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Why OnlyFans has young British women in its grip

The porn star Bonnie Blue offers a straightforward explanation for her decision to join OnlyFans. She was in her early twenties, married to her teenage sweetheart, pursuing a career in recruitment and living in Derbyshire, the county of her birth. As she told an interviewer last year: ‘I used to work an office job, nine

A lament for the lads’ mags

Do you remember the lads’ mags? I do because I worked on them for years. FHM, Maxim, all those gloriously disreputable titles. I helped dream up the captions, the gags, the gonzo reportage, the phwoar-heavy covers. I also remember how they were reviled. Condemned by broadsheets, feminists, academics. Accused of objectifying girls, toxifying masculinity and

OnlyFans is giving the taxman what he wants

Fenix International occupies the ninth floor of an innocuous office block on London’s Cheapside. The street’s name comes from the Old English for marketplace, and once upon a time Cheapside was just that: London’s biggest meat market with butcher shops lining either side of the road. Today, the street houses financial institutions and corporate HQs.

How to game the social housing system

Westminster council has announced that every single social housing tenant in the borough will receive lifetime tenancies. No test of need. No review of income. No incentive to move on. Once you’ve been awarded a property, you can stay as long as you like. When you die, your adult children may be eligible to inherit

The depressing rise of ‘direct cremations’

Twenty per cent of last year’s funerals in Britain were direct cremations – up from 14 per cent in 2020. Numbers are continuing to rise, fast, for this most affordable, clinical form of body disposal: cremations with no ceremony and no attendees. Daytime advertising campaigns put out by corporate firms such as Pure Cremation promote

Can Pope Leo end the liturgy wars?

Last weekend, under windswept banners depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, nearly 20,000 young pilgrims marched through fields and forests between the cathedrals of Paris and Chartres. All of them carried rosaries and chanted in Latin, sometimes breathlessly: it’s a punishing 60-mile trek through mud and rocks. Each ‘chapter’ of the

Why is the MoJ making life so hard for prison charities?

For 15 years The Clink charity has run commercial restaurants in prisons, training inmates to cook and teaching them front-of-house service. It is a vital way of giving offenders a second chance. But many of its operations have been forced to close due to the folly of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). At Styal women’s

Is Xi Jinping’s time up?

Stories about Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, are blowing up on social media. He died in 2002, so why the interest in him now? The weird fact is that Xi Zhongxun is being talked about in the West because he is not being talked about in China. Omission is the perverse way that one learns

Notes on...

A love letter to lonely hearts ads

Published in Britain for at least 330 years, lonely hearts ads are now a rare sight – driven to the brink of extinction by the rise of dating apps. This is a pity. ‘The personals’ were a voyeuristic delight. Even if you weren’t looking for love, you still read them. They could be tragic, comic,