grigio for UnHerd next year. Conversely, if she finds the strength to refuse, she could yet be reborn as the first global storyteller not of some new sexual Puritanism, but of a far subtler (and more horny) sexual Restoration. And having found her “forever”, she might even be able to keep it.

I still feel there’s a grain of truth in that vision of Thatcher as a nursery dominatrix, thrashing grown-up little boys who confuse punishment with love. But now I’m 57, I realize the reason Thatcher made our podium is more obvious. A powerful, intelligent woman who knows her mind and is unafraid to use her sexuality as part of her arsenal can act as catnip on certain men.

A new, pleasingly unconventional biography of Thatcher, The Incidental Feminist: Friend, foe, femme fatale? by Tina Gaudoin, places much of its focus on what sociologist Catherine Hakim terms “erotic capital” — the way personal assets, such as glamour and sex appeal, can be used to gain social and economic advantage. Instead of looking at the leader’s political legacy, Gaudoin tracks down Thatcher the woman: daughter, sister, wife, mother, fashion lover, flirt, manipulator of men. The book examines how the Finchley coquette’s utilization of feminine qualities propelled her to the top job, with chapters titled “Autistic Glamour Puss”, “Warrior Queen, Gender Blender?” and “All the Prime Minister’s Men”.

For all the “Attila the Hen” labels and Spitting Image’s puppet of a beaked PM standing at a urinal in a man’s suit, what stands out now is the constant sexual appraisal of a woman who was 53 when she entered Downing Street and 65 when she left. In 1989, Vanity Fair ran a major interview with Thatcher by Gail Sheehy, which contained the following frothy passage: “President Mitterrand says Britain’s prime minister ‘has eyes like Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’. She also has the nerves of a five-star general and, increasingly, the sexual charisma of a woman in her prime. She manipulates her court of bedazzled male advisers with the skill of Elizabeth I.”

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If you think Sheehy’s wildly overstating the case, here’s a tableau I witnessed at the Spectator summer party in July 1992. I arrived just as a car drew up amid a cascade of paparazzi flashes; the former prime minister, dressed to the nines, stepped out and was greeted by a phalanx of adoring young fogeys with Simon Heffer at the fore. I recall thinking I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had laid down his immaculate linen jacket for her to tread on. For one surreal moment, in the crammed entrance corridor, I found myself bosom-to-bosom with Thatcher, looking into her blue eyes (which didn’t alight on me) and imbibing the heady cocktail of fame, glamour and mythology still in the making.

That, however, wasn’t the first time I registered Thatcher’s erotic allure. This happened earlier, in 1988, when a friend from university invited me to join her family for a country walk. Her charming father was Peter Snow, renowned for Newsnight’s election night “swingometer”. At some point in the conversation he made reference to the PM’s sex appeal, which his daughter and I — with all the callowness of youth — found impossible to countenance. How could the 60-something villainess of the Poll Tax, with her roller-set hair and pussy-bow blouses, possibly be seductive?

Nearly four decades later, I realize Snow was just one in a sizeable cohort of media men who — if not all ardent admirers — couldn’t help but relish the way Thatcher deployed her femininity (rather as many media men and politicos now battle inconvenient attraction to Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni). Peter’s cousin, Jon Snow, said of encounters with the Tory PM, “she enjoyed being a woman and I enjoyed being a man”. John Sergeant, the BBC’s former chief political correspondent, admitted on Michael Parkinson’s chat show in 2005 that Thatcher “could be… sexy, almost”. He explained that it was “unusual” in the Eighties “for a prime minister, or powerful woman of any sort, to put her hand on your arm and she could do that to devastating effect. And I would tend to weaken, I must admit.”

Thatcher’s allure was carefully cultivated, as Gaudoin’s book reveals. Childhood letters to her older sister Muriel reveal a passion for cinema, but also for clothes and quality lingerie. I hadn’t anticipated quite so much bra shopping. There’s even a moment on a trip via London when teenage Margaret fibs to her parents about the day’s trajectory and absconds to Bond Street.

Over the years, Thatcher’s love of fashion and finery was honed for strategic effect. When she won the Tory nomination for Finchley in 1959, an Evening Standard headline blazed: “Tories Choose Beauty.” She would go on to appear in Vogue four times. One fascinating example of Thatcher maximizing personal effect is the private deportment classes she took from Laurence Olivier, arranged by her speech writer Ronald Millar. She was advised by the thespian to take long confident strides, and to use her eyes to seduce and flirt.

Thatcher’s use of fashion as a seductive power ploy became even more effective when she took on Margaret King as a personal stylist. The Aquascutum director sharpened Thatcher’s look for a state visit to Russia in 1987, as a guest of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gaudoin describes King’s vision for Thatcher as “a kind of Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago meets Sigourney Weaver as the boss in Working Girl”. The PM even wore a Lara-style fur hat. So successful was the Moscow visit that the Mirror ran a photo hoax on the next April Fool’s Day, using Thatcher and Gorbachev lookalikes cuddling up to one another in Gorky Park. Many readers fell for it.

Prime-ministerial tendresses appear to have cropped up all over. The Australian CEO and diplomat Sandy Holloway recalled attending a private Downing Street dinner for Australian leader Bob Hawke, and sitting next to Neil Kinnock who said, “You just watch how Margaret flirts with Bob.” Although, of course, that was a mere flicker compared to the flame that developed between Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Charles Moore once said that, “She had a sort of, it sounds a bit explicit to say, a sexual attraction” to the US president. It’s just as well Nancy and Denis got on too, so no one was left feeling too much of a wallflower. But the Reagan pash lends weight to Kinnock’s observation: “All of Margaret Thatcher’s favorite men and those she promoted, sometimes way beyond their abilities, looked as though they’d walked out of a 1950s B-movie.”

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Gaudoin takes Kinnock to task in the book for oversimplifying Thatcher’s predilections. She agrees the PM appreciated good-looking men. But argues that “she also liked men who flattered, and those with brains, tenacity and, to put it bluntly, balls”. The chevaliers and stalwarts are there, like Airey Neave, Robin Butler and Willie Whitelaw, who inspired her immortal line “every prime minister needs a Willie”. But there’s a more fun list of bounders: Cecil Parkinson, Jeffrey Archer, Alan Clarke, Jonathan Aitken and PR advisor Tim Bell (who boasted about putting his hand on the PM’s knee). It’s worth noting that the supposedly devout Methodist PM readily overlooked her favorites’ peccadilloes; perhaps because, in some part of her brain formed by wartime movies, she was swooning in their arms too.

Conservative women MPs didn’t enjoy the same leeway as the chaps with Thatcher. Those who succeeded — Virginia Bottomley, Edwina Currie and Gillian Shephard — did so for many of the same reasons she had: talent, graft, good hair, and persuading constituencies that they were good political housekeepers. Thatcher was never a “sister” and wasn’t even all that sisterly to Muriel, who she once alluded to in the past tense while still alive. Gaudoin makes it clear that it was the leader’s forward-propulsion and sense she was any man’s equal that rendered her an “incidental” feminist. In his 1990 TV interview with Thatcher, Terry Wogan says of male media interrogators: “They don’t seem to make any concession to the fact you’re a woman.” Thatcher flashes back at Wogan — another favorite — “Why should they? I don’t make any concession to the fact that they’re men.”

Notably, the one man who didn’t seem to attract Thatcher much at first was Denis Thatcher. Both Charles Moore and Gaudoin deduced from the Muriel letters that 20-something Margaret’s preferred suitor was a medical superintendent twice her age, Robert Henderson, inventor of the iron lung. There’s a tantalizing mention of an overnight stay with Roberts at a hotel in Eastbourne, but no indication of similar intimacy with poor, patient Denis who she was running alongside the medic. Then Henderson suddenly disappears from the correspondence and Margaret Roberts marries the man whose loyal support — and money — would allow her to fulfill her political ambitions.

It strikes me now that this long, stable, unsexy but mutually supportive marriage may, in itself, have contributed to Thatcher’s erotic glamour. For certain individuals, there are few things quite as tantalizing as an attractive woman (or man) who is unavailable, but happy to deploy their sexual energy within safe boundaries. Denis gave her that freedom and perhaps took a little for himself. I was intrigued to learn via the book of his late-blossoming friendship with Marilyn Foreman, better known as Mandy Rice-Davies of the Profumo Affair.

In the end, Woodrow Wyatt speaks for all of Thatcher’s admirers, the overgrown schoolboys who doted on matron: “I was in love with her, yes, but I suppose in the best platonic manner because — well, she was a marvelous girl… her skin was glowing and she had very fine legs.” You can’t help suspecting that for all Thatcher’s political achievements, that gushing appreciation of her sexual charisma might be her preferred epitaph.

In the flesh, Bonnie — real name Tia Billinger — was burnished and svelte, giving every sign of being genuinely happy with the career that has made her millions. Her gimmick is to have sex on camera with what she calls “normal men”, not porn stars, then make subscribers pay to watch — and for six months, she has allowed the documentary-makers to follow her around. Gangbangs are her self-professed kink, including an infamous one in January allegedly involving 1,057 men in 12 hours. This proved too much for OnlyFans bosses, who refused to air the footage much to its star’s frustration. Instead, she has persuaded Channel 4 to show excerpts. The accompanying voiceover calls it “an unofficial world record”, as if waiting for Roy Castle to arrive with a certificate.

Along with journos and TV types, members of the Billinger family were in the audience for the screening, including her proud mum and gran. We all watched as their girl got penetrated by various portly naked men, touted for virgins at freshers’ fairs, and did jigsaws and crafting projects as downtime. “My brain works differently, I’m not emotional,” she says to camera at one point, and I believed her. Filmed at the end of her mass orgy, she lies down on the condom-strewn floor and does a comedy starfish.

I’m afraid I laughed. Blue/Billinger is quite funny in a Carry On Up the Algorithm sort of way. Asked during the Q&A whether she ever “hit the wall” during marathon sex sessions, she replied that “the only walls that get hit are mine”. She is good at bathetically juxtaposing the outrageous with the mundane: “I would love you to rearrange my insides somewhere near Oxford Circus”, goes a typical TikTok advert for one of her events. She also says she is looking for male participants whether they are “barely legal or barely breathing”, and that they should hide any wedding rings for the cameras.

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With a cool business head, she explains that the provocation is deliberate: the more wives and mothers rant angrily about her, the more husbands and sons go searching for her online. Making money like this is far more fun than her previous job in finance recruitment for the NHS. Yet she also likes to think of her content as educative, teaching men to have better sex. “I am basically a community worker,” she declares somewhat implausibly, before masterminding a sex scene in a classroom. Frightened-looking young women, awkwardly dressed up in school uniforms, say that they hope their unpaid participation will drive more subscribers to their own tiny porn accounts.

Also involved in Thursday’s presentation were the Channel 4 backers, visibly confused about what sort of film they were promoting: heartwarming story of feminist empowerment or hollow-eyed nightmare. (On camera, Blue says it is the former: “If anything I’m the image of what you [feminists] have been asking for for years”.) The anxious commissioning editor got a laugh when he fulsomely thanked “Kirsty from legal”; while director Victoria Silver seemed to struggle with Blue’s cheerful sociopathy, switching incoherently in the Q&A between praise for female autonomy and sad head-shaking on behalf of her teenage daughter. At one point, she told the audience that “all of us” should “park” our judgemental responses to Bonnie: she’s just out there doing her thing.

But part of Blue’s thing is to resist others’ attempts at humanisation. At one point in the documentary, she gets banned from the OnlyFans platform altogether, for announcing that she next intends to film herself displayed in a clear glass box in central London, bound, gagged, and open to all-comers to penetrate as they wish. “Do you consider yourself an artist?” a pretentious American journalist asked her after the credits had rolled, perhaps keen to frame her as the new Marina Abramovic. Replied Blue with derision: “Oh my god, that’s far too intellectual a question; what is it you think you’ve just watched?” Another questioner noticed that some subscribers seemed to crave emotional connection, and asked her what men who paid to watch her might be “grateful for”. The frank answer came back: “my holes”.

We don’t really need to wonder what Roger Scruton would have thought about all of this, because in 1986 he wrote a book called Sexual Desire which told us. In it, he sketched a Platonic ideal of sexual arousal: of erotic desire involving mutual recognition and communication of pleasure between you and your partner, ecstatically directed towards an irreplaceable particular person in all their specificity, rather than towards a mere selection of body parts, or some pictures on a screen. Sexual desire in this ideal state is individualizing, not objectifying; it is a “cooperative enterprise” between two people, discovering new aspects of the mysterious other; it is sacred and full of awe. It is the absolute opposite of hundreds of men standing in boxer shorts and balaclavas, waiting for a few seconds of bodily contact with a woman they have never met; or of thousands of spectators, home alone with credit cards out and flies unzipped.

Scruton — someone I knew a little through our shared interest in philosophical aesthetics — did not write from a religious point of view. His arguments in Sexual Desire were all secular. Still, he was very clear that sex is always a moral matter, and seemed confident that any sexual impulse falling short of his demanding interpersonal conception must be relegated to mere perversion. I used to find this endearingly idealistic, assuming that he had probably got an exaggerated idea of love’s redemptive power from listening to too much Wagner. Now though, I think he was probably right.

For while it seems clear that something has gone hideously awry with Bonnie Blue’s general approach to sexual matters, if you take modern morality at face value, then it’s hard to say exactly what. Was it when she passed a certain number of penetrations? Was it fine at 10 men, but not at 11? Would it have been better if she had spaced out the bodily collisions a bit, with a few hours between each? Or if she hadn’t filmed it for others to watch?

Faced with the unsatisfying arbitrariness of these proposals, Scruton’s more tempting answer beckons. Things went wrong the moment Blue decided to treat her fellow human beings as depersonalized objects, and to let them treat her like an object in turn. This was just as wrong the first time she did it, as the 1,000th. The awkward thing about this answer is not that it is unsatisfying; it is more the way it forces most of us to say “Je suis Bonnie Blue” too.

Contemporary theories of sexuality urge us to go beyond feelings of love and desire for particular special people to the “true”, more basic nature of sexual contact. They reduce sex between humans to a blind urge to reproduce genes, or to a repressed version of childhood attachments, or to animal lust untrammeled by civilizing religious impulses, or whatever the modern story is. Via such narratives, we are supposed to think of human relationships as fruitfully extracted from the world of familiar subjective appearances, and given up to the pitiless objective gaze of the scientist, sexologist, or psychoanalyst, so that the “real” story can emerge about what we are doing when we long for another person.

But as Scruton saw, in trying to strip the world of enchanting sexual appearances to get to the supposedly real urges “underneath” the appearances, we just replace beautiful appearances with uglier disenchanted ones. As he wrote:

“… to see human beings as objects is not to see them as they are, but to change what they are, by erasing the appearance through which they relate to one another as persons… It is to create a new kind of creature, a depersonalized human being, in which subject and object drift apart, the first into a world of helpless dreams, the second to destruction.”

It’s almost as if he’d been watching Channel 4.

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Having a lovely time around the dinner table at Scrutopia, I chatted to serious young men about expectations placed upon them. One of them brought up the dangerous practice of sexualized choking, made popular through exposure to violent porn. He said that, just like most women, most men don’t like it either, but sometimes feel they are expected to do it, and may even be reluctantly complying out of embarrassment. It seems like a horribly dark version of the Abilene paradox: nobody wants to go to Abilene, but everyone thinks everybody else wants to, so they all unhappily troupe there together. Except that this time, a woman is involuntarily strangled instead; and here too, it turns out nobody was ever having any fun.

Blue — who perhaps needless to say, is a big fan of being choked — would undoubtedly say this issue is to be solved by more vocal consent. It was a point she came back to repeatedly when questioned on Thursday night. But having to read out an ever-growing list of internet-approved acts you positively don’t want to participate in, every time you get into the bedroom, does not seem to me a liberating state of affairs for anyone. And for every future dead, strangled daughter who once watched a Bonnie Blue video — or whose sex partner did — it won’t be much consolation for her family to think she nominally had a choice.

Scruton was the sort of social conservative who positively fought for the beautiful and noble things in our culture, trying to safeguard their presence before they disappeared entirely. If the rest of us are too jaundiced to manage that, we should at least try to fight off the obviously ugly and degrading. OnlyFans has recently been valued at $8 billion. It’s all very well saying you won’t be looking into the abyss; either way, the abyss will end up looking into you. Do we really want to have to decline balaclavas in the bedroom on a case-by-case basis? Do we really want sex as a pay-per-view circus with Bonnie Blue as ringmaster in-chief? I suggest we get our disapproving judgments out of the carpark and back on the road.

Sex-doll brothels sprang up around Europe in 2017 — including in London — as novelty establishments which could skirt regulation around human prostitution. Cybrothel is one of only two to have survived the initial wave of curiosity (the other is in Prague), with plastic dummies giving way once more to the appeal of a living, breathing woman to violate. At the same time, another rival reared its head: AI-generated pornography burst onto the scene a couple of years later and has developed at breakneck speed since. Part of Cybrothel’s survival can be explained by its willingness to integrate this new tech into the experience with the help of an “in-house sex-tech entrepreneur”. AI-powered sex dolls are part of a booming industry in China, with one of the leading manufacturers expected to make a 30% sales increase this year. Middle-aged men in Europe are the most common buyers of these £2,000 dolls.

But sex dolls alone are by no means old hat. For hardcore enthusiasts, the ultimate aim is to buy your own. The activist Caitlin Roper, author of Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating, has spent “many hours” on forums of men, numbering in their thousands, who own replica women. “I’ve seen photos of dolls bound, tied spread-eagled to a bed, strung up, penetrated with objects and in positions of sexualised torture,” she says. “One man said he wished his doll would ‘struggle’, and another expressed his disappointment that he couldn’t leave bruises on his doll after a beating.”

Selling or renting out silicone likenesses of women as literalised sexual objects is among the queasy horrors to which liberal feminism lacks an answer. After all, the arguments in favor of this industry are the same ones bleated in the case of that other caste of less-than-human women, the “sex workers” whom enlightened cultures expect to service the needs of undesirable, abusive, violent or awkward men. In both cases, the solution to antisocial male sexuality is never to simply compel men to pack it in: sex positivity is about advocating for erections, regardless of how they are achieved. Instead, entire industries — from “barely legal” OnlyFans accounts to “breath play” fetish clubs (for those variously interested in paedophilia and now-normalised strangulation respectively) have sprung up to square the circle of how dangerous paraphilias and ever more extreme porn-inflected demands can coexist with women’s safety; in the real world, they mostly cannot. But with a sex doll, one can be as depraved as he likes.

Accommodating the desires of porn-brained men is necessary to keep the failure of the liberal sex project hidden from women and children: allowing transactional rape and violence to flourish in dark corners means fourth-wave feminists can deny the consequences of having traded away all their power for acceptance by the porn lobby. Besides, the sacrificial losers in this trade deal — prostituted, trafficked women and children — rarely have the means to complain. Conveniently for many unscrupulous websites, catering for such men is also big business. Last week, Collective Shout, the feminist charity for which Roper is campaigns manager, found that Temu was selling “child sex abuse dolls” under the guise of makeup-practice models. The Chinese online marketplace which, along with Shein, offers cut-price products from fast fashion to junk plastic gadgets, banned the terms “child sex doll” and “girl sex doll” last year after the charity exposed the products being marketed as such. Now, the same products touted as “male masturbators” a year ago — disembodied heads with cherubic features, carmine lips, doe eyes and hair in bows — were being sold to the same men for precisely the same purpose, only with a conciliatory tweak in description. In a review of one child head, a customer wrote: “The tongue is cute. I can kiss it. It’s wonderful.” The charity found similar products on Shein.

“It’s hard to think about where we will be in five to ten years, as I feel like we’re already in hell,” says Roper, who has dedicated much of her recent work to the emerging world of AI porn, from “girlfriend generators” to apps which allow users to virtually “undress” real women in photographs. “Owning a replica woman sex doll is akin to owning a non-sentient female sex slave. The freedom to enact any act of violence or abuse on a replica woman facilitates the escalation of these acts of violence.” The dolls’ inanimate nature is not simply a design flaw: it is a feature of a broader mode of violent male sexuality which prefers that women be passive or unwilling. “A female-shaped object with penetrable orifices can be just as good, if not better, than an actual woman,” Roper adds.

Sex dolls have been written about and featured on lurid reality television programmes for years; the general response is revulsion, as though disgust in itself is justification for them not to exist. Clearly, sexual politics should not turn on what’s known in philosophy as the “wisdom of repugnance” alone, which is why “sex doll brothels” still exist at all. But there is a genuine dilemma to address, particularly when confronted with technology hurtling towards alarming new levels of sophistication with the help of AI. How can a sex-positive culture deal with the gruesome excrescences it has created? Are the only options available now grimy, woman-hating “kink communities” and men’s entitlement to access rape material, or re-enacting perverted desires on a doll? These antisocial obsessions have been allowed to mushroom under our culture’s nauseating mantra — “don’t yuck my yum”.

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On choking during sex

By Mary Gaitskill

The bar at which we curtail free will in sexual desire, particularly the free will of men to abuse women, is set the highest of almost any question in Western culture. The right of a man (women mostly do not solicit prostitution of any kind) to override a prostitute’s enthusiastic consent with money is far more protected than his right to harm himself with, for example, Class A drugs, or to harm others with hate speech. This is not coincidental: the fact that most victims are women and girls is the reason for this high bar of social and political toleration. In the pretzel logic of liberalism in which obvious harms are justified by abstract ideals like open-mindedness, it is increasingly difficult to make the case for this demographic, as we saw in both the grooming gang scandal and the ongoing wrangling over men’s access to women’s bathrooms and changing rooms. In the case of sex dolls, the sanctification of the right to get a boner makes it particularly difficult: I’ll do it anyway.

The fundamental problem with sex dolls is that they endorse men’s right to abuse women and children. This isn’t just make-believe: it’s practice and encouragement to fuck whoever, whatever, whenever you like. If you do not believe that AI-generated child sexual abuse material should be created and circulated, you must also condemn sex dolls, children or not: they are, by definition and design, an object made to be raped.

This underlying truth is clearly not good for women; neither is the way individual dolls look — the ideal woman has freakish proportions which, in real conditions, would see her neck snap and her ankles buckle under the weight of improbable globes of wipe-clean flesh. A similar aesthetic stalks AI virtual girlfriend websites, which Roper has trawled in search of this new frontier of objectification. On them, she says, there are public galleries where users share their creations: “It’s just what you would imagine if men and boys raised on porn could create their own version of women with no limitations. Women who look like children, with giant porn-star breasts, in the most degrading poses and scenarios you can think of.”

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The principle in which sex dolls are grounded — that we are disposable, penetrable objects — is becoming increasingly normalized by unfettered access to dehumanizing pornography, AI or otherwise. But is this even good for the men themselves, their dopamine receptors rewired to light up at only imagined grotesques, never satisfied by a real body — or trained to believe a real body to be at his infinite disposal? The truth is that a culture which tacitly accepts the existence of rape objects, and which neglects to regulate the dissemination of generative (and other) hardcore pornography, must also accept a forever warped dynamic between the sexes. It must accept young women paralyzed by their own sexualization, and young men stunted by the socially and sexually disabling effects of porn addiction. These are unavoidable consequences of modern sex-positivity culture.

But it is important to remember that none of this is truly inevitable: Western societies have accepted the existence of socially noxious pornography just as they have wearily acceded to other perceived inevitabilities, like spiraling welfare states and untrammeled illegal immigration. But like those other cases, sex-doll brothels and dehumanizing pornography are, at their heart, policy failures by systems which don’t care enough to intervene. We need to stop talking about regulation as pipe dreams on radical feminist wish lists and show some grit, if only for the small cause of salvaging sexual relations for future generations. After pressure from Collective Shout, Temu took down its child sex abuse doll heads on Monday. Headless child bodies remain up — but we know that shaming works. Temu and Shein can and should be held accountable, online forums where men share AI-generated rape porn should be shut down, and pimps to silicone women who tear their clothes and bind their limbs should be banned. Looking the other way is a choice, so pack it in.

Virgin Island — for that is the show’s name — is effectively Dangerous Liaisons rebooted for the modern era. In the 18th-century French novel, manipulative libertines systematically despoil the innocence of various naïve virginal types, ruining them for polite society thereafter. Victims are forced to spend the rest of their lives sheltered in some rural convent or monastery, safely away from disapproving eyes. In the updated version, manipulative libertines sequester 12 sexually inexperienced young adults in a rural convent-like environment, systematically despoil their innocence, and send them out into the world again, remade as newly respectable and technically adept members of the pornified 21st century. Or that’s the theory anyway.

I watched the first two episodes, released this week, between my fingers. Corrupter-in-chief is the “groundbreaking sex therapist” Danielle, flanked by her right-hand woman, Celeste: two MILFs on a mission to save the earth from the perils of mass chastity. “One in eight people aged 26 are still virgins in the UK,” warns Danielle in concerned tones. “This is happening all over the world,” adds Celeste. “Even the French are having less sex.” To combat the problem, they have come up with what they call the “Somatica Method” — building what they call “mutually vulnerable, two-way relationships with clients” and teaching “real-life intimacy tools to them within a safe, non-judgmental space”, according to their website.

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On the show, they put their anxious, socially-challenged clients on an island, dress them in mandatory grey garments, do a few breathing exercises, show them a few sex toys, then dive into the main business: touching them up more and more intimately, in order to bring about “disinhibition” and overcome their “shame”. Celeste and Danielle are willing to get to second base for the cause, but apparently leave the harder stuff to a team of “sexological bodyworkers”, all of whom look like they just arrived from a yoga retreat in Goa. Taking charge of any “emotions that come up” is an accompanying “licensed mental health clinician”, though I’d like to know who gave her the license.

In case it’s not already obvious, none of these people are British. Their clients, in contrast, are very much so. It’s like watching Adrian Mole at a sex-positive boot camp run by Kamala Harris. “Take a deep breath down into your belly and connect your body with your hands,” seductively drawls Danielle to Brummie Jason, exhorting him to touch her limbs as the rest of the group look on appalled. “Think of your hands as if … ‘I’m going to get pleasure out of her arms’, do you know what I mean?” Jason nods nervously, keen to show he understands: “I’m going to wank off your arms.” Another bloke in the group, a parliamentary researcher called Ben, tells the camera he is a “logical person” who has created a spreadsheet listing all his previous dates. “I see dating in the same way a football manager would see their team. I like to analyze things and see what I can do better.”

The dominant emotion during group sessions is abject embarrassment. Faced with the sight of middle-aged Celeste moaning in ecstasy before them, or pretending to be an animal in heat, the rigidly averted gazes and squirming body language of the onlookers speak for many of us. The therapists pretend they can’t understand why participant Emma feels tearfully overwhelmed, forced to watch two weird strangers get hot and heavy in front of her, the cameras focused tightly upon her face all the while. “Witnessing sexual desire is clearly unsettling,” one would-be Dr Freud suggests; “I feel like she is a bit stuck.” But actually, the reactions of “the virgins” (as they are collectively referred to by the chirpy Northern narrator) are refreshingly normal. “It was like watching a sex scene with your parents but times 100,” said one. Pronounced another: “it was very Jungle Book, and I was feeling very Downton Abbey.”

In other ways, too, these youngsters seem reassuringly old-fashioned. In every reality show, the closest that viewers are likely to get to a revealing glimpse into real personalities is via the unselfconscious participants of the very first series: they haven’t seen the format, don’t really know what they are getting into, and aren’t acting to camera with the perception of some earlier version of the show in mind. In the case of Virgin Island, the touchingly awkward and likable cast don’t seem to be doing it to chase fame, but because they each genuinely believed its makers could help them find love and connection. It’s almost as if they have never seen reality television before.

Porn doesn’t seem to have corrupted the men’s preferences; the internet hasn’t turned them into bitter incels, or the women into man-haters; they all still apparently long for monogamous romance, and are sweetly supportive of one another without much drama. And despite knocks to confidence in the past, and many expressions of self-doubt, they still seem hopeful and willing to give relationships a whirl. They haven’t, for instance, defined their lack of sexual experience as a core part of their identity, called themselves “asexual”, and given up the libidinal ghost.

Whether they end up scarred for life by the whole experience is another matter. Says the team’s resident mental health expert at one point, explaining the concept behind having sex with a supportive stranger, “this is a container to practice a relationship”. But what her clients apparently crave above all is intimacy; and I don’t see how practicing certain complicated physical gyrations and accompanying sensations gives them much help with that. Intimacy with another person requires that your sexual activity isn’t paid for, and that it hasn’t become a weird kind of spectator sport.

The idea of ordinary therapy is already strange enough: practicing some kind of friendship with a sympathetic but distant figure, unguardedly spilling your guts to them, yet with a steep fee and a sharp cut-off time on the hour. Any professionally inappropriate feelings, arising as a result of the therapist’s unusual degree of access to the very depths of your soul, are pathologized as “transference”; but that doesn’t necessarily make them go away. God knows what happens to tender hearts starved of affection when the therapist also starts shagging you. Should any proto-romantic ideas emerge on the show, presumably the mental health expert will come along with her license to remind participants it was only ever pretend. But never mind: at least they’ll have the solace of knowing their fumbling amatory “practice” sessions have been immortalized on screen, with an option to be sold onto Netflix later.

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Given the usual redemption arc for this sort of series, it’s probably more likely that in future episodes, our innocent anti-heroes will finally arrive in the 21st century. Under the tutelage of Celeste and Danielle, the lovably stammering, cack-handed geeks will cast off their inhibitions and become the gimlet-eyed, icicle-hearted progressive Lotharios they have always secretly dreamt of being: pangender, polyamorous, and wielding ethical vibrators made out of ocean-bound plastic with great aplomb.

Already by the end of the second episode, there were worrying signs of encroaching technical ability and emotional disassociation from a few. Strangely protective as I now feel towards the inhabitants of Virgin Island, I won’t be watching to find out the results of this gruesome piece of televisual conversion therapy. I suspect the finale will be as painful as when Winston Smith comes out of Room 101.

This was, perhaps, a bit premature; wokeness certainly labored along for a few months longer, wheezing and shuffling through Brat Summer, before finally collapsing into dust with the reelection of Donald J. Trump. But if that video of Sweeney’s breasts was the beginning of the end for the phenomenon known as woke, this week has been all about dancing on its grave — in a pair of electric orange hotpants.

I’m referring, of course, to Hooters, which is back in the news and, if not better, then certainly more British than ever. The raunchy restaurant chain has been in protracted decline in the US since 2018. It’s been plagued by labor lawsuits, discrimination complaints, and a general sense that its baldly woman-objectifying business model had no place in a post-MeToo world. But that was then. Now it’s a new year, with a new vibe, one powerful enough to reach all the way across the Atlantic — to Newcastle, where Hooters recently announced that it would open its third UK location. The new restaurant, with a capacity of 200, is set to employ at least 50 “Hooters Girls”, with some reportedly as young as 17.

The reaction to this news has been predictable, insofar as all the usual suspects are raising the usual objections to a restaurant where every dish comes with a side of female objectification. Hooters holds its all-female waitstaff to strict appearance standards, and while the infamous “nose test” (in which aspiring employees are told to stand against a wall to ensure that their breasts protrude further forward than their nose) isn’t a real thing, everything else — from hairstyle and makeup to manicure colors and bodyweight — is tightly regulated. A report on the Newcastle opening features the expected complaints from feminist academics and non-profiters against what one charity director called “a chain that treats women as objects to be served up alongside chicken wings and fries”.

And yet, the grumbling feels a bit obligatory, a little phoned-in, a bit stemming from a sense of duty rather than one of genuine outrage. One wonders if this battle over the breastaurant represents a final, futile skirmish in a fruitless war against human nature, one that even feminists understand they were always going to lose.

There’s something absurdly self-defeating in the notion that we shouldn’t celebrate the female form, when humans have been doing nothing but this since the first enterprising cave artist carved a figure with a great pair of bazongas into a limestone wall. A tour through human history reveals a continuous obsession with breasts, one that transcends time, geography, religion, and culture alike. There’s the 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf, sporting a pair of stupendous, pendulous big naturals; there’s the Hindu fertility goddess Parvati, with a perfect hourglass figure topped by perky B-cups. There’s Titian’s Venus of Urbino, clasping a small posy of roses the same delicate pink shade as her exposed nipples — or Jean Fouquet’s 15th-century Mary, offering a perfectly spherical alabaster breast to the baby Jesus. How dare we objectify these bodies?

I mean, how can we not, for God’s sake? Just look at them!

The conscription of the breast into the 21st-century culture wars could only have happened in a world where everything — from issues to institutions, aesthetics to ideas — was being obsessively politicized in ways that didn’t always make sense. In this paradigm, breasts were good for just two things: feeding babies, and titillating men. They were the stuff of Playboy spreads, Victoria’s Secret runway shows, and Baywatch babes running in slow motion on a beach; they were the vestiges of a culture that was analog and heteronormative and unabashedly male-gazey. And while it would be an oversimplification to say that breasts themselves became wholly Right-coded, it’s also not a coincidence that the progressive movement, at this same moment, was increasingly focused on both queer sexuality and gender nonconformity in a way that made it impossible to embrace something so traditional, so conservative, as a pair of terrific tits. There was even a period, which lasted for a few brief and very weird years, in which progressives were more likely to celebrate a female chest bearing the twin scars of a gender-affirming mastectomy than one with its original anatomy intact.

In hindsight, this was untenable; it should surprise no one that it has come to an end. And if a few diehards still wearing “White Dudes for Kamala” t-shirts remain unconvinced as to the durability of both the human appreciation for breasts and the 2025 vibe shift, mainstream American media and culture appears to agree both that woke is dead and that boobs are back. The most recent demonstration of this came at the Super Bowl, whose significance as a sporting event pales in comparison to what it reveals about the culture. Before the game even began, commentators were abuzz over the removal of the words “End Racism” from the end zones, a relic of the 2020 reckoning kicked off by the death of George Floyd. (The new slogan, painted earlier that week, was the benign and notably apolitical “Unity Through Sport”.) But the real, best evidence came during a commercial break, when viewers were treated to an advertisement featuring a furiously catchy pop-song soundtrack and a 30-second smash cut montage of boobs. Lifted, separated, bouncing boobs; boobs of all shapes, shades, and sizes. There was a twist, of course — what seemed like a gratuitous cleavage-fest was actually just the attention-getting lead-in to a Novartis ad for breast cancer screenings — but this doesn’t mitigate the first half of the commercial so much as create a permission structure for it. Go ahead and leer, fellas — it’s for a good cause!

In a culture where this commercial can air during the biggest, most-viewed sporting event of the year, complaints about objectification ring hollow. If a montage of bouncing boobs can be used to promote cancer awareness, you can hardly turn around and claim that using them to sell beer and wings is a bridge too far.

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But maybe more to the point, those who do want to argue this will find their audience both smaller and substantially less engaged than they were during the peak years of cancel culture, or the pandemic-era reckoning during which we had nothing better to do than freak out about people sexually objectifying the green M&M.

Most folks on the Left, exhausted from a decade of performative resistance liberalism and perceiving (not incorrectly) that progressives’ shrillness was at least partly to blame for their staggering losses in the recent election, are disengaging from battles like this one — lest they alienate the last three heterosexual men who still identify as Democrats. Meanwhile the political Right, formerly the last bastion of the kind of conservatism that disliked raunchy ads or breasty restaurants on the grounds that they were too sexy, has been fully overtaken by a new breed of Republican whose idea of “family values” is a horny beer calendar featuring MAGA babes in bikinis. In just a few short decades, the modal American conservative has somehow transformed from a pearl-clutching moral majoritarian to a pro-natalist, pro-tech, America First social libertine. On both sides, the age of the prude is over.

Perhaps this is as it should be. Let the battlefields of the culture wars stand empty, and on them, let a thousand flowers bloom — while the exhausted warriors, Left and Right alike, broker a peace that begins by recognizing all the things that unite rather than divide us. Things like family, and friends, and food, and art, and beauty of all kinds. Who knows: if we can agree on that, maybe we can agree on some other things, too?

And maybe the reemergence of Hooters is, perversely, exactly what we need to usher in this brave new world: a return to, if not tradition, then to the embodied and universal pleasures of gathering together, in person, to joke and chat and watch sports and drink beer — served to us by a barmaid with a really nice rack.

White’s prolific sexual career took place during the “golden age” of homosexual metropolitan promiscuity. This was a time for “tribal love”, a time for exchanging the shackles of “grim American “morality”” for shackles of more specialist kinds, a time — as White reports in one of the antique strings of camp verbal play he has hoarded from the era — for “falling heels over head in love”. Or, more prosaically: a time when one wouldn’t think twice of “taking a break from writing at two in the morning to saunter down to the piers and have sex with twenty men in a truck”.

Like most gay men of his generation, White is an unreconstructed sex-positivist, at least avant la lettre. Needless to say, in today’s ideological climate, sex positivity — the view, roughly, that the only significant evaluative constraint on sex is the consent of the parties involved — comes in for a hard time. The publicity stunts of OnlyFans camgirls such as Lilly Phillips, for example, who managed to sleep with 100 strangers in one day, rightly strike most people as grotesque for reasons that have little to do with the willing agreement of everyone taking part.

Of course, next to the body counts of Edmund White, and indeed many gay men, Lily Phillips and her colleagues are banking amateur numbers. But because it is invariably developed under a female lens, the critique of sex positivity is often implicitly treated as though it does not generalize to the gay male case. If it is not being politely ignored altogether, the gay sexual market is treated as a sui generis and lawless domain where strongly sex positive norms enjoy a kind of local legitimacy, if only because no alternative seems possible. Yet between Lily Phillips and Edmund White, it seems the more interesting question, at least psychologically, is why someone like White — an intelligent, cultivated, reflective person with a rich inner world and the apparent capacity for self-control — would live as he did.

White is, in the truest sense of an over-used term, a survivor. An anomalous immune response prevented him from developing AIDS, despite an HIV diagnosis in 1984. In consequence, he lived long enough to write dozens of novels, memoirs and plays, a gay sex manual, a literary biography of Jean Genet, and win the Pulitzer Prize. His atypical longevity has also given him free reign, in his memoirs, to preach what he so enthusiastically practiced in the original all-you-can-eat gay heyday. The result, in this case, is a memoir so sexually graphic as to be at points booby-trapped against direct quotation by reviewers in the mainstream press.

It is impossible to turn more than a few pages without being confronted by yet another “dick as big as a child’s arm”, or “as large as something that would have saved the lives of three Titanic passengers”, darting out from within another pair of “piss-stained denim jeans”. We hear of the male prostitutes White has employed all his life to meet his surplus sexual needs. This, he admits, is an “expensive hobby”, but worth it if you have a “gout exclusif” for “Nordic blonds” or “young but legal”, or, more innocently, if you happen to find yourself in New York, famously the bottom capital of the world, and quite reasonably want to hire someone who will at least agree “to impersonate a top from the outset”. The best in the business, White notes, will even “crush my head between Transformer biceps” and “obligingly ridicule my tiny penis”. Throughout the Eighties, White particularly liked holidaying at a favorite beach resort in Crete, because there “everyone was available for a price, even the mayor”.

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White’s style of self-revelation shares something of the sexual exhibitionist’s fascination with provoking his audience. That, and at the age of 85, perhaps the occasional touch of the rapt self-involvement characteristic of senile disinhibition. White and his partners, we hear, drank one another’s urine: “like seals begging for fish”. Other anecdotes are so gruesome as to make the above adventurism look quaint by comparison. One surreal story unfolds at a fisting colony in Normandy. There, an acquaintance of White’s, Robert, “pushed an entire football up a Frenchman’s rear; the man had to visit a local surgeon”. The real kicker, however, as we are informed with glee, is that the next day “a whole queue of ass-hungry men were lined up before Robert’s door at the colony. They, too, wanted to be worthy of a serious operation… greedy glutes!” Such goings on stretch, among other things, credulity.

In fact, his blasé presentation of the consequences of embracing minimalistic sex-positive norms often seem like an open invitation to call that theory’s bluff. Despite what sex positivists insist, there is more to the evaluative appraisal of sex than a thin, rigoristic condition of consent. The uncritical live-and-let-live view that sex, alone among valuable things, cannot be seriously degraded if pursued in a self-destructive way is hard to sustain, when given a moment’s thought.

Of course, one shouldn’t downplay the substantial differences of male psychology, and the physical and emotional parity of male-on-male sexual relations, that reduce the attendant dangers of allowing sex positivity to reign in the gay sexual market. Men prize sexual novelty more. They are less physically vulnerable to one another. There is more common knowledge, making the exploration of extreme practices safer. It is, at least to my mind, considerably easier to think of a woman like Lilly Phillips as straight-forwardly self-deceived than it would be her hypothetical gay male counterpart. Still, there remain serious risks, as Loves of my Life inadvertently reveals, in organizing one’s life around the satiation of a single impulse, one’s sex drive, while driving other reactions to the margins.

Sex positivists have a hard time accounting for the value of sex because they are committed to thinking that all it takes for sex to count as good is for it to be authentically willed. According to this view, one’s sexual practices are presented as at once central to one’s life and self-identity, but oddly resistant to any satisfying evaluative appraisal. White is a case in point. He writes that what has “mattered most” to him in his long life are his many thousands of often anonymous, fleeting and ungentle sexual encounters. And, yet, “in the cold polar heart of old age”, he comes to see his sexual adventures as “comical and pointless, repetitious and dishonorable”.

Though an aesthete in his artistic and intellectual life — a self-described “epicure with high standards” — White makes a marked exception when it comes to sex, where he becomes defiantly undiscriminating: a “clumsy slut” with a “pair of warm holes”. He claims to have felt “intimate and tender” love for his thousands of partners and fallen “in love ten times a day”. But it is difficult to think of this as anything other than kitsch exaggeration when elsewhere he describes his sexual life as “sequential and hyper-horny”: “one-sided, aspirational and impossible, never domestic and mutual”. This is not just a matter of catching White out; such inconsistencies reveal a deep tension in his view.

To give him credit, White clearly has enough self-knowledge to pre-empt the bleaker revelations that threaten to undercut his book’s official tone of sexual triumphalism. He invites the reader to witness his later sexual misadventures, but only on the condition that he is able to cast himself in a knowing or comic enough role: one able to absorb some of the instability that comes with having to share his self-conception as liberated, while at the same time recognizing him as helplessly degraded.

In his old age, pursuing younger men with fetishes for sadism, White feels a vivid indignity: crawling obesely across the floor, “as big and awkward as Mr Snuffleupagus in Sesame Street, a muppet so large and unwieldy that it takes two people to operate him”. Does White’s very detachment from sexual reality itself take on an erotic thrill? And with the arrival of Aids, his continuing pursuit of casual sex comes to seem to him like “Russian roulette”. Nor does old age stop him from “feeling like a starving dog at the door of a meat locker”. By this point, he attracts complaints that he is “somehow too experienced, too slutty, too quick and adept in assuming the position”.

Though it bears pointing out that many of those who lead less adventurous sex lives than Edmund White might be disappointed and unfulfilled, attempting to double-down on the opposite sexual strategy is no guarantee of securing what’s of value in life either. Helplessly caving to impulse might seem to provide a handy model for liberation. But it is an obviously fallible one. Appeasement, so often a bad strategy for avoiding conflict, works no better when deployed to keep one’s own desires at bay. Deceiving oneself about the profundity of casual sex is not a means to happiness; it is means to being overblown.

The first half of Mitchell’s narrative related how she had been brought up in America’s Nineties sexual purity movement, taking the pledge and practising abstinence before becoming a stay-at-home mother of three. Living “a modest and devout life” with her husband in the Midwest, she became a pastor in her local evangelical church. The second half of the piece effectively described a conversion experience, in which our heroine saw a bright light on the road to Damascus and realised that her deepest, most authentic self was an insatiable bisexual slut. Renouncing every aspect of her former self, she duly moved to California and turned on the webcam.

“Instead of preaching from a pulpit, I take off my clothes and get down and dirty on OnlyFans. Instead of denying my sexuality, I embraced my sluthood. I am now the happiest, healthiest, and wealthiest I have ever been! There is finally congruence. There is integration. There is alignment.” There is no mention of what her children think about their mum’s presence on social media, delightedly detailing the stretchiness of various orifices.

“So what?” you might ask. Or as one man complained when I posted, only slightly facetiously, that this was the worst thing I’d ever read: “What is it about other people being happy that upsets you?”. In any case, Mitchell’s story certainly wasn’t the worst thing I have ever seen on X. That was earlier this year, when I had the misfortune to click on a link featuring OnlyFans performer Lily Phillips, and learnt for the first time about the concept of a “cumwalk”. In case you don’t already know, this involves walking about a town centre with what looks like glitter all over your face, except it’s not.

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Phillips is the woman involved, quite literally, in a race to the bottom with fellow OnlyFans luminary Bonnie Blue about how many hundreds of men they can have sex with on film in one go. Confusingly, Blue and Phillips look almost identical and both have East Midlands accents. Initially this gives you a false sense of relief as you dismiss what you are seeing as a lunatic one off. But if it helps tell them apart, Phillips is the Derbyshire girl from the widely-circulated documentary last month, talking the director through her extensive collection of dildos and insertable traffic cones, before a team of assistants set up a marathon gangbang for the delectation of her subscribers. Blue, meanwhile, is the one from Nottingham who haunts various Freshers’ weeks, standing outside student union buildings with a felt-tipped placard saying “BONK ME FOR FREE LET ME FILM IT”.

Shown in the documentary weeping with exhaustion after fielding a 100-strong queue, afterwards an unbowed Phillips told the world she now had plans to hit the big 1K. Reportedly furious that her former friend had nicked her idea, Blue then rushed to climb sex-Everest first, eventually triumphantly announcing that she had just conquered 1007 men in 24 hours. Phillips has since declared she will be working up to the goal, a bit like doing the three peaks as a sponsored training run before Nepal. “What’s the point in just going straight to the thousand? Then you’re not going to profit off of it. If you do 300, then 500, then 1,000, it just makes a little more sense.”

Apart from that age old motive, Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire rivalry, what could explain what is happening here? Cancel culture brought us the concept of the “purity spiral”: as journalist Gavin Haynes told it, a process of “moral outbidding”, “when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and no single agreed interpretation”. The result is a “moral feeding frenzy” as members vie with one another to demonstrate who is the purest. In contrast, the OnlyFans apparatus seems to be trapping some people in what you might call an impurity spiral. This time, though, the value without upper limit is anticipated male gooning — another modern concept, and apparently nothing whatsoever to do with being an Arsenal fan — and camgirls are outbidding each other with more and more extreme ways of producing it.

Obviously, there’s the money. A popular take is that these women are the ones in control of their sad sack subscribers, helplessly pinioned one-handed to the mouse button. Phillips is said to have made £2 million from OnlyFans. Blue is making £600,000 a month. Mitchell was making $100,000 a month in 2021 according to the New York Post, though some of that could be from her side hustle as an inspirational life coach (free gift: “7 tips to make a sh*t ton of money”, though weirdly she doesn’t mention her main income source).

The average OnlyFans income is pitiful, at around $150 a month, so you can see why there might be a cynical interest in capturing more attention. Still, Phillips, Blue and Mitchell seem sincere when they say they adore their work, the odd fit of exhausted crying aside. Watching the Phillips documentary and seeing her talk us through her massive collection of sex toys and props, I concluded that OnlyFans is a new kind of Panopticon. Thousands of naked camgirls are stuck in tiny rooms getting ever freakier, entranced by fantasies of themselves as desired by excitingly faceless men, irrespective of the grim reality of the drooling deadbeats actually watching online.

Though I could be wrong, Phillips seemed to me to be fascinated by how she thinks she appears to an imagined audience, carrying the erotic vision of it with her wherever she goes — and especially into stinking rented Airbnb bedrooms, crammed with expectant flesh-and-blood subscribers. They too were basically a kind of prop for the benefit of viewers elsewhere. “When I did 37 guys in a day, I genuinely can’t remember any of their faces” she tells the filmmaker. “If I don’t find someone attractive I struggle to look at them when I’m having sex with them.” “But you don’t struggle to have sex with them.” “No, no, no.”

Later, after making a bespoke “jerk off instruction” video for some bloke paying her to tell him to eat his own semen, she says “it’s kind of fun, you’re kind of like playing an acting role”. This would have felt like superfluous information, except that I felt it inadvertently got to the heart of the matter.

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By Kathleen Stock

Back on X, my own mental prison of choice, I have certainly seen people posting at each other as if they were really talking to someone else entirely: a person in their head they are very angry with, or someone they want to impress. I may have even done it myself. And why wouldn’t it be this way? You can’t see or hear fellow users and most of them have made-up names anyway. People talk about the phenomenon of “audience capture”, but in my experience it’s rarely your actual audience that ends up consuming you. On X, the psychic projection results in lots of aimless snark, ranting and humblebragging. Translated into the world of livestreamed porn content, you get unexpected creativity with traffic cones instead.

People tend to treat OnlyFans as relatively benign in relation to obviously sinister outfits like Pornhub, but when it comes to worrying where porn culture will all end, it seems like it might carry its own special risks. We are told the erotic plasticity of women is far greater than the relatively fixed desires of men; meaning cultural and social factors are more likely to affect what they find arousing. Women make most of the content on OnlyFans, seamlessly moulding bodies and libidos to badly typed-out fetishes in order to wring higher order self-objectifying pleasure out of the process. Women performers outbid other women performers in increasingly extreme behaviour, locked into exciting rivalries to feel the most desired, to become the most monetised. And all with nobody else in the room.

In the old days, whatever other physical and mental risks they ran, porn performers were safely separated in time and space from their audience. Their gymnastics were trapped on the videotape like flies in amber. Nowadays they cumwalk among us, even as new jerkoff instructions ping into their phone from lecherous men with credit cards, identities and faces thrillingly vague. Maybe it’s true that I just don’t like people being happy, but it all seems a bit unhealthy to me. In an impurity spiral, as in the original version, there is apparently no upper limit to the crazy.

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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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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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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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.

Since then, I have (without actively looking) casually come across a scattering of articles that mention it and/or worry about it, including a piece on this site by Kat Rosenfield, titled “The Death of Intimacy”. In the piece, Rosenfield declared that, in a dramatic shift of mores, women have “cast off the mantle of the sexual gatekeeper only to find themselves in a world where your boyfriend’s idea of first-date intimacy was to engage in a little light choking before ejaculating all over your face… oh, but consensually of course.”

“The Death of Intimacy” is of a piece with a number of articles on UnHerd, apparently written to call out the crisis state of our current erotic (or rather anti-erotic) landscape, for example: “Porn Will Destroy You” (Sarah Ditum), “How to Save Sex” (Blake Smith), and the mutually respectful conversation between Aella (OnlyFans advocate and Substack star) and Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. In this context, sexual choking appears to be another aspect of the dehumanising, porn-influenced bad direction we are headed in, and/or a dangerous rebound reaction to a neurotic obsession with sexual safety and feminist overkill. Indeed, it’s easy for me to see it that way.

I came of age during the Seventies, a time of great permissiveness that segued into the even greater permissiveness of the Eighties. It was a very male-dominated time, but playfully so, in my circles anyway; feminism could be pretty playful too. Almost anything you could think of was okay. BDSM in particular came out to party in full regalia, and all flavours of queerness — including trans-ness — were celebrated at least in some communities; the word polyamory wasn’t in use, but people lived it, albeit more quietly. Of course, much of this depended on where you lived and who you spent time with; it was great to be young and queer in San Francisco or New York but not so much in small-town Texas or Michigan. I have the impression that this is still the case.

During this period I had many friends and acquaintances who spoke frankly about their preferences and experiences and in all that time I can only recall hearing a girlfriend mention choking once: in a mild, bemused tone she remarked: “So George strangled me a little bit last night.” (Oddly I don’t remember anything more of the conversation, just the matter-of-fact quality of her statement.) Of course, just because I didn’t hear of it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; there must’ve been some couples who played with choking under the general heading of kink. And there were the occasional media stories about “strangubation” — that is, masturbation combined with self-choking, something young men seemed to do alone, and only made the news when it went fatally wrong. So: not exactly a popular pastime.

And now… it is? The aforementioned Rosenfield essay was not, despite the provocative mention, about choking but rather the datafication and commodification of sex. To illustrate her points, she featured a spreadsheet created by the (also aforementioned) Aella: this document featured “every sexual encounter” that Aella had experienced along with a myriad of details about those encounters. I had a look and found myself more interested in another of Aella’s charts: a sex guide purporting to help frustrated men achieve greater sexual success via a “data-based theory of vagina-kind”. This meant, basically, a flow chart revealing what a sample of 600 women like and don’t like in terms of positions, attitudes and acts. Or, as Aella put it: “A) how much they like the thing and B) how much they’ve encountered men doing the thing.”

The idea of such a chart made me roll my eyes (more on that later) but I perused it anyway. And, with my vague knowledge of the subject, I was surprised to learn that, along with the classics (oral, doggy style and general masculine dominance), “most women” love choking — love it! In fact, it was in the category of what Aella called the “land of the unfulfilled feminine”, meaning women want it more than men are doing it. Insert wide-eyed emoji here!

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Of course, 600 isn’t a very big sample; it’s also skewed demographically. Aella described her group as “straight, biological… moderately liberal” women in their early 30s who’d had sex with at least five people. But her sample is not the only one. According to the National Library of Medicine (an official arm of the US government), fully 58% of female American college students have experienced and enjoyed (mostly) voluntary choking during sex. Some of them had been introduced to it as young as 12.

So… why? Why do so many women and girls suddenly want to do something that women of my generation would’ve considered a little too close to… murder? Because that is what it looks like to me. Dominance bordering on cruelty is for whatever reason a pretty standard feminine taste — but choking suggests murder, even if the suggestion is purely symbolic.

The phenomenon is sometimes explained by the ubiquity of internet porn, but that seems only half-right, the right half being “ubiquity”. In the past, a young guy might discover erotic choking via porn but he would not assume that his middle-class 15-year-old date would’ve heard of such a thing; if he wanted to live the fantasy, he would need to approach it with a great deal of care and her possibly horrified reaction would probably not seem worth it. Now, a 15-year-old girl has likely heard of sexualised choking because she may well have been exposed to porn on the same laptop she uses to attend Zoom classes.

This cultural change is huge. But it doesn’t explain why choking is regularly showing up in porn. I could be wrong but I think porn exists to make money, not to push a cultural agenda; it doesn’t manufacture desires, it caters to them. And, according to the NLM, women and girls also learn about choking through social media, fanfiction, movies and friends.

There are any number of explanatory theories floating around, one being that, because of the increased feminisation of society, women are so hungry to feel masculine strength that they will respond to it in this physically extreme form. This makes some sense. Superior physical strength has been a lynchpin of masculine social dominance for most of human history; it was vital for the survival of families and communities. But this is no longer true for modern societies which value mental prowess far more — an area in which there is no gender disparity. (On top of that, culturally we are now pretending, or at least people who make movies and TV shows are pretending, that there is no physical disparity either: female characters are now commonly portrayed as physically equal to men to the point of beating them in fistfights!)

Even so, I think the gender-neutral privileging of intelligence is in general a positive and inevitable development, but the animal nature of masculine force remains a compelling and beautiful thing. It makes sense that both men and women might want, on some profound level, to be reminded of it in their most intimate joining.

But there are many less murder-adjacent ways to be reminded. So I wonder too about subliminal anger and despair. American society in particular is so violent and rageful, so steeped in fear that it has become part of how we experience the world in our bodies — especially women who are more physically vulnerable. In sex, as in dreams, there is an element of metaphorically processing life experience, including that which we most fear; to experience it in a way that we can control ideally with someone we trust which, at best, may alchemically transform something frightening or ugly into pleasure and connection.

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In a long email conversation, the writer Lillian Fishman told me that she thinks most people who are “into choking” are into a light-pressure version of it that is mostly “representational”. She described its appeal in the following way:

“I think most light sexual kink tends to come down to wanting to feel temporarily paralysed/powerless/stuck/held down, in a non-scary way, so that the anxiety of how to act or of being the more interested party disappears (same reason I imagine that rape fantasies are so prevalent among women). And in good sexual relationships, this anxiety fundamentally retreats, without needing to be coaxed, one hopes. But I think choking is a shortcut to it. My suspicion is that most choking… is about this.”

This is something I understand: a “shortcut” to intimacy through intense experience that, while ritual, still requires trust.

But if all these reasons seem over-thought, consider this far simpler one: the eternal desire of the young to explore, to push past the acceptable or the known. The NLM survey features interviews of young women who describe their experiences of being choked in a variety of ways, some of which reveals touching sweetness:

“It feels very warm. It feels affectionate. It feels like a security. I don’t know. It’s like when you hold someone’s hand and it’s just kind of like a possessive kind of thing… Oh, like ‘I got you’ kind of like a dominance thing as well. Like if it’s being done to me, like, which is nice in the context of sex.”

For this young woman, the experience of light choking/facial ejaculation on the first date might be sublime. But only if it was done in the right way, by the right person who could give her that “I got you” feel. That might sound ridiculous. But a lot of sexual stuff sounds ridiculous if you aren’t there in the moment.

Which brings me back to my eye-roll at Aella’s instructive chart detailing the dos and don’ts of “vagina-kind”. Such instructions are nothing new, even if spreadsheets are; we have for decades seen books, columns and blogs claiming to school men on how to succeed with women. Sometimes, their advice is very sensible — Aella is sensible and witty. But this broad-spectrum counsel always leaves out the secret ingredients because those ingredients are impossible to describe in words or charts and depend almost entirely on the invisible and changeable emotional dynamic between any given two people. What can be incredibly exciting with one person might be lacklustre or actually repulsive with another; even the same words can have a very different quality depending on who is saying them, when and how.

I distinctly recall doing things in my youth that a month earlier I would’ve said I’d never do — and I only did some of those things once, with a particular person. It wasn’t even a question of liking or desiring that person more than others. It was about responding to him in a way that was unique to him and me, together. How can that be factored into a chart?

Which is exactly what makes it troubling that choking, rather than being accepted as something that some people like, has seemingly become something you’re expected to like or to do regardless; the sudden taste for it seems crowd-sourced, and that is not a mode that favours intimate nuance. This predicament is also very much reflected in the interviews conducted by the NLM. As one young woman said:

“… and so I fake moaned a lot when he was choking me ‘cause I felt like, ‘cause I’m also like a people pleaser. I like to make people feel happy. So I felt like I had to make him feel comfortable and everything like that… even though it’s just like during that time I was just like, oh this is new, it’s going to happen. Um, but also at the same time I’m just like, I don’t necessarily fully like this. I wish it was different.”

It is true that women have fake-moaned over all kinds of things, for millennia. It’s a perennial struggle for many people — men as well as women — to learn how to say no. But it seems different when it’s a girl feeling like she has to reassure someone who’s squeezing the bones of her throat. Reading those words online from a young woman I don’t know made me feel sad. If she were my daughter, it would break my heart. It would also make me angry without knowing quite where to direct my anger.

Then I remember: my mother would’ve been pretty sad and mad about some of the stuff I got up to if she had actually heard me talk about it. It’s probably impossible for mothers, for older people generally, not to sometimes feel that way about the stuff that much younger people get up to on their way past the acceptable and the known, especially “stuff” that looks or sounds violent. It’s easy to forget that, like the charts and the data, what you can see from the outside via interviews and articles does not reveal the inner workings, the private interplay that can happen even when people are being crude with each other. It’s easy to forget that what looks grotesque and awful on paper might feel exalted when you’re in the middle of it. And that each generation has to make its way through its own grotesque, awful and amazing experience.

***

This article was first published on 23 March, 2024.

Or take divorce. Even high-profile advocates for stable romantic relationships such as Rod Dreher and Andrew Sullivan have spoken about the breakdown of their marriages. Both writers disagree about a number of issues, gay marriage chief among them. But they both celebrate marriage, based on romantic love, as a stabilising force in a fraying society. Accordingly, it seems highly valuing love in one’s personal life, and even promoting it as a political force, is not enough to guarantee long-lasting desire. Romantic love, clearly, demands reconsideration.

There is no better guide to this urgent task than Eva Illouz, the world’s leading sociologist of love. Her first study of the topic, Consuming the Romantic Utopia (1997), explores how, over the past century, Westerners have tried to reconcile their characteristic jumble of conflicting wishes and goals: to “fall in love” and be swept away by passion, to meet a proper spouse and share a stable household, to be equal to and independent of one’s partner while preserving certain eroticised elements of the older inegalitarian system of gender (we may expect men, for example, to ask women out, and initiate sex, while punishing awkward or ill-timed advances as masculinist aggression). We put incredible, even impossible, demands on love — and on our lovers.

Our pre-modern ancestors would have found it odd to imagine romantic love as the basis of stable relationships in which children are raised and property transmitted. They tended to see passion as a force that was perhaps exalted, even divine, but certainly out of the ordinary, and most probably a threat to the rational management of such important matters as marriage. We, in contrast (and with some self-contradiction), often consider love to be both a powerful, disruptive emotion that falls on us out of the blue and also a connection between well-suited individuals who can build a common life. We think of families no longer as lineages that perpetuate themselves through alliances, but as small units founded on love. Love is now expected to accomplish a lot.

But many individuals do still manage to have reasonably happy romantic relationships today — especially in the middle and upper classes. The class character of contemporary romantic success — that is, the collapse of marriage among the working classes —suggests that the ability to fulfil romantic aspirations, like economic ones, is increasingly dependent on “soft skills” from which too many individuals are excluded. Sustaining relationships despite the multiple, contradictory demands that we place on them, requires that romantic partners have a sophisticated capacity to recognise, articulate, and respect their own and other people’s emotions. Perhaps the central skill transmitted in couple’s therapy is the ability to say “I’m feeling” this or that.

Illouz’s cautious optimism about contemporary love, tempered with a Leftist critique of satisfying relationships becoming the privilege of the well-off like steady work and healthcare, has collapsed over the following decades. Across hundreds of interviews conducted throughout the world, she has studied the effects of the internet on dating and desire, and come to troubling conclusions.

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In this she is hardly alone. A number of contemporary philosophers, such Byung-Chul Han and Alain Badiou criticise online dating. They take the popularity of apps like Tinder to be symptomatic of the loss of concrete, particular forms of attachment in an increasingly atomised and virtualised world. They observe that people on such platforms encounter each other, and present themselves, as commodities.

Illouz echoes some of these concerns, but goes beyond the backward-looking lamentations of critical theorists. Her first sustained analysis of internet-based romance, appearing in Cold Intimacies (2007), points to the ways that dating online resembles shopping. More originally, it also attends to the disillusioned resignation of her interviewees about the “dating market”, which they saw as simultaneously hopeless and inescapable. As she said, “this cynicism marks a radical departure from the traditional culture of romanticism”, and seems to arise, in part, from “the routinisation produced by the sheer volume of encounters”. After flipping through 500 profiles on Tinder, one is naturally cynical about love. And one keeps flipping.

In her next sustained study of how the internet is changing practices and ideas of contemporary romance, Why Love Hurts (2012), Illouz took her thinking a step further. Our desire today is shadowed not only by cynicism, produced by the predictable, endlessly re-iterable character of online dating, but also by the internet’s lure of information. Whether we match with someone on an app, or fall for them first by encountering their social media profile, we can gather a great deal of information about them without ever meeting them in person.

In the past, falling in love with a stranger would mean first seeing a beautiful body, which would incite idealisation and fantasy. For some famous lovers, like Dante or Petrarch, such a vision of the beloved might be an end in itself. In more ordinary cases, the lover could, with effort, learn more about the person whose beauty had so dazzled him or her, and gradually that knowledge would allow the sometimes overwhelming passion of love to become a stabler foundation for a lifelong match.

Today, however, we can accumulate a great deal of knowledge about someone prior to seeing them as an embodied person. It is easy, and common, to “cyber-stalk” a crush, or to become a “simp” fixated on a person whom one has never met, but whose tastes, travels, friends, etc., one knows in apparently intimate detail. Illouz argues that when we do this, our “emotions are largely self-generated… anchored in technological objects that objectify and make present the virtual person”. Rather than being directed towards the person with whom we are apparently obsessed, this form of internet-based romantic imagination allows us to manipulate a series of virtual objects (profiles, posts, information gleaned from searches) to sustain pleasurable feelings in solitude.

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Much like the consumption of pornography, these practices do bear witness to desire, but desire in a peculiar form, one that Illouz argues is poorly suited to be a foundation for the pursuit and continuance of romantic connection. Where thinkers such as Han and Badiou see our increasingly internet-based society as an emotional wasteland from which desire has been banished, Illouz perceives that the internet fuels an intense, unusual kind of desire that we struggle to integrate into our traditional ideas about love.

Quasi-pornographic, self-generated desire, like pervasive cynicism, arises almost inevitably out of our experience of encountering other people through the internet. Both, in different ways, disrupt the possibility of moving successfully from an initial idealisation of the other person to a real, sustainable relationship with them. This strange form of desire incites us to see the other as a set of data points to be manipulated for the purpose of private fantasising; while cynical thinking leads us to see the other as one of a vast number of interchangeable such sets available online, behind none of which is a real person to love us. Gooner-ism and doomer-ism go hand-in-hand, combining a pornographic form of yearning and a pessimistic vision of the world to reinforce already lonely individuals’ isolation from each other.

The mismatch between our historically unprecedented experiences of internet-driven, self-generated, cynical desire, on the one hand, and, on the other, our received ideas about how erotic longings can connect us to other people, seems to be confirmed in, for example, the writing of literary critic Becca Rothfeld. In a disturbing essay, she describes her cyber-stalking of an ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend as a paradigmatic case of falling in love, and a lesson on the apparent impossibility of truly knowing another person — rather than, as Illouz might help us see it, a peculiarly recent form of playing with one’s own feelings, a kind of emotional and intellectual masturbation, against which critics might do well to start their own “No Fap” movement.

Taking love seriously as a political issue, as something critical to private and collective life that is over-burdened with conflicting demands, eroded by economic inequalities and perverted by the internet, demands more than the wankery of personal essays or the impotent exhortations of Dreher and Sullivan. It would require a new ethics of erotic life. While therapists can teach us how to name, regulate and govern our emotions, and moral traditions teach us to channel our sexual desires, we are now entering an uncharted territory in which our feelings and longings increasingly orient us away from, rather than towards, other people.

But, amid all the morbid aspects of internet-based pseudo-sociality, people do, in some cases, meet online and successfully transition into real relationships. Some people are, in spite of everything, still happily in love — and all of us have a stake in understanding how they manage to do it. If we build on Illouz’s work, adapting it to an extremely online era, we can ask what skills (management of emotion, desire, and perhaps especially, attention) permit love to survive, and how they can be taught to the seemingly growing and large number of people who lack them.

Korea is a difficult place to be female. Its president Yoon Suk-yeol ran on an explicitly anti-feminist platform, claiming feminism “blocks healthy relationships” between men and women. You’ll find similar language in the Korean equivalent of the manosphere, where popular influencers describe feminism as a “mental illness”.

As female participation in education and employment has increased, so has men’s resentment. Rates of domestic violence are alarmingly high, and the country’s standards of female grooming are so severe, “Korean beauty” has become an international export, characterised by exhausting (and expensive) multi-step routines. Women are desired but also despised: the insult kimchinyeo (“kimchi bitch”) suggests women are spoiled, materialistic parasites seeking to live off men. Small wonder a minority of women are drawn to a drastic repudiation of men.

But when the 4B women proclaim their independence, that too is received with hostility. Women who visibly signal their disinterest in men by cutting their hair and rejecting makeup are subject to open abuse and harassment. In 2016, a man stabbed a woman to death in a Seoul public toilet and told police that he did it “because women have always ignored me”. (Police declined to take the perpetrator at his word and treat it as a hate crime.) This, of course, only serves to vindicate the 4B women’s approach.

In an onerously patriarchal culture, Korean women are increasingly opting out of marriage and motherhood: the country has the lowest birthrate in the world, with an average of less than one child per woman of reproductive age. And 65% of Korean women (48% of Korean men) say they want no children at all. So while it’s very likely that there are more women claiming to follow 4B than there are doing so in practice, there are even more women again whose lives reflect at least some of the movement’s core refusals.

In that context, it’s harder to see 4B as a perverse form of feminist extremism. Rather, it’s the utopian fringe of a situation where relations between men and women have broken down so calamitously that the future survival of the nation is in doubt: 4B represents an ideal of female-only existence, where male violence and sexual and domestic exploitation can be eliminated by simply ridding yourself of the males who do these things. Not just the eschewal of men, but the creation of a parallel world by and for women.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that one of the reactions to Trump’s re-election has been a flurry of young American women declaring their affiliation to 4B. Like South Korea’s Yoon, Trump has positioned himself as a defender of traditional masculine values (and unlike Yoon, Trump has been found liable in a civil court for sexual battery). Kamala Harris made considerably less play of her gender than Hilary Clinton did in her 2016 campaign, but nonetheless, this was an election where for many, sexual politics were on the ballot.

Trump’s first administration laid the groundwork for the appeal of Roe vs Wade, enabling individual states to remove legal access to abortion: much of America is now a dangerous place to have a miscarriage or termination. Embracing 4B is a way to “show people that actions have consequences”, a 21-year-old adherent from Georgia told the Washington Post. “Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not be able to have access to abortion. They can’t have both.” What she’s describing is essentially a sex strike, an idea with roots going back into antiquity and the Aristophanes comedy Lysistrata.

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In that play, the womenfolk organise to withhold intercourse until men bring an end to their war. It’s a comedy because the scenario is presented as inherently ludicrous — for one thing, the women find it as much of a struggle to contain their libidos as the men do — but crucially, in the end the women win. Students of the history of female separatism might find Lysistrata’s ending the most absurd thing about it. Through the 20th century, the feminist movement in America and Europe gave birth to various forms of women-only societies, and all of them seemed to end in failure.

In 1975, Leeds Revolutionary Feminists published a pamphlet with the deliberately provocative title Love Your Enemy? “We… think that all feminists can and should be political lesbians,” declared the opening statement. “Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified-woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women.” Heterosexual sex itself was suspect: “every woman who engages in penetration bolsters the oppressor and reinforces the class power of men.”

Some women — including Julie Bindel — have written about how liberating they found the idea that they could choose their sexuality, but while this may be personally true for them, it is probably a “choice” that is easier to make when your underlying sexual orientation is pointing in the right direction. In a recent article about 4B, for example, the singer Janelle Monae is offered as an example of someone who has supported the idea of a sex strike against men. It is probably relevant that Monae is a self-described pansexual.

While bisexual women probably do have the option to round themselves up or down to lesbian or straight depending on circumstance, and lesbians have routinely been coerced into tolerating heterosexual relationships by social norms, female libido is not universally negotiable. The most generous interpretation of Love Your Enemy? is that its authors had mistaken their own experiences for generalities: the liberation they found in rejecting men would be far harder to come by for women whose sexualities were stubbornly straight.

That made political lesbianism contentious for heterosexual women, who took the victim-blaming implication that their inherent desires made them responsible for the abuse men inflicted on them. It was also unpopular with some lesbians, who were adamant that there was nothing voluntary about their orientation — and resented their sexuality being lumped together with celibate straights. A movement that claimed to elevate lesbianism could be seen to have reduced it to a lifestyle label. The proponents of lesbian feminism rejected those criticisms. But when the idea was put into practice, it didn’t necessarily look the way they had envisaged it.

The Van Dykes were a troop of leather-clad lesbians who cut a peripatetic sweep across America in the late Seventies. Under the charismatic leadership of Heather Van Dyke (the name was self-chosen, for self-explanatory reasons), they travelled between patches of “women’s land”, minimising contact with men as much as possible. The writer Ariel Levy describes Heather Van Dyke as “a kind of lesbian Joseph Smith, driving around the continent looking for the promised land with a band of wives and ex-wives and future wives in tow”.

Perhaps inevitably, this was a circumstance that fostered power-play and eventually sadomasochism: while the theorists of lesbian feminism had believed that removing the penis from the equation would remove the brutality from sex, the Van Dykes set about vigorously reinstating it via whips, chains and dog collars. Eventually, the Van Dykes dissolved. Few could sustain their commitment to separatism. Life got in the way of ideals: one of the Van Dykes resumed talking to men after finding a new female partner who already had two sons.

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For straight women, a man-free life is even harder to maintain, though the prospect of doing so remains tantalisingly appealing. “I decentered men. Decentering my desire for men is harder,” lamented an article in the New York Times earlier this year. The author no longer believed marriage and motherhood were the twin pillars of a successful existence, but she remained, to her own disappointment, stubbornly attracted to men. You can try to subordinate your orientation to your politics, but in the end your orientation will likely win. It’s probably a mistake to make your principles the hostage of desires you’ll never be able to change.

On that count, the 4B movement is doomed to fail. You can find YouTube videos of 4B recidivists describing their enthusiastic return to heterosexual femininity: prodigal wives, safely back in the fold. And 4B itself can be seen as a reinvention of chastity culture under the colours of feminism. In one gloating response, Brandon Morse of the Right-wing media organisation Red State said of 4B: “They went so Left they started going Right, claiming they’re going to stop being hoes and won’t put out until men respect them. That’s what we’ve been saying you should do all along.”

But Morse and his brethren should pay attention to the demographics of South Korea, and check their complacency. The appeal of 4B may be nothing but a blip in the trending topics for American women, but the social currents it was born of — falling marriage and birth rates, and rising male resentment at women’s emancipation — are already embedded in the US. However hard it is for women to stop liking men, if men don’t like women, refusal becomes the only rational female choice.

For women, this problem is sharpened by the twin pressures of sexual violence and pornography. Last week, the Edinburgh sexual crisis centre Beira’s Place reported that growing numbers of young women were seeking counselling after having been choked during sex. The Times responded with harrowing testimony from the mother of Emily Drouet, a fresher at Aberdeen University who killed herself in 2016 after being physically and mentally abused by her ex. In court this ex, who was known as the “alpha male” on campus, admitted to seizing her by the neck. Elsewhere in the story, a sex worker blacks out after being strangled by a trusted regular, who then rapes her unconscious body. “She thought she was in control,” says a sexual crisis worker. How many of us have said the same?

Women are now rarely shamed for sexual desire; on the contrary, they are shamed for not having appetites for acts which, not too long ago, were quite fairly viewed as degrading or disgusting, or both. As sex is “liberalised”, the scenarios we conjure up during intimacy are becoming more harrowingly patriarchal. It would seem that sex-positive feminists are, on this issue, becoming strange bedfellows with pornographers and the ever-escalating super-stimuli they concoct. These feminists have also taught us, among other harmful falsehoods such as “you can buy a woman’s consent, and she’ll happily sell it to you like the liberated businesswoman she is!”, that it is perfectly normal for men to desire to inflict physical harm on the women they sleep with. This in itself should remain, as it was not too long ago, extremely controversial. After all, if feminism is all about choice, then we must be absolutely sure that the choice to be brutally choked by a boyfriend is one we make out of genuine desire, and not ambient pressure and shame about being called frigid.

What, exactly, is so empowering about being choked? And why is it that the most radical, liberating acts of the modern sexual repertoire are those which rehearse the most oppressive, shackling truths about being a young woman in a modern city — that at least one of the men a few paces behind you at night might want to strangle you, to debase you? It might be that our male partners simply don’t notice the endless news stories that underlie these fears: most recently, the trial over the 37-year-old NHS worker Natalie Shotter, who was orally raped to death on a park bench. Having seen such stories, a woman’s instinct when feeling a hand creep up her neck and tighten out of nowhere might reasonably be to slap it away in rage. If feminism cannot stop women being made to do things that disgust, hurt and frighten them, what is it for?

Once, sex itself was transgressive — so much so that Anne Boleyn succeeded in changing the national religion by withholding it. Now, we are in an arms-race of sexual extremity, propelled by the internet and an ever-more-casual dating culture. Most of the young women I speak to say they’ve been choked without permission. Many of them chirp, “but I don’t mind, of course!” with a coquettish glance. Then, upon further questioning, they begin to ask themselves whether they do actually like it — or whether they’ve simply been going through the motions. It’s an uncomfortable realisation.

Here, the Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray has something to say. In a more convincing echo of John Berger’s theory that “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”, Irigaray writes that women derive “vicarious pleasure” from pleasing men — though indifferent, or even repulsed, themselves. Sex is a “masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own… she does not know, or no longer knows, what she wants”. When Irigaray was writing in the Eighties, modern kink culture was still contained — it was born in the gay leather bars of the Fifties, working its way into top-shelf magazines such as Bizarre and the mainstream via The Rocky Horror Picture Show before becoming a routine, even perfunctory, part of internet pornography. Today, Irigaray’s once radical take seems depressingly conventional and hard to argue against. Young, inexperienced women, made to feel prudish or illiberal for not wanting to feel scared or unsafe during sex, go through the motions of ever more extreme acts; the validation they receive, apart from those — I suspect, a minority — who genuinely enjoy “breath play”, is the “vicarious pleasure” Irigaray envisioned.

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Sex is the most political thing in the world; the idea of it being a space free from the power dynamics of gender, where being “submissive” and “dominant” is entirely disconnected from the fact of — in heterosexual arrangements — one partner generally being easily able to overpower the other, is pure fantasy. There is nothing wrong with finding those physical realities themselves erotic — and with discussion, and trust, people should do whatever the hell they like. But for the submission, even hurting, of every woman a man sleeps with to be so routine as to be unannounced suggests little to no interest in what women want. This is not the noble act of subversion which kink is so often breathlessly told to represent. Nor is the claim of sex as a politics-free zone — chill, babe, all the other girls do it! — evenly meted out; in one rattling breath, young women are told not to take unconsensual slapping, choking or spitting as a sign of a troubling thirst for sexual violence — so judgemental! — but also to respect a partner’s proclivity for those things as a sainted feature of their identity. It is this mindset which has fostered a culture in which a middle-aged bloke feels comfortable standing at a bus stop on Battersea Rise with a furry tail and gimp mask — a recent sighting in the wild to which not only I, but an entire busload of Year 7s, was recently treated.

The thing about sex is that precisely because it is so swamped in political factionalism, it is the subject, perhaps aside from death, most prone to the airiest theoretical concoctions, the most pretentious, hopeful bullshit. Take Audre Lorde’s vision: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life-force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” That such a lofty take has avoided outright ridicule — and has, I suspect, worked its way into the notebooks of nose-ringed undergraduates since Uses of the Erotic was first published in 1978, goes some way to explaining the aesthetic problem that “prudish” feminists have when saying that maybe not every woman should be choked. “Sex-positive” feminists insist that to question kink or to avoid degrading acts is to live within “negativity” and to be joyless. How different is this from the million times we’re told we’re “no fun” for refusing things — that the last girlfriend did it, why can’t you?

While there is a place for dreamy empowerment narratives about sex, a feminist needn’t assert it in every avenue of her life, least of all the office. In reclaiming female sexuality in this way, Lorde connects it to the general virtues of women, women who dance, love, work. What about the off-duty feminist, prone and alone in her bed as I am now, who is currently doing none of those things? What about the vast stretches of time when, rather than ravenously exploring subversive sexualities and wresting eroticism from the clutches of our oppressors, we just want to scroll on Twitter instead? I am making the case for a more brutal vision of female sexuality, one which — alongside seeking no doubt world-shaking experiences — sometimes simply cannot be arsed, and is equally blunt about brushing off coercion to do things which are, frankly, grim. Let’s uncouple kink from virtue and bring it all back to basics: do I like this, do I like them? And if you don’t, get the hell out of there.

But out in the real world, time moves on, and even the sacred world of Jilly was not entirely immune. In August, the writer Flora Watkins shared the sad story of how she was defenestrated from the Jilly Cooper Book Club, originally formed by two friends who wanted somewhere to “drink champagne and shriek about Jilly”. Eventually, though, the culture wars crept into the JCBC, and Watkins clashed with fellow members over — inevitably — the trans issue. After tweeting “It’s women who go through the menopause”, Watkins found herself booted from the WhatsApp chat. The last message she saw was someone saying that it would give them “great pleasure” to tell Watkins “to fuck off from us for good. Bye!”

All this implies that now may not be the wisest of times to bring Cooper to TV. But that is what Disney+ has decided to do, with an adaptation of Rivals, the second Rutshire novel. You can imagine huddles of executives holding crisis meetings, frantically trying to reshape Rupert into something contemporary sensibilities can accept. Not only is he irredeemably posh, he also loves blood sports; worse than that, he’s a Tory MP. In Rivals, the main object of his affections is Taggie O’Hara, who can be no older than 19, while Rupert is in his mid-thirties. He announces his interest in her by sticking his hand up her skirt while she’s waitressing.

These were marks of Rupert’s caddishness in the Eighties, when both novel and series are set. Now, they’re near-insuperable taboos — the assault, obviously, but also the age gap.

By contemporary mores, Rupert Campbell-Black could be seen as not just a cad, but as a predator. As an article in Reason explained last year, a term that originally described the sexual exploitation of children by adults, “grooming”, had been stretched to apply to situations where all parties were adults. But even without his morality-offending excesses, you might wonder if there’s any room today for the kind of character he is: the charming libertine, the compulsive seducer, the overgrown manchild whose own gratification defeats all else. If Rupert fits any modern archetype, it’s the “fuckboy”, defined by journalist Nancy Jo Sales as “a young man who sleeps with women without any intention of having a relationship with them or perhaps even walking them to the door post-sex. He’s a womanizer, an especially callous one, as well as kind of a loser.” A “fuckboy” is not someone to be desired.

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The new romantic hero can be found in the pages of Sally Rooney — Cooper’s successor, in that she’s the contemporary queen of the dirty book, but a very different kind of novelist. In a Rooney story, you’re only supposed to be turned on by what’s good for you. “The reader is never quite able to shake the suspicion that Rooney’s characters have all been made to sign contracts holding them to high standards of personal conduct before they are permitted to appear on the page,” noted the critic James Marriott. In the words of Ann Manov, Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, offers “two supposedly problematic males who make love tenderly and give love fiercely”. In other words, not that problematic at all.

You certainly can’t imagine a Rooney character killing a fox or groping a server and being rewarded for it with a throbbingly hot sex scene. And so, in order to make Rupert Campbell-Black palatable to modern tastes, the TV show has changed… well, actually it’s changed almost nothing. The Rupert played by Alex Hassell is, with a few tweaks, the Rupert of Jilly Cooper’s novels, right down to the saucy banter. In the opening scene, after joining the mile-high club on Concorde with the journalist employed to ghost his memoir, Rupert smirks: “I always believe in laying one’s ghost.” It’s a line that comes directly from the book.

Olivia Nuzzi, the New York Magazine journalist who lost her job after allegedly sexting one of her subjects, the one-time presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, might feel some nostalgia for Jillyworld. In Jillyworld, sex can be just fun. Yes, people fall in love ill-advisedly and get hurt, usually by Rupert Campbell-Black — it wouldn’t be any fun if there weren’t any risk involved. But for Cooper’s characters, erotic possibility is everywhere, and pleasure doesn’t come with a morality test. In a later episode, Lizzie (a romantic novelist and Cooper proxy, played by Katherine Parkinson) looks around a garden party and wonders if everyone there is committing adultery: the answer is probably yes, and the implication is that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Part of the pleasure of Rivals is the sheer relief of this position, after a slew of dramas such as The Affair and Apple Tree Yard which have portrayed infidelity as not only a severe ethical infraction, but the portal to a total unravelling of the protagonists’ lives. While the conventional romantic novel ends with marriage (or, if you’re Sally Rooney and marriage seems intolerably basic, then at least with a vague suggestion that a couple is now in it for the long haul), for Cooper, marriage is just the background for illicit desire and more potential couplings — which is why she’s been able to return to the same cast of characters for so long now.

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Even if someone in her novels does try to stay faithful, it’s very unlikely that their partner is doing the same. In Cooper’s saucily pragmatic universe, the happiest union might well be the one with a little room for indiscretion on both sides; the most convincing forms of monogamy often occur between people who are married to other people. This might not be a model that many of us would like our own spouse to follow, but it is undeniably quite sexy. Some might even argue that “being quite sexy” is the whole purpose of romantic fiction — or at least, a more important part of its purpose than training female audiences to fit their pleasures to their morals.

This version of Rivals has also arrived almost exactly as the trend for “bad vibes TV” (as the critic Sophie Gilbert has called it) has reached exhaustion point. “Lately,” she wrote, “TV has felt to me like one long bad trip, a season of moody episodic rhapsodies that eschew the conventional architecture of narrative for something more subliminal, and more disturbing.” Shows such as The Bear and The Lady in the Lake have become fixated on inflicting their characters’ trauma on the audience, at the expense of storytelling and entertainment. One thing you can be very sure of with Cooper is that you won’t be encountering a brutalising dream sequence or an experimental rendering of grief psychosis. In Rutshire, people pull their socks up when bad things happen.

Perhaps Rupert Campbell-Black isn’t a hero out of time: he’s a hero just in time. The Eighties he belongs to might never have really existed but the fantasy he represents still does. As the number of shapely male bums on show demonstrates, Rivals is absolutely designed for the female gaze, and the female gaze (it’s fair to say) is tired of being hectored. The female gaze would like to be free to want bad things, and not be told that there’s a terrible price to pay for getting them. The female gaze is ready to have fun again.

Fortunately for Javier, he doesn’t exist. He’s a figment, a spectre, a ghost in the machine of the diversity-industrial complex — and a character in the anti-harassment and discrimination training that I had to complete last month. This training, accessed remotely via an online portal, is an annual requirement of my part-time job as a yoga instructor. Designed by a third-party contractor, it covers all manner of workplace sins: sexual harassment, discrimination, plus various isms and phobias.

It also takes two hours — as in, 120 minutes — as required by state law. In 2019, Connecticut governor Ned Lamont put his signature on two pieces of legislation known, collectively, as the Time’s Up Act. Touted as a “proactive approach” to combating workplace sexual harassment, the law was inspired by the #MeToo movement (along with, presumably, the movement’s fancy Hollywood cousin, Time’s Up.) Among its accomplishments was a mandate that the employees of any company comprising three or more people must complete two hours of sexual harassment training, no exceptions.

The above information is contained in the training itself, for what I’ve concluded must be two reasons. The first is that the authors of the training want you to know exactly who is responsible for making you sit through an interminable lesson in why you shouldn’t refer to your co-workers using homophobic slurs. The second reason is that, man, two hours is a lot of time to fill.

To be fair to the creators of the training module, they have done their best to make it interesting (more on that later). But, having been employed at the same company since before the passage of the Time’s Up Act, I’ve noticed something intriguing: all this content is virtually unchanged from what it was several years ago, when the law required just one hour of DEI compliance training. It’s not just the same concepts, but the same actors, the same scripted scenarios. Is this a two-hour training? No: it’s a one-hour training in a two-hour bag padded out with a bunch of foam packing peanuts. Having noticed this DEI twist on shrinkflation, it’s impossible to unsee. The sheer volume of gimmicks, whereby the training designers manage to convey the same information in double the time, would be awe-inspiring if it weren’t so irritating.

Each hypothetical harassment scenario is described four times: in a short text essay, then in a first-person video, then as a word problem followed by a multiple-choice quiz, and then, finally, in a post-quiz recap that reiterates the same information all over again. A segment about the professional hazards of social media is similarly laborious, making you click through six panels of an alleged confession by “Sarah”, who wrote a social-media post with a “discriminatory tone” before boarding a long flight, only to find herself dogpiled when she landed. (It’s hard to know what’s worse: the time-consuming structure, or the blatant, uncompensated rip-off of the Justine Sacco story, as if that woman hasn’t suffered enough.) And in the section detailing the content of the Time’s Up Act, the legislation is broken into eight bullet points, each hidden behind an interactive drop-down menu that you have to physically click on three times — once to open it, once to close it, and once to advance to the next one.

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Have you ever been stuck in the supermarket checkout line with a cashier who insists on breaking a bunch of bananas into eight individual bananas and laboriously scanning them one at a time? It’s like that, but worse, because you can’t eat the sexual harassment training. But if the form of the training is categorically absurd, what it attempts to teach isn’t much better. At best, these concepts are common sense, a reiteration of the basic norms of human interaction that most of us learned in preschool. Don’t exclude, don’t name-call, don’t touch people who ask you not to touch them — and no, Javier, I do not think you should tell Raphael to “stop being such a drama queen” about his co-worker referring to him with a homophobic slur.

At worst, though, this training seems like it was designed in a lab to replace a functional, high-trust workplace with one in which employees are both in constant terror of giving offence and primed for any opportunity to take it: ratting each other out to HR for failing to use a co-worker’s preferred pronouns, hand-wringing about whether it’s harassment to invite a gluten-intolerant colleague out for a pint, asking formal consent to high-five. And I particularly have questions about the instructional video on gender identity, featuring a montage of daring gender nonconformists such as… a man holding a baby and a woman lifting weights. Should we really be telling people who literally work at a gym that every woman in the weight room is gender nonconforming? Isn’t this crude and sexist stereotyping the opposite of inclusive? Excuse me, sir, but don’t you know that holding your infant child is for sissy girls? A real man would drop-kick that baby through the goalposts at the Big House while shotgunning two beers at once!

It’s strange to realise that all of this has been done in the name of the #MeToo movement, whose original purpose was to raise awareness of how women continue to be held back in the workplace on the basis of sex. It wasn’t just harassment or assault; it was pregnancy discrimination, gendered workplace expectations, the way the inescapable presence of sexuality loomed in the background of our professional lives. A woman who is expected to sleep with her boss in order to advance professionally is in a terrible position, but so too is the woman at the same company whose boss doesn’t want to sleep with her, and whose prospects suffer as a result.

But insofar as this problem can be solved, it’s not by ensnaring would-be perpetrators in a web of red tape; it’s through the slow and deliberate work of effecting cultural change, and the immediate improvement of support for the victims of discrimination. On this front, I’ll grant that the Time’s Up Act isn’t entirely useless. Those who wish to file a workplace harassment complaint now have up to 300 days to do so (it used to be 180 days). And while employers were already prohibited from retaliating against complainants, it is now also illegal to change the terms of a person’s employment after they make a harassment complaint — by relocating that person, for instance — without their consent.

But mostly, this legislation is typical of the extreme do-somethingism that politicians become afflicted with whenever a lot of Americans — and particularly the subset of Americans who walk the red carpet at the Oscars wearing $85,000 gowns — are up in arms. From the War on Drugs to the Patriot Act, moral panics tend to make for bad policy. And in this case, the clarion call of “There oughta be a law!” becomes complicated by the fact that there already is one: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 established a nationwide edict against workplace discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex, one which has been consistently upheld by both the courts and a cultural consensus that women should be able to do their jobs unmolested.

The problem is, there’s a difference between making a thing illegal and writing that thing out of existence; much like thieves, murderers and fake Nigerian prince email scammers, sexual harassers are still out there, harassing people sexually. But rather than admitting the limits of their power to eradicate the world’s ills through bureaucracy, politicians instead conclude that the existing law making workplace harassment illegal doesn’t make it illegal enough. It needs more bells and whistles! More rules and regulations! We need a cursed matryoshka doll of policies within policies within policies, each more unwieldy and elaborate than the last.

This is where the mandatory training comes in — a training which I would estimate prevented exactly zero incidents of harassment, unless the would-be offender happened to be stuck completing it at precisely the day and time when he would have otherwise been harassing someone. The Weinstein-esque perpetrators at whom the #MeToo movement took aim are not going to be deterred by an extra hour of anti-harassment training, if they even have to take it (most, I would imagine, are getting an assistant to complete it for them). This is what makes the Time’s Up Act and its ilk so toothless, and frankly so offensive: it pretends to address the abuses of powerful men by condescending to and wasting the time of ordinary working people.

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It’s worth noting that employees like me are often not compensated for this training, and it goes without saying that we are not meant to model our actual behaviour on it. It’s not just that being maximally sensitive to microaggressions is incompatible with a job that requires you to stand at the front of a crowded room, in spandex, lunging and squatting while two dozen people stare at your body in order to mirror your movements. It’s that fitness is a service industry, one in which tolerating people’s idiosyncrasies, oddities and low-key improprieties is part of the job.

Of course, if I were sexually harassed at work, I’m sure my employer would protect me to whatever extent required by law — but only because it’s required by law, much like the two-hour harassment training, which I’m equally sure the company would point to as evidence that they ought not be held responsible for the bad acts that happen under their watch. We gave them the training! It’s not our fault! Ultimately, these measures are little more than exercises in box-checking compliance, a way for corporations to dodge lawsuits and displace the accountability for workplace harassment onto someone else’s shoulders.

This was never more apparent than in the moment after I finished the final quiz, when I was greeted with a pop-up and a countdown clock: “This course requires you to spend a certain amount of time on your learning experience,” it read. “Please go back and review the course material until you’ve reached the time limit.” In spite of everything, I had finished too quickly; I would need to stare aimlessly at the module for another 30 minutes to fulfil my compliance. Time’s Up, indeed.

Billed as “a new book of fantasies for a new generation”, Anderson makes a conscious nod to Friday’s seminal oeuvre in her introduction, enquiring, Carrie Bradshaw-like, “how have women’s deepest internal desires changed?” For the purposes of girlboss science, ethnicity, religious belief, wage bracket, “sexual identity” and relationship status are recorded for each participant, though weirdly not age. And as with Friday’s written contributions, there is a lot of quasi-feminist posturing at the beginning of each section. “Sexual liberation must mean freedom to enjoy sex on our terms, to say what we want, not what we are pressured or believed we are expected to want,” we’re solemnly told. “Fantasies can help crystallise our wants and needs.”

One thing that definitely seems to have changed since the Seventies is that aesthetic standards in sex writing have improved, presumably honed by contact with a thousand self-published erotic novels on Amazon Kindle. In Friday’s day, the means of expression was often rough and ready but in Want it tends to be silky smooth. Devouring looks and quickening pulses are swiftly followed by competently handled flushes, swellings, openings, and so forth.

In this professionalised context, the odd bit of purple prose stands out all the more starkly. One image unlikely to leave me anytime soon describes “a saintly stake of flesh that points to the heavens, aloof and destined to do good” whose presence is soon to be felt against the protagonist’s “sopping dividing wall”. Other bits are simply baffling: “She pulls out a large onion and rubs it across my erection,” writes one contributor.

But perhaps a more interesting way in which desires seem to have changed over the decades is that they have got a lot more boring. Things like racial dynamics, incest, slavery, and bestiality — all casually included by Friday, to the point where it was hard to find much else in there — are absent from this collection, said to be the result of whittling down eight volumes worth of responses to the publisher’s call. In fact, this book is generally so vanilla that, perhaps anticipating disengagement from readers in advance, Anderson is forced to entice us with the promise that her own fantasy is included among the anonymous offerings. Certainly, this keeps the reader more alert than she otherwise might have been. Is it the one about the door handle, one wonders? Or maybe the one about the Weasley twins?

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But since many of the main fantasy themes of Friday’s era still appear on message boards all over the internet, it seems likely that their invisibility in Want is not because women have become more repressed in the meantime, but rather because publishers have. Even in its relatively etiolated form, I presume extra fainting couches were required for this book’s sensitivity readers. The closest we get to genuine transgression of old taboos is a bit of water sports and a few tentative rape scenes, rushed through with evident embarrassment and a lot of editorial emphasis that — in this case only, for some reason — the fantasies absolutely do not crystallise the author’s “wants and needs”. Not all of the participants are so convincing. “I’d probably be super-upset if my actual dentist tried to fuck me,” writes one, with an interesting use of the word “probably”.

All this coyness makes something of a mockery of the collection’s main conceit: that it’s offered in the cause of freeing women from shame about what turns them on. Predictably, contributions are not even exclusively from women: “women” is described by Anderson as “an imperfect term” and there are male voices here too. Rather than boldly illuminating the wellsprings of the contemporary female libido, Want is probably more profitably read as a guide to respectable sexual mores in the 21st century. As with female-associated activities generally, there are a lot of unspoken rules. And frankly, the news for men who don’t identify as women isn’t great.

Reading between the lines, it seems that women should expect physical encounters with men to require imaginative supplementation in order to be successful. One writer, not even particularly into robots, puts the point baldly: “Robots are necessary for this fantasy because a group of real men could never focus on a woman sufficiently to participate.” In the main, contributors seem to fall into two groups: those who are not having sex at all, and those who are, but are thinking about having sex with someone else when they do.

Of course, this is scarcely a representative sample. It seems likely that well-satisfied women have much better things to do than write down their innermost desires and send them to Gillian Anderson. And there is also a big information gap here, since we are not told whether men also have to imagine hotter versions of their partners in order to get themselves off. I assume we never will know, since it is very hard to see how such a thing could get off the ground. Friday managed it once, but even then, she had to give the book the sappy name Men in Love — a title quite hard to reconcile with the image of two nurses chopping a man’s cock off after his final orgasm, as I recall.

In any case: according to Want’s subtext, ideally as a woman you should be bisexual, or more grandiosely “pansexual”: what seems like the vast majority of participants describe themselves this way. And whether you describe yourself as lesbian, bi, or heterosexual, based on the numbers exhibited here, fantasising about women is preferable to fantasising about men — even if in practice you say you only ever sleep with the latter.

Partly due to the obvious omissions of certain topics — priests but not imams, Bigfoot but not the family dog, etc. — it seems you should also be alert for the immoral aspects of your fantasies, which is somehow not the same thing as feeling shame about them (bad). One anxiety-ridden participant writes: “Every time I find a woman attractive, I fear that it will come across as predatory, and any time I find a man attractive I question my own feelings, wondering if they are true or if it’s the patriarchal conditioning of society.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same woman says she has never been kissed.

As this quote perhaps suggests, despite the clear ideological bent of the book, tantalising glimpses of reality sometimes break through. Hinting at a fascinating back story, the woman whose kink is to flush her knickers down the toilet says it started in her college dorm bathroom, but “I now do it in a safe manner in a way that cannot affect anyone other than myself”. Her other fetish is wetting the bed every night, which she does in practice: “It took over a year to fully commit to it, and I’ve never looked back.” (She too is single.)

Other fantasists also don’t sound particularly liberated or functional. One woman describes crying each time she imagines that her partner, unfaithful in life, has sex with another woman. Another laments that “it feels like my life is made up of sex dreams punctuated by an occasional real-life event”. Equally, there are those who seem unable to shake off worldly responsibilities entirely, even for a stolen moment alone. Writes one woman, imagining the aftermath of an energetic threesome: “Impressed and shaking with pleasure, I cover myself in a luxurious robe and offer crackers and dips to balance out the wine.”

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The main subtext I drew from the book, however, is that there seems to be a new range of social “taboos” shaping some women’s sex lives. These are not taboo enough to be omitted entirely by the book’s censors, but still forbidden enough to become thrillingly desired. One woman masturbates at the idea of her boyfriend proposing. An exhausted mother and wife has an orgasm when she thinks of an anonymous couple having emotionally engaged sex. To the delight of the manosphere, no doubt, there are several feminists who want to be tied up. A woman who is fed up with planning everything for her exes wants someone who takes charge: “How about you do it for a change?”

Strikingly, three separate fantasies involve the simple act of a man ejaculating inside a woman, presented as something incredibly transgressive. And one woman dreams of vanilla heterosexual sex with a man who loves her, in a “clean suburban home”, yet is appalled by this: “This fantasy is the one that makes me feel fucking sick. What does that say about sexuality? About me?”

Perhaps we should not read too much into all this. Perhaps it is mostly just a case of grass being greener. For the record, there is also a “very shy” Buddhist who imagines being a male crime boss slapping a submissive blonde in the face before she gives him a blow job. There are asexuals dreaming of couplings, lesbians craving men, three women who long to have sex with themselves, and a “Church of England (lapsed)” heterosexual who imagines being a man watching his wife being gangbanged at a sex club.

Leaving the book behind me with some relief, though, I couldn’t help concluding that Anderson might be right: there are still some honest conversations about sex that we up-to-the-minute modern women are afraid and ashamed to have. I’m just not sure they are the ones Anderson has in mind.

In late 2013, she was found guilty of harassment and given a suspended custodial sentence. “Stalking” borrows its name from the language of hunting. When it happens to you, you know that you’re the prey, even if it’s hard to say exactly what you imagine will happen to you at the end of the chase. So I was eager to know something, anything, about this person who had caused me so much angst and misery from behind her screen name.

The stalker was gaunt and scruffy, said my friend. So overwhelmed by the courtroom she could barely look up, never mind speak. Terrible teeth. I felt both good and bad about this. Good, because it’s nice to believe that the people who torment you are ultimately tormented by being themselves. Bad, because it was embarrassing to have been psychologically scarred by someone so obviously pathetic. Bad, because the only reason she’d been able to get to me was that I’d welcomed her in.

I had posted a tweet about an outrageous piece in a lad mag and it went viral. In reponse to it, there had been firings, apologies and a donation to a women’s charity. It was 2010, and though I’d written a few bylined pieces, this was one of my first experiences of being a somebody. I liked it. A day later, the stalker arrived in my mentions: who do we go after next, she asked. Did it feel a little off? Yes. Did I follow her? Also yes.

I hadn’t thought about any of this for about 10 years, and then, when I was watching Baby Reindeer, it all came rushing back. In the show, main character Donny (played by, and based on, the show’s writer and star Richard Gadd) is working in a bar when Martha walks in. She’s crying. Something, obviously, is not quite right about her: she claims to be a high-powered lawyer, but says she doesn’t have enough money for a cup of tea.

Donny feels sorry for her. He gives her a cup of tea on the house, and this becomes the inciting incident for a nightmarish harassment campaign spanning years. In real life, Gadd says he received 41,071 emails, 744 tweets and 350 hours of voicemail from his stalker — making the woman who pursued me look like a rank amateur. If that was all Baby Reindeer was about, though, it wouldn’t be a very interesting show.

What makes Baby Reindeer particularly interesting is that it examines, in mortifying detail, Donny’s complicity with his stalker (which, by implication, is Gadd’s own complicity). Pity explains the cup of tea, but it doesn’t explain why he would continue to indulge her on repeat visits; why he would give her his email; why he would agree to take her for coffee. But Martha gives Donny something. Through her obsessive eyes, he can appear to himself to be as funny and fascinating as he dreams of being. “I went along with it,” he says eventually, “to satisfy my own stupid need for attention.”

For Donny, and Gadd, this is compounded by the fact that he’s living in the aftermath of being groomed and raped by an older man; feeling worthless and questioning his accustomed straightness, the heterosexual adoration of his stalker is irresistible. But even this disclosure doesn’t turn Donny into a perfect victim. He was an aspiring comic and his rapist was someone senior in the industry. As harrowing as the abuse was, Donny kept going back “for a little peep at fame”.

There has been a lot of praise for Gadd’s bravery in admitting to being a victim of sexual violence as a man. There should be more, I think, for his bravery in admitting that he helped to create the conditions for his abuse. Not every victim will recognise themselves in this, but there’s an important truth to it. “Victim blaming” is taboo, but sometimes, the most important way to protect yourself from future harm is to take responsibility for the ways you put yourself in harm’s way.

The impulse behind the bar on victim blaming is a well-intentioned one. Victims, especially female victims of male violence, often find themselves put on trial for what was done to them: what were you wearing, why didn’t you leave? The implication is always this: what did you do to deserve this? When Donny first tries to report Martha to the police, the officer on duty asks him why he didn’t do anything earlier.

The twist is that the officer’s question is actually a good one. Donny downplayed the danger of Martha, partly because he was getting some gratification from her, partly because he was in desperate denial about his rape: how can you complain about some weird emails when you didn’t complain about being physically violated? It’s only when he recognises that he’s trapped in a terrible cycle of shame and attention that Donny begins to crawl his way out of it.

In the book The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker argues that most violent situations are recognisable before they turn violent. There will be a shiver of discomfort that you choose to ignore — maybe because acknowledging it would cause social awkwardness, maybe because there’s something else in the encounter that you want enough to overlook your qualms. The next time you feel that shiver, you listen to it: that’s what “the gift of fear” means.

Telling victims that there’s nothing they could have done is a false consolation, because it tells them that they have no power to avoid such situations in the future. The question isn’t: “What did you do to deserve this?” It is: “How can you protect yourself from this ever happening again?” I could have refused to change my social media behaviour on a point of principle, but I think I would have been very stupid to do so.

It’s worth pointing out that Gadd’s experience isn’t typical. Most stalkers are male. Most victims are female. This doesn’t make his stalking (or my own, much lesser one) any less distressing, but it probably does help to explain how he walked himself (and I walked myself) into that position. A woman doesn’t seem like a physical threat. Though the interest is asymmetrical, it can appear — at least initially — manageable when the source is female.

To the stalker, though, the relationship is real and reciprocal. Every response from the subject, whatever the content, however hostile, is treasured as confirmation. In Baby Reindeer, a throwaway comment Donny makes about curtains is elaborated by Martha into proof of his intense sexual desire for her. This is why the number one piece of advice anyone experiencing this kind of unwanted contact will receive is: say nothing. Don’t even tell your harasser to leave you alone — or, rather, do it once, unambiguously, and then record all further communications to forward to the police.

This is hard advice to take, because to the stalked, the stalker can become the dominant presence in their life. When Martha falls quiet, Donny is anxious. If he doesn’t know what she’s thinking, how can he know what to expect? But there’s more to it, of course. When he doesn’t know what she’s thinking, he’s overtaken with the fear that she’s not thinking about him. Martha is the proof that he matters. He masturbates over her. Eventually, he goads her.

I wasn’t that insane. But I did feel bereft, as well as relieved, when mine seemed to drop off the internet sometime in 2015. I had to make the painful admission to myself that I had got something from being her victim. It had made me feel frightened, cornered — and important. I still googled her sometimes.

Sometimes it struck me that I might be the only person left who cared what happened to her: the relationship she’d forced me into persisted after all. Over the past few years, she has been reported missing several times. In the posters, she looks haunted and ill. There’s no mention of her being found after the last time, which is the only reason I feel OK writing about this now.

Baby Reindeer’s stalker, though, is alive at the end of the show. Inevitably, internet detectives — fresh from cracking the case of the missing princess Kate — turned to identifying her. If they have correctly identified her, they have probably given her the most thrilling weeks of her life so far. For a stalker, being told to get lost can be interpreted as a coded message of interest. Imagine what being the subject of a limited Netflix series must feel like.

Part of me thinks Baby Reindeer should never have been made. Not to protect the real-life Martha from public interest, but to protect Gadd from the now-provoked real-life Martha. Maybe he isn’t, after all, completely over the weaknesses that dragged him into Martha’s orbit. It doesn’t seem incidental that, in the drama, Donny has his revelation about his complicity on-stage, during a standup set. It’s only with a roomful of people transfixed by him that he can separate himself from his need for Martha’s gaze.

This makes sense. Maybe it’s impossible for someone who’s truly recovered from attention addiction to honestly explain what attention addiction feels like. Maybe, if you recognise yourself in Donny’s story, it will save you some pain in the future. To use a worn-out term from the worst kind of criticism, Baby Reindeer is “problematic”. If you judge it by how well it serves Gadd’s own self-preservation, it might be indefensible. But it wouldn’t be worth watching if it were anything else.

Yet today we are lurching towards a society where sexual intimacy and family life are being undermined at the most basic levels. The impact can be seen in shifting dating patterns and declining rates of marriage, family formation and childbirth. And this is no longer a Western disease; a majority of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level; by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to experience population decline.

To some extent, the roots of this war between the sexes is economic, exacerbated by the global “cost-of-living” crisis stemming from house price increases relative to incomes, higher energy and food costs. With hopes of a steady career and home ownership fading, many young people now choose to, or are forced to, adopt a lifestyle incompatible with marriage and family. 

This is most evidenced in the West by the rapid shift away from not only family but heterosexual engagement overall. But in East Asia, the breakdown in male-female relations is if anything, starker. In Japan, for instance, the harbinger of modern Asian demographics, one in four people in their twenties and thirties are virgins. Indeed, the Japanese even have a term — herbivores — for the passive, desexed generation of young men.

So too with China, which, despite once being renowned for its strong familial culture, is now home to 200 million unmarried adults. Once virtually unimaginable, the proportion of adults aged 17-36 living alone in China has risen to nearly 70%. Marriage and childbirth, notes one Chinese Gen Z, have become “almost synonymous with the stress of life for us young people”.

And this does not simply represent a demographic crisis — but inevitably a political one too. We cannot know the political implications of the current war of the sexes in societies such as China and Russia, where civic life is strictly controlled. But in the US, new fractures are becoming more pronounced. Most obviously, women, particularly single women, now provide the base for progressive politics. Similarly in Canada, according to a 2020 poll, women favoured the Liberals by two to one while men slightly tilted to the conservatives. 

Now, the existence of a political gender gap is nothing new — but, according to recent Gallup surveys, it is now five times bigger than in 2000. Survey data has found that from 1999 to 2013, about three in ten women aged 18 to 29 consistently identified as liberal but rose to 40% in 2023. And crucially, Gallup interprets these changes as “stronger-than-average pro-liberal shifts”, particularly in elite colleges. 

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In sharp contrast, an increasing proportion of men, particularly in the working class, are embracing Right-wing causes. Just like their American counterparts, who are increasingly supportive of Donald Trump, European men under 30, are also shifting to the Right. Meanwhile, in Korea, the Right-wing shift among young males was sufficient enough to put a Right-wing “anti-feminist” into the Presidency. 

Likewise, a post-sexual society in the West will not be a pretty picture. For one thing, the breakdown of sex relations undermines the traditional focus on long-term wealth creation within families. Married people, for example, aided by the mingling of spousal resources, account for 77% of all US homeowners. But when society no longer places the same value on such a traditional focus, calls for government assistance can be irresistible.

Rather than seek to bolster the prospects for young families, there are growing calls to expand such things as rent subsidies or direct transfers. At a recent campaign stop in Atlanta, speaking to over 10,000 supporters, Kamala Harris pledged to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases”. This latest statement mirrors her earlier position before Biden withdrawal where Harris shared on X her belief that “Every American deserves affordable housing”. This refers to the Biden administration’s call to cap rent increases by 5% on landlords with 50 or more rental units or risk losing federal tax breaks. She has also called for Medicare for all, essentially replacing employer-based healthcare , until she decided to backtrack from this unpopular stance.

For many, the idea of family solidarity has all but disappeared as a primary source of support. Rather than being progressive, as is often suggested, the sexual war and the decline of familialism seem likely to accelerate societal decline, mirroring the plague-cursed Medieval period when as much as 15% of the population was estimated to have been permanently celibate and when classical values about the primacy of family tended to fade before theological concerns. As Richard Reeves has noted: “You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects.” 

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The future, it seems, will belong to those largely disconnected individuals who somehow find a way to negotiate what the US Surgeon General has described as an epidemic of loneliness. Already by 2020, 28% of all occupied homes in the US were one-person households, up from just 8% in 1940. Three years later, Pew found that 10% of Americans had no close friends. 

But this is not just an American tragedy. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and now China are evolving similarly. In Japan, the number of people living alone is expected to reach 40% of the whole population by 2040. Already, there are estimated to be 4,000 “lonely deaths” in Japan every week. 

Changes in sexual relations are of course inevitable and, in some ways, liberating for individuals. But on a mass basis, the sexual war represents a critical civilisational challenge. As one seminal study from Singapore has noted, family buttresses not just society but serves as “the primary source of emotional, economic and financial support” for individuals and as the best way to “protect society from the negative fallouts” of a competitive economy. Without a strong family structure, individuals can be cast adrift, looking to material pleasures, government aid and virtual worlds for comfort.

If not addressed, the decline in sexual relations suggests a very dystopian future, in which only the elderly population grows, while children and families become rarer and more stressed. Governments — whether in America, France, Japan or Scandinavia — have not found an effective way to slow this process. That may be because this is more a matter of spirit, than just incentives. What is needed is nothing less than a rediscovery of romantic love and embracing the value of nurturing offspring. Freud may have exposed the seamy side of family life, but he still understands that it stands at the centre of any successful human civilisation.  

It was also, always, an easier sell to men than to women, which is why frontiersmen often had to obtain a wife by mail order. What for a man might be a pioneering adventure might be, for his wife, an arduous daily grind of growing and preparing food, making and mending clothing, laundry, animal husbandry and so on, all with no family help and multiple children underfoot.

Over time, though, a slew of innovations — from cars to ready-made foods to labour-saving home devices — have made it ever easier to live life in a seemingly self-contained way. Perhaps most of all, this has liberated women to pursue individualist dreams just like men. As the American antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly once observed, women were liberated more by the washing machine than feminism.

But what if something was lost, as the grind disappeared? This was the view of perhaps the most controversial modern critic of technology: the late mathematician and domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski, commonly known as the “Unabomber”. In his manifesto, Kaczynski argued that as “industrial society” developed, it corroded human freedom, leaving behind enfeebled, inhibited and “oversocialised” individuals unable to exercise full agency in the “power process”. He was so vehemently opposed to this perceived degradation that he pursued a campaign of anti-technology vandalism and letter-bombing that killed three and injured 23 more.

Obviously I don’t condone terrorism. But there’s something to the idea that labour-saving devices have stripped us of practical skills, making us more dependent on their services and infrastructure, even as they relieve us of effort. But if you can’t separate agency from effort, what does this imply for all those mothers condemned to the grind? This tension supplies much of the power, and also the controversy, surrounding the very contemporary cultural figure of the “tradwife”.

Across social media, these influencers document their labours as wives and mothers. In doing so, they make a virtue out of adding the very domestic chores back into their lives that earlier generations of women rejoiced in escaping. And this invites reflection. With such a reactionary message, why is their content so popular? Was Kaczynski on to something, about the need to escape “oversocialised” industrial society? And if so, what does this mean for women?

Among these figures, none is more popular — or, lately, more contentious — than Hannah Neeleman, dubbed “the tradwife queen” in a recent viral Times interview. On her Ballerina Farm social media channel, Neeleman documents the earthy aesthetic, agrarian lifestyle and expensively styled “back to the land” lifestyle she enjoys with her husband, airline heir Daniel Neeleman, and their eight children on a 328-acre farm in Utah. But if Neeleman’s popularity, output and controversy tell us anything, it’s that neither Phyllis Schlafly nor Ted Kaczynski is a good guide to the tradwife phenomenon.

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In the Times interview, author Megan Agnew describes Neeleman’s home life with a clear insinuation that something is off. She hints that perhaps Neeleman is putting a positive gloss on a life of drudgery with an overbearing husband; she did, after all, give up a place at a prestigious ballet school for barefoot pregnancy and pig farming. Perhaps, too, she was pressured by the same overbearing husband into declining pain relief for her many home births. And perhaps her accomplishments have been pushed aside and her potential discarded: Agnew details the beauty queen costumes dumped in the garage, and the room Neeleman wanted as a dance studio but was instead turned into a homeschool classroom.

Agnew observes that she has barely a moment to speak to Neeleman without her being interrupted by toddlers, or talked over by Daniel. Where, we are invited to wonder, does this beautiful, gifted woman get to be a person, over and above being a dutiful wife and mother? Since the interview was published, it has incited a storm of speculation as to the health of her marriage and the meaning of the birthday egg apron, compassion for her obviously oppressed condition, as well as an equally spirited defence of her lifestyle (including from Neeleman herself).

So what’s really going on at Ballerina Farm? Is Hannah Neeleman oppressed? Did she have her dream stolen from her? Certainly, what’s depicted in social media often diverges from reality, and it is of course true that relationships that appear loving may have less happy backstage dynamics. Some purportedly “trad” marriages really are abusive. I’m not privy to any such gossip about Ballerina Farm, though, and have no interest in adding to speculation.

But what about the structure of Neeleman’s situation? Surely the mere fact of her being diverted from her dream of life as a prima ballerina to one of agrarian domesticity, pregnant every 18 months and besieged by sticky toddlers and farmhouse chores, reveals an “abused” woman whose chance of self-actualisation in the “power process” was stolen by a domineering man?

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This, however, also misses the point of Ballerina Farm altogether: one that neither Neeleman’s would-be feminist rescuers or traditionalist defenders fully acknowledge. At face value, yes, the setting looks unnervingly antifeminist. But if you take as its message not just the content of the social media posts but the entire Ballerina Farm project, Hannah Neeleman emerges as neither classically “oppressed” nor “empowered”. Rather, she shows up as profoundly embedded in her life’s work, in a way that doesn’t map easily onto either the Kaczynski-style pioneer libertarian vision or the high-tech world that emerged from that vision to “liberate” women in the Schlafly sense.

The suspicion directed at “tradlife” is directionally correct, in this sense: if Kaczynski got his way, and industrial society vanished tomorrow, it might well return some practical agency to individual men from bureaucracies and complex social structures. But it would also remove the majority of women from public life, into the everyday grind of subsistence chores with children.

All the most contentious aspects of Ballerina Farm discourse are animated by this intuition. For example, the Times interview and its swarm of respondents on TikTok and X have all made much of the fact that the Neelemans don’t have a nanny to help with the smallest infants, because Daniel doesn’t want one. This detail is consistent with the self-reliant pioneer image, but evidently a greater burden on Hannah than Daniel. Also consistent with “going it alone” pioneer-style, most of her babies were home births, without pain relief. How far was this her choice? Who knows?

But perhaps the real question is: how “pioneer” is their life anyway? The rugged, self-contained Little House schtick is only believable as long as you never ask yourself: who’s filming? I can enjoy watching Neeleman making a “perfect summer lunch” of sourdough flatbreads, pesto and cheese all from scratch — including making and straining the cheese — because I choose to look past the obvious fact that it’s all confected for the cameras. Doing all that would be an insane amount of work just for lunch, for someone with eight kids and farm chores, unless she had a ton of help.

But, very obviously, she does have a ton of help. For starters, with production values that good there’s likely a crew on-site to assist with lighting, shooting, editing and publishing her all-natural-looking kitchen creations. Neeleman herself has detailed their 30+ employees, and shared footage of the (considerably less artfully styled) space where Ballerina Farm Oompa-Loompas package and dispatch products from the show’s multimillion-dollar spin-off food and lifestyle brand. Their farm-cum-home-cum-studio is clearly a hive of activity and people, all the time. As the interview notes, there are also domestic cleaners, plus a home tutor to educate the older children.

No, Hannah Neeleman doesn’t have a nanny for the babies. But nanny or no nanny, there is no shortage of people about to keep an eye on a swarm of kids. This is not Little House on the Prairie, with no one for miles in any direction but Ma and Pa and the brood. And nor, as evidenced by the fact that both Neelemans are actively engaged in the Ballerina Farm enterprise, is this a “traditional” domestic setup on the homemaker-breadwinner model.

This split between working husband and dependent wife, often glossed as the “trad” bit in “tradwife”, dates from the industrial era. That is: it’s not “traditional” at all, but distinctively modern. It’s also the model that, over time, drove many of the dissatisfactions challenged by feminism. But Hannah Neeleman is emphatically not a “tradwife” in this sense: more accurately, she’s a tradewife: a mother who works within an economically productive household.

Ballerina Farm is both a home and a tightly run and obviously profitable business. In it, both Daniel and Hannah are engaged in distinct but equally vital roles. It’s a lifestyle that more closely resembles the pre-modern era, than anything “trad” in the “tradwife” sense. But it’s not an attempt to go back to the pre-industrial era either. On the contrary, Ballerina Farm is only possible because it’s not a low-tech project on the Uncle Ted template.

After all, none of it would be possible without the internet: Daniel Neeleman’s IRL farming exists in symbiosis with his wife’s engagement farming. Unlike the many miserable farmers living hand-to-mouth as supermarkets squeeze their margins, Daniel can charge $139 for a box of croissants and sausage meat. For him, the difference between this and American farmers’ more usual elevated suicide risk is his glamorous, internet-savvy wife. Who knows what their relationship is like behind closed doors; but in terms of money and power, I have no trouble believing Hannah Neeleman’s characterisation of them as “co-CEOs” of Ballerina Farm.

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Seen in this light, as a family business blending high and low tech, Ballerina Farm isn’t propaganda for the “pioneer” model or its suburban successor, the bourgeois housewife. What the Neelemans have constructed is closer to a 21st-century update on a far older domestic template: the preindustrial “productive household”. That is, a home that is also a workplace, in which everyone is economically active. Even the Neelemans’ large number of full-time staff recalls the extensive historic employment of servants in productive households.

And perhaps this gives us a clue as to what’s really driving Ballerina Farm discourse: envy. For a 21st-century “productive household” of this kind is not available to all. More than ever, the internet has made it possible for mothers to have it all, after a fashion: the rewarding, economically active life, the big family, the beautiful home, all woven together with the remote-working possibilities opened up by the internet. But not all women. Just those with the skills, the money, the charisma, the space for a home office — and a spouse who shares the vision.

If that’s you, you can enjoy your flexible, rewarding career from home, with half an eye on the kids, the home help, and the rising sourdough. For everyone else, there’s the same old juggling as ever — and scrolling through Ballerina Farm as you commute.

Lost in the days of press attacks that followed was the fact that both Trump and his critics were stuck in an outdated American electoral calculus of identity politics grounded in race. In fact, the key to a Harris win in November won’t be the support of black Americans or Indian Americans or even “brown Americans” — though she has identified at various points in her political life as all three. Rather, Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic: never-married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45.

Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.

The Democratic Party’s political engineers first sensed the centrality of BOTS to the Party’s power base during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. The Obama campaign then duly rolled out a storybook ad called “the Life of Julia”, which explained how Obama’s policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would care for Julia from graduation through motherhood and finally to the grave without her needing to form a human relationship with anyone outside the government.

Julia’s life was defined by her interactions with the state, with each step of her life tied to a particular government programme. She is able to pursue her chosen career as a web designer because, at age 27, “her health insurance is required to cover birth control and preventive care, letting Julia focus on her work rather than worry about her health”. At age 31, Julia changes her mind about birth control and “decides to have a child” — a decision that apparently involves no partner aside from the state. The resulting progeny, Zachary, attends a Race to the Top Federally-funded public school — which allows Julia to start her own business. At age 67, Julia retires with the financial support of Social Security and Medicare, and spends her partner-less golden years volunteering in a community garden.

While the Julia campaign was a subject of some mockery in 2012, the Obama campaign was in fact ahead of the curve. When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he made the fictional “Linda” the avatar of his “Build Back Better” campaign. More blue-collar than Julia, in keeping with Biden’s lunch-pail Democrat persona, Linda earned $40,000 annually working at a manufacturing facility in Peoria, Illinois — an income that was a little more than $10,000 short of the city’s median salary. However, Linda had no need for a second income in her home, thanks to the government — which gave her $3,600 annually in the form of a Build Back Better tax credit. Her son, Leo, who like Zachary appears to have been fathered by an anonymous bureaucratic sperm donor, began universal pre-K by age three and enjoyed a free educational ride subsidised by the state — all of which enabled Linda to keep working and Zachary to obtain a “good-paying, union job as a wind turbine technician”. The saga wistfully concludes by describing how, later in life, Linda needs home and hearing care. But fortunately, help is at hand: “Thanks to President Biden’s plan,” it adds, “Linda can access affordable health care through Medicare, and Leo is able to afford at-home elder care for his mom.”

Kamala Harris can fairly be seen as the flesh-and-blood electoral successor to Julia and Linda. Childless, she remained unmarried throughout her professional career until a decade ago, when, aged 49, she tied the knot with a lawyer named Doug Emhoff while preparing her run for the US Senate.

Both Harris’s demographic profile and electoral appeal are, therefore, arguably quite different from the last woman that the Democratic Party nominated to take on Trump. For all those who derided Bill and Hillary Clinton’s marriage as a business deal, it was hard to question the reality that Hillary Clinton was a classic Seventies feminist who was entirely serious about the idea of having it all: she stayed married to her law-school sweetheart through very public ups and downs for nearly a half-century while raising a child and enjoying a notable public career. By contrast, Harris first attracted public notice as the mistress of flamboyant San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, a married man more than twice her age who rewarded her with an expensive car and public office — a relationship which in turn became a stepping-stone to other public jobs. Julia and Linda, take note.

Harris’s life and career are, therefore, clearly representative of a demographic shift that is remaking the Democratic Party and American society as a whole. An astonishing 22% of women aged 40 or higher in America have never been married, which is the highest percentage since data was collected in 1900. The rise in these numbers is both recent and startling. Throughout the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, the percentage of American women who remained unmarried by age 40, as Harris was, had remained constant at around 6%. The percentage of black women who have never married by 40 is markedly higher, hovering at 46%. The overwhelming majority of these women vote for Democrats.

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The ballot box is hardly the only place that this new demographic is making its unique preferences felt. BOTS have demanded and received not only the female-targeted government grants, educational and jobs programmes, and social safety nets that benefited Julia and Linda and their singular progeny, but also a much broader set of social engineering measures that are fundamentally reshaping American mores. Since the Nineties, young American women have been positioned as the primary beneficiaries of neo-Victorian speech and conduct codes that have fundamentally transformed the behaviour of men and women everywhere from classrooms to workplaces to bars.

BOTS are also the primary beneficiaries of government affirmative action programmes in education and hiring. In fact, in the roughly 60 years since Civil Rights programmes to reduce racial and gender discrimination were introduced in higher education, women have surpassed men in earning four-year degrees, while black and Latino students remain underrepresented.

But have these efforts made BOTS happy? The answer, according to young women, is no. In fact, the demographic that has been the most highly socialised into core progressive values and would seem to benefit most directly from bureaucratic intervention in their lives is also the most miserable group in America. A startling 56% of liberal American women aged 18-29 have been diagnosed with a mental-health condition (the percentage for conservative women is 21%).

What is even more striking is that the enormous happiness gap between liberal BOTS and their conservative peers has only existed for the past decade or so. Analysing an NIH dataset of high school seniors, the researchers Catherine Gimbrone, Lisa Bates, Seth Prins, and Katherine Keyes found that, prior to 2012, when the Obama campaign rolled out Julia, there was no meaningful difference between male or female or liberal and conservative high-school students in internalising symptoms (depressive affect). “We hypothesise that increasing exposure to politicised events has contributed to these trends in adolescent internalising symptoms, and that effects may be differential by political beliefs and sociodemographic characteristics,” the researchers concluded. Noting that liberal female adolescents were by far the most depressed, they suggested that the new ideological lenses through which adolescents were viewing the political climate were affecting their mental well-being.

When the Gimbone study came out, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg rejected that view. “Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights,” she wrote, concluding: “It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.” The real culprit, Goldberg suggested, was social media and iPhones. Yet she didn’t explain why social media would have such disparate effects on young women and young men, or why its effects would differ according to political viewpoints.

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By blaming technology, Goldberg was clearly avoiding the implication that the victory of liberal ideas itself was helping to make young women miserable — a point made by the feminist writer Jill Filipovic: “Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life… are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimisation, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response.”

If Filipovic’s point is persuasive, the Democratic Party’s message for the past decade has been exactly the opposite. Instead of promoting the goal of mental health in young women, and using unbiased research to determine what in fact makes women happy, progressives have instead been bent on implementing a set of evermore-intrusive top-down social policies that substitute state intervention and protection for the fellowship of human partners of whatever gender.

From the Party’s point of view, at least, the unhappiness and depression of younger, never-married women, which produces outcomes like never getting married or having children, may be less of a bug than a feature: that BOTS are both unhappy and dependent is what makes them a uniquely valuable energy source for the party. Conversely, adopting policies and encouraging social attitudes and outlooks that make women happier and less depressed and anxious would in fact negate the Party’s most significant electoral advantage, and thereby undermine its power — depriving the Party of its most loyal voters and foot-soldiers.

Paradoxically, then, the Party’s interest is in telling young women that they are miserable and alone without providing solutions that promote personal happiness, and then transmuting the resultant depression and anxiety into anger, which it then utilises as political fuel for empathy-based social justice campaigns from Ferguson to Gaza. This strategy, whether cunning or simply ad hoc, hardly benefits women, though — either individually or as a class. Instead, it undermines their sense of personal agency, while denying them the tools that any human needs to make themselves happy. That humans find happiness and satisfaction in community is as true for women as it is for men, if not more so. Yet only 35% of American liberals report being a member of a church or place of worship, and 37% of American liberals are currently married — a social arrangement that has been shown to have broad benefits for the mental and physical health of both adults and children at all stages of life (56% of conservatives are married). The idea that the state can make up this apparent happiness gap with Build Back Better grants and assertions of false consciousness on the part of conservative women is a chimera.

These numbers are also likely to get worse. According to Gallup, nearly 40% of young liberal women now identify as LGBTQ — a startling rise in a demographic that was presumed to be relatively constant across most societies over time, regardless of what people told pollsters. Partly as a result, fertility rates in the US, which had long hovered around replacement level (2.1 lifetime births per woman), have plummeted since 2008, to a new European-style low of 1.61. However, this sudden demographic sea-change does not appear to be the result of Americans not wanting to have children. Last year, the share of Americans who said that having three or more kids is the ideal hit its highest point since 1971, at 45%. In the simplest sense, young American women want what their mothers had — but have no idea how to get it.

Why is that? While one might blame everything from the internet to plastics in the water to the exploitation of female misery by the Democratic Party (even if some real share of that misery is caused by anti-family conservative social policy), a more concrete answer may be the impact of not having fathers, particularly on young girls. Here, too, Kamala Harris’s biography — she was raised largely by her mother, who moved her to Montreal from California, where her father still bitterly complains about being separated from his daughters — maps directly onto the larger social turmoil.

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When Americans do have children, they now do so out of wedlock more often than ever before in American history, with 69% of black children being born outside of marriage, 52% of Hispanics (up from 34% in 1990), and 28% of whites (up from 15% in 1990). What this means in practice is that an increasingly large percentage of American children are now growing up without regular contact with their fathers — thanks in some large part to the persistence of the “tender years” doctrine that gives mothers custody of young children.

The numbers here, too, are startling. In 1960, 89% of minor children lived with their fathers. The number in today’s America is 73%, with nearly half of African American fathers — like Kamala’s father Donald Harris, an economics professor at Stanford — living apart from their children. There is a plethora of studies that show that children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems, with boys more likely to become involved in crime and girls more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression.

One under-appreciated reason why increasing numbers of young American women are confused and miserable, and failing to make choices that promote happiness later in life, may therefore be that increasing numbers of American children grow up without regular contact with their fathers. And contrary to popular stereotypes, the effects of paternal absence, especially in early childhood, are particularly negative for young girls. “In both self-reported and parent-reported data, we found a three-way interaction of gender, age, and parental divorce, indicating that with increasing age, parental divorce became more strongly associated with depressive symptoms among girls, but not boys,” one Dutch study has found. “These results suggest that girls with divorced parents are at particularly high risk to develop depressive symptoms during adolescence.” Subsequent studies have further localised the negative effects on girls to paternal absence in early childhood.

If governments want to stem the tide of misery among young women, which is affecting everything from voting to birth rates, they may wish to do more to keep fathers around — both inside marriages and also in cases of divorce. On the other hand, the Democrats might not win as many elections.

Rather, what the prison system has a major problem with is retention. According to the Prison Reform Trust, half of officers who left the service in 2021 had been in the role for less than three years, with more than a quarter leaving after less than a year. And while there are many reasons for this, one in particular has been thrust into the spotlight as of late: the curious phenomenon of female staff falling for inmates.

Let’s start with the most recent, and no doubt most infamous, case to date.

We’re inside what appears to be a prison cell in HMP Wandsworth. The camera shows a well-built tattooed man, legs akimbo, receiving oral sex from someone on their knees. To add more context, the cameraman pans around the cell. We catch sight of the grinning cameraman smoking a spliff, before he cuts back to the couple. Then comes the big reveal: as the pair start to have sex, we catch sight of a woman’s uniform. She’s a prison officer.

For the next two minutes and 59 seconds, what transpires is essentially a porn movie set in a real-life prison cell, involving real-life inmates and (former) real-life prison officer Linda De Sousa Abreu, 30, from Fulham. “Guys, we’ve made history,” says Wandsworth’s answer to Cecile B. De Mille before going straight to camera: “That’s how we live in Wandsworth, bruv.”

It remains unclear what will happen to this still unidentified character and his cellmate, 36-year-old burglar Linton Weirich. Likewise, senior management heads are sure to roll at the prison, which was just handed another £100 million of funding following a “catastrophic” inspection. Only last week, a prison officer was suspended after being filmed on a contraband mobile rolling a joint in a cell with two prisoners.

The focus of the fall-out, however, has fallen on De Sousa Abreu, who it turns out “models” on OnlyFans, has appeared in a Channel 4 show about swinging, and is in an open relationship with her husband. The Portuguese national, who was apprehended at Heathrow airport attempting to flee the country, pled guilty last week at Isleworth Crown Court to one charge of misconduct in a public office.

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When she receives her sentence later this year, her name will be added to a disturbingly long list. In the three years to March 2023, 31 female prison staff working in male prisons were busted for having intimate relationships with prisoners, including one who gave birth to her lover’s baby and another who had his cell number tattooed on her thigh. This represents a 61% increase on the previous four-year period, but only covers male prisons run by the HM Prison Service — and not the 14 private institutions contractually managed by companies such as G4S Justice Services, Serco Custodial Services and Sodexo Justice Services.

If prison sources are to be believed, however, the number of female staff sacked for having affairs with inmates is significantly higher. To save face, I’m told, prison governors prefer to have a member of staff resign rather than go through the ritual humiliation that comes with a full-blown investigation.

As a fellow at the University of the Arts’ Design Against Crime Research Lab, I’ve visited numerous prisons in the UK and abroad, including HMP Belmarsh. I know first-hand the high-level security measures that are put in place to stop inmates from gaining access to contraband — from mobile phones to drugs — via visitors who typically attempt to smuggle goods orally or via other cavities.

One member of staff inside Belmarsh told me that a mobile phone could change hands inside for up to £5,000. For the benefit of co-workers and official visitors alike, staff created a glass display containing assorted items, from electronic devices to knives, which have made their way into the category-A prison.

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But with increasingly sophisticated surveillance equipment stemming the flow of contraband coming through prison visitors’ centres, vulnerable female prison staff have proven to be a useful conduit for funnelling illegal items into the prison black market. “You can spot them a mile off,” says Lee, a reformed criminal who’s spent time in HMP Wandsworth for serious drugs and robbery offences. “You see them on the wing with the hair, the nails, being all familiar and that, and you just know they’re an easy touch.”

Lee says that he managed to manipulate female prison officers by “putting it on them” — either by relentlessly working on them or by having criminals on the outside find out information about them via social media or interconnecting networks. As well as exploiting weaknesses, Lee says inmates are often looking for “pleasers” — women who want to help prisoners after buying some sob story, and then find themselves making a very human yet damaging connection with someone who’s in jail for a good reason: they’re a liar, a cheat and a manipulator.

On the one hand, it’s obvious that these women are often in emotional turmoil. As a judge remarked in a recent case of a female prison officer who started a relationship with a convicted murderer: “You have shown remorse, your motivation is not financial, but emotional. You are, and were, acutely vulnerable.” Or as Lee says: “People think screws are smart cause they’ve got a uniform on and a little power, but they’re just fucking glorified security guards.”

Following the HMP Wandsworth sex tape scandal, The Guardian dragged up an ex-prison officer to blame De Sousa Abreu’s behaviour on 14 years of Tory cuts. While decreasing staffing levels and an increasing prison population have led to a raft of problems within the prison system, my ex-lag Lee is dismissive of economic fingering. “Fuck The Guardian, and fuck the Tories,” he says, dismissing the notion that female prison officers who fall for prisoners have anyone to blame but themselves. “Screws get paid a chunk of change [starting salaries range from £30,000-£40,0000, plus overtime]. And for doing what? Most of the time you’re either doped up or banged up in your cell. Being a screw is easy money.”

As a result, when De Sousa Abreu learns her fate later this year, there will be many clamouring for the book to be thrown at her. She has, after all, made a mockery of the prison system and feeds into a narrative that the authorities have lost control of the public realm. But by putting her hands up she saves the sordid details of her infamous video being bandied around in open court. While I doubt it will save her a jail sentence, there is one silver lining: it will allow the prison system to move on and get back to the business of putting people behind bars — for all the right reasons.

The daft incongruity of this answer works — at least for me — because the one thing everybody knows about Freud is how seriously he took sex. According to the canonical interpretation, lascivious urges and impulses buried deep in the unconscious are responsible for large chunks of our behaviour, and indirectly for much of the content of culture generally. If you’ve ever bitten your fingernails at a moment of tension, felt strangely aroused looking at a skyscraper, or wanted to kill your father over a competitive round of minigolf, Freud has an explanation for you. It may not be empirically falsifiable, but you can’t fault it for local colour.

Freud’s foundational insight, that human minds have unconscious aspects, has since proved invaluable — not least as a corrective to Enlightenment fantasies of perfectly rational interactions between participants, each transparently aware of his own beliefs and motivations. When it comes to the self and its patterns of decision-making — perhaps a bit like the government of the United States at the moment — we don’t always know who or what is in charge. Though the real-life Jung took this point and ran with it in his own work, he eventually fell out with Freud, judging the latter’s obsession with sex too dogmatic and itself in need of psychoanalysis. In the memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he recalled: “There was no mistaking the fact that Freud was emotionally involved in his sexual theory to an extraordinary degree. When he spoke of it, his tone became urgent, almost anxious, and all signs of his normally critical and sceptical manner vanished.”

But the recent republication of one of Freud’s most famous works seems to have put the monomania of its author in some doubt. As reported in The Observer last week, in a commentary upon a new edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, analyst and neuropsychiatrist Professor Mark Solms argues that Freud was using the term “sexual” throughout his oeuvre in a way that differed from ordinary usage. Instead, his intended object was “any activity that was pleasure-seeking in its own right — anything that one does for the purposes of pleasure alone, as opposed to practical purposes”. It seems clear that this might well include activities only tangentially connected to the nether regions, if at all: enjoyably attending to music, food, art or sport, for instance. Indeed, Freud apparently described a child kicking a football or swinging on a swing as “sexual’ in this vastly extended sense. And far from being the sort of cultural radical beloved of the avant-garde, Solms underlines that Freud was “a rather conservative gentleman and shared none of their revolutionary social inclinations”.

If this textual interpretation is right, then it too is funny: for it appears bathetically to undercut a century’s worth of edgy academic posturing about the supposed centrality of polymorphous perversity to the human condition. Perhaps poor Bertha Mason, stuck in Rochester’s attic, isn’t Jane Eyre’s sexual alter ego after all. Perhaps Hamlet’s interest in his mother is perfectly healthy. Perhaps Rosebud really is just the name for a sledge.

But there is a serious side to this too. One unfortunate aspect of modern (mis)readings of Freud is the way they have set up shop for the hideous idea of “childhood sexuality”, implicitly justifying perfect relaxation at the sight of young girls twerking in crop tops to Meghan Thee Stallion or cavorting with drag queens at Olympic opening ceremonies. If a reconsideration of what Freud actually meant prompted a reset, it would certainly be welcome.

On the face of it, Solm’s thesis seems to resemble one put forward by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, commenting in an illuminating book about Freud on his notion of an “erotogenic zone”. In early infancy — as all through life — we seek pleasure as a calming release from tension, pain, and agitation. The baby sucks at the breast or bottle and experiences gratification. Later, it is moved to find substitute objects that simulate or expand upon the original pleasure, investing them with motivational affect instead. As Lear puts Freud’s point: “In infancy we suck at breasts and plastic nipples, then we suck thumbs and blankets, then we suck on ice cream and candies and other delicious foods, then we kiss, and later we again get to suck on breasts and genitals.”

But clearly, this is not to say that children have anything like the sexual desires of adults: they haven’t the concepts, emotional capacities or physical apparatus, for a start. It is only to make the benign point that such feelings are at the very beginning of a developmental continuum which will, if all goes well, result in mature adult erotic experiences much later on. Just as we wouldn’t say a baby making protolinguistic burbling sounds had the capacity to write sonnets, nor is it appropriate to think of children as “sexual” simply because, like the young of many other species, they too seek out basic forms of pleasure to soothe themselves.

One unfortunate aspect of modern (mis)readings of Freud is the way they have set up shop for the hideous idea of “childhood sexuality”

Equally, Freud may have referred to “masturbation” as the “primal addiction”, but a child’s unfocused and exploratory touching is significantly different from what a grown adult knowingly does when clicking on PornHub. And when he talks about Oedipal feelings in infants — whether or not this is a plausible hypothesis, which it probably isn’t — he surely means extremely primitive affects, not yet brought into the realm of language, rather than fully-fledged emotions structured with subjects and objects. Many of us can look back at our former young selves and remember vague stirrings and nascent crushes; but as Freud also points out, memory is frequently unreliable about the meaning of things at the time.

Despite the obviousness of such points on reflection, they seem lost on those hundreds of academics now hellbent on “queering” childhood, complaining about the supposedly egregious social construction of early youth as a non-sexual “innocent” time as if this was the latest civil rights frontier. As one recently published, fairly representative article puts it — in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law no less —  “the taboo surrounding child sexuality and gender variance can make childhood especially traumatic for queer children whose desires and expression are forcibly suppressed”. In other words, kids are presented as suffering horribly for having to bottle up their sexual urges. This metaphor barely works for adults and is completely inappropriate for children. Like settlers moving further West during the gold rush, researchers desperate to uncover a new and profitable victim class are imposing adult frameworks upon younger groups, and reaping the professional spoils of grants and research outputs accordingly.

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One serious issue here — albeit one that dare not speak its name in academia, for fear of looking embarrassingly déclassé — is that this framing of children as mini-sexual beings works rather conveniently for those adults with illicit designs upon them. But another less dramatic but still reasonable worry is that the constant cultural focus upon youthful “sexuality” may well be changing later adult trajectories. For, as is also highlighted by Lear in his book and by Freud before him, unlike with the sexual behaviours of other species, human sexuality is highly plastic.

Freud observed that what he called “the sexual aim” in humans — roughly, what we want to do — can come apart from “the sexual object” — who or what we want to do it with, or to — partly due to the influence of personal imagination, and partly due to developmental circumstances. In some cases, the aim can get stuck on fetish objects: practically no object, inanimate or animate, seems to be ruled out in advance. And a developing sexuality is also culturally permeable, as the fact of changing erotic proclivities over different historical periods attests. (If you care to be up to the minute, the latest trends apparently include orgasm hypnosis, Japanese rope bondage, and “dipping”. Do keep up.)

Uniquely among animals, humans have the ability to reflect on their own behaviours generally and third-personally, but then to incorporate findings into first-personal narratives about the self: who I am, exactly, and what my life therefore means. It is plausible, then, that the Freudians’ dragging of human sexuality from its formerly tenebrous gloom into a technicolour, over-theorised daylight has significantly changed the significance of sex for post-pubescent brains along the way, giving it disproportionate discursive importance for the ego, at the expense of making it something the id feels like it might be fun to try.

When we look at the falling rates of sexual experimentation in adolescence, coupled with the large numbers of people apparently making some particular sexuality or gender presentation part of their “identity”, the connection looks more than suggestive. Perhaps if we stopped thinking of sex as the root of all interesting human behaviour, we eventually might start having more of it. In the meantime though, we should at least take a different psychological tip from Freud, and avoid using children as the canvas for the projection of contemporary adult dramas.