Sex

What, if anything, should a moral, liberal-minded person think about the hacking of the infidelity website Ashley Madison? And by ‘liberal-minded’, please note, I do not mean ‘Liberal Democrat-minded’, for such a person would perhaps merely think ‘Can I still join?’ and ‘I wonder if my wife is already a member, though?’ and ‘But will I find anybody prepared to do that thing I like with the pillow and the chicken?’ Rather, I mean somebody who believes in the sometimes jarring moral precepts that ‘People should be free’ and ‘People should not be a bit of a scumbag’. Ashley Madison, you see, is a website claiming 37 million users worldwide

Over ten years ago, the satirical American magazine the Onion published an article under the headline: Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does. If you’ve ever heard someone insist that pole dancing is empowering, the Onion predicted it. In a take-down of the lazy gluttony of ‘choice-feminism’, it told us: ‘Whereas early feminists campaigned tirelessly for improved health care and safe, legal access to abortion, often against a backdrop of public indifference or hostility, today’s feminist asserts control over her biological destiny by wearing a baby-doll T-shirt with the word “Hoochie” spelled in glitter.’ I thought I was reading the Onion all over again yesterday, when I stumbled across the

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

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

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