Sex

Looking back and trying to choose just one out of those incomparably bewitching women of one’s youth can be tricky. Giselle was definitely one of them – blonde, French, mesmeric, an apparition – but so was Kiki, very white-skinned, also French, patrician and very sexy. They were friends, those two, but they fell out after they chose the same boyfriend. They were also married to men who knew and liked the boyfriend, but back then such things were commonplace, and it was Paris after all. Both ladies are still alive and now quite old, Giselle a widow, Kiki a princess. There were many other beauties, of course, but those two

You know you’re getting old when your friends start going to sex parties. In our twenties, there were parties, and sometimes people would have sex at them. But they were never known as sex parties. Now we are firmly in our thirties, the phrase ‘sex party’ is creeping into everyday conversations alongside mortgage rates, nursery options and the cost of living. At a country wedding recently, I caught up with an old acquaintance. While we ate our lemon possets, I bored on about mother-hood and she bored on about sex parties. I can’t repeat what she divulged, but the conversation felt strangely familiar. It concerned racy outfits and group sex.

Something is ravaging through the gay community, leaving death and misery in its wake, yet few are willing to talk about it. If I’d written that sentence a generation ago, I’d have been referring to the Aids crisis. But this time the enemy isn’t a virus, but a substance called ‘tina’ or ‘ice’. It is a methamphetamine – a stimulant drug that is either smoked or injected into the veins. Tina is also called crystal meth, made famous by the Netflix series Breaking Bad. It causes a rapid increase in dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline, which leads to euphoria, alertness, energy and self-confidence. It also triggers an almost insatiable increase in

In matters of sex, Philip Larkin was late getting away. On his 23rd birthday, he wrote defeatedly to Kingsley Amis: ‘I really do not think it likely I shall ever get into the same bed as anyone again because it is so much trouble, almost as much trouble as standing for parliament.’ His 2014 biographer, James Booth, adds that Larkin was ‘still effectively a virgin… [and] Amis was puzzled that his friend failed to follow through his pursuit of sexual satisfaction’. There is no join-the-dots explanation for what Larkin called the ‘sex-fear and auto-erotic fantasies’ that beset him all his life. But in the centenary of his birth, it’s time

Lisa Littman, a doctor and researcher, recently surveyed ‘detransitioners’ — people who thought they were transgender then changed their minds. The majority, 55 per cent, ‘felt that they did not receive an adequate evaluation from a doctor or mental health professional before starting transition.’ Sadly, it seems, their identity issues were more complicated than simply being trans. Many of these individuals are now living with the consequences of medical treatments that failed to help their gender issues and may have caused permanent physical and psychological damage. There is no objective diagnosis for transgenderism, and the evidence supporting hormonal and surgical ‘reassignment’ as an effective remedy for gender dysphoria (the feeling of

Not long ago I was a regular Tinder user. Having heard that gingers were romantically incompatible, I decided to mix work and pleasure and put this controversial claim to the test. I set up a sort of interview-date with a nice young lady called Laura, a former international gymnast who was working as a waitress, but looking for more permanent work. She sported a lovely glossy dark ginger mane. We weren’t getting on too badly, but not much of a story there. Luckily there was scope for deepening the research: we went back to mine, and a bit of horizontal research definitively established that the alleged incompatibility of gingers is

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

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

I hadn’t heard of Everyone’s Invited until a few weeks ago, despite being mother to a 15-year-old girl. I was a little surprised to learn that the forum making the front pages, on which predominantly teenaged schoolgirls share their experiences of every-day sexism, sexual harassment and worse, was actually founded in June last year. The site received no prominence until it went viral following the death of Sarah Everard. As I write, the testimonies of those Wikipedia is terming ‘survivors of rape culture’ number almost 14,000. That the connection made between a horrifying yet rare occurrence and an ‘endemically’ misogynistic society might be tenuous is an argument that cannot be