Sex

Wednesday

Steerpike

Britain is sexier than France, says Jean Paul Gaultier

If the French are flocking to Britain, it’s not just down to a 75 per cent tax hike on the super-rich. Multi-millionaire designer, Jean Paul Gaultier comes to the UK for a different reason. “The British have a lot of connection with the sexual, which is something that I appreciate. None of this ‘No sex- we are British.’ It is more like ‘A lot of sex- we are British!’” The designer, who opened a retrospective exhibition in the Barbican this month, told Mr S that the French are “snobbish” and he comes to London to “to have fun”. “Britain represents iconoclastic creativity, individuality – things that we don’t know so

Steerpike Steerpike

Does Country Life know their derrière from their elbow?

Fun times for our country cousins over at Country Life: they have compiled a list, drawn up with the help of Jeremy Paxman and Jilly Cooper, of dos-and-don’ts to guide the modern gentleman. Mr S has chosen not to comment on their unprovoked attack on coloured trousers, or the usual jazz about pre-tied bowties and tardiness, because he is rather puzzled by the emphatic statement that a true gentleman always ‘makes love on his elbows’. The mental image is beyond description. Needless to say, this particular tip does not seem to have made the cut for Debrett’s – or, to take in another point of view, Playboy. Mr S can

Thursday

Tom Hollander

The summer of love

Last time I was allowed to write a story for The Spectator, I managed to get away with a frankly smutty and boastful piece about sex. Well, it’s been a while, so… I do hope nobody minds if I do that again. If I’m honest, when young, one of the reasons I decided to mortgage my life to showbiz was because I thought that if I did, I would get more than my fair share of bedroom action. Hang on. Sorry, not more than my fair share. (I must stop putting myself down.) Firstly, as we all know there is no such thing as fair in these matters; very attractive

Monday

Steerpike

What happens at conference stays at conference

Readers of yesterday’s Mail on Sunday were treated to what appeared to be the perfect ‘Tory Sleaze!’ story. But appearances can deceive. Here’s what the Mail reported: ‘A Tory Minister is involved in an extraordinary row over claims that taxpayers’ money was used to fund gay sex parties. The politician is said to have been in a feud with a senior party official accused of using dating app Grindr to invite gay MPs and activists to his suite at the Conservative Party conference.  Neither the Minister nor the official can be named by The Mail on Sunday for legal reasons.  The gay sex party is alleged to have taken place at

Sunday

Theo Hobson

Ladies of the Guardian: please stop writing about sex

I’m generally a fan of the Guardian’s website, and sometimes write for it, but I’m sick of how much space it gives to ladettes banging on about sex. It’s a firm rule that, to write on matters sexual, you have to be a young female with a jaunty prose style and a strong belief that (fully consensual) sex is GREAT! It’s good dirty fun – if you’re doing it right! Articles that take a more nuanced line are as rare as non-Etonian cabinet ministers. A visiting Martian might be curious to know why this puffing of sex has to come from female writers – don’t men enjoy the bliss of

Thursday

Julie Burchill

The joy of less sex

From the age of 13, when the hormones kicked in, till I left my parents home at the age of 17 to become a writer (nearly forty years later, I’m still waiting) I must have been the most sex-mad virgin in Christendom. Nights were spent dressed as a West Country approximation of a transvestite Port Said prostitute, blind with eyeliner and dumb with lipgloss, alternately dancing like the lead in a Tijuana pony-show and hiding in the toilets during the slow numbers, crying repeatedly ‘Why won’t all those men just LEAVE ME ALONE!’ Days were spent in an attempt to evade the attentions of the regiment of leering males while

Thursday

Nigel Farndale

Is any kind of sex still taboo in literature?

The first gay marriage will be conducted this Easter, and those who still object to the idea find themselves in a minority. The majority, according to polls, can’t see what all the fuss is about. How far we have travelled in a relatively short period of time. Until 1967, the punishment for homosexuality was a year in prison, or chemical castration, which was the option taken by Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park codebreaker. At least he has now been posthumously pardoned, so that’s OK. Extreme though attitudes to homosexuality have been in the past, I don’t think that, as a subject, it ever had the status of a taboo, not properly.

The Spectator

Where to open your brothel: an international comparison

The best places to open a brothel The Commons all-party group on prostitution has called for a Scandinavian-style law where selling sex would not be illegal but buying it would be. How does the world treat prostitution? — In a survey of 100 countries by the educational charity ProCon, 50 were judged to treat prostitution as illegal, 39 as legal, with the remaining 11 making it an offence in some instances. — Among the most liberal were Canada, where laws against brothel ownership and pimping were recently overturned by the supreme court, the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand and Greece. — The most severe criminal sanctions were found in Iran, where

Thursday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Sex, secrets, and self-mortification: the dark side of the confessional

I have a confession to make. I really enjoyed this book. It’s been a while since I admitted something of the sort, and I feel ashamed, because, although it’s smartly, smoothly written, my pleasure was partly based on titillation. I smirked — I occasionally snickered — at the madder facts of self-mortification, whereby in the Middle Ages the (frequently female) faithful might flaunt their holiness in acts of rank humility. Elizabeth of Hungary kissed the feet of lepers; Margaret Marie Alacoque ate vomit; Catherine of Genoa, it’s said, sucked the pus of a plague victim. More than this, though, John Cornwell’s history of confession is preoccupied with sex, which always

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

I’m nearly 60. I’m still interested in sex. Is that a problem?

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Cosmo Landesman and Mary Wakefield discuss what defines a ‘dirty old man'” startat=683] Listen [/audioplayer] The other day I casually remarked to my ex-wife that our son’s new teacher is ‘really hot’. She gave me a look of disgust, shook her head and said, ‘You dirty old man!’ It’s not the first time I’ve been called that, and usually I just keep smiling and stay silent. But this time I bridled. Recently, in two separate courtrooms, both Dave Lee Travis and Bill Roache had been denounced as ’dirty old men’. OK, I confess: maybe I did emit a ‘phwhoar!’ or two too many for my ex’s taste —

Thursday

Duncan Fallowell

William S. Burroughs was a writer – not a painter, prophet, philosopher

William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all dandies, he had a nose for hedonistic hot spots which he could mythologise along with himself. On the occasion of his centenary, Barry Miles takes us through these gorgeous, macabre scenarios with an attention to detail reminiscent of Dadd or Bosch: the boyhood in suburban St Louis; Harvard and early trips to Europe; the war, Greenwich Village and the Beats; Latin America and exile in 1950s Tangier, Existential Paris, Swinging London; the return to the USA and emergence as a literary celebrity adored by Warhol. The wheels are oiled with

Thursday

Simon Baker

A creepy father, a lustful music teacher, four virgins — and one genuine love affair

London, 1794. It’s a different world from that portrayed by the Mrs Radcliffes and Anons of the time: rich young women are not all naïve and swoony in Katharine Grant’s first novel for adults. In Sedition, five girls (two of them sisters, the others unrelated) are more or less put up for sale by their calculating parents, who want to attract titled sons to help them complete a leap from trade into the aristocracy. From the start, the parents’ scheme of buying a pianoforte and hiring a music teacher to help the girls appear eligible seems destined to backfire momentously. One of the daughters, Alathea, is not at all innocent

Amanda Craig

Fiction embroiled in the Profumo affair

Sex, spies, aristocrats and atom bombs — the Profumo affair is in the news again, thanks to the recent Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about Stephen Ward. William Nicholson has chosen to hang his seventh novel around it in Reckless, which takes place between the end of the second world war and the Cuban missile crisis. Our hero, Rupert, is a quiet Englishman and aide to Lord Mountbatten. During the war he is invited to tea at Cliveden, where he meets the teenage Princess Elizabeth in the company of a Russian and an American; inspired by her gentle thoughtfulness, the three young officers vow a pact for there to be ‘no

Monday

Steerpike

Jon Snow: sex expert

Jon Snow’s interview in the Standard today makes for perfect post-lunch reading: ‘Sex comes into every evaluation of a woman, there’s no doubt about it. It’s there. Once you’ve established a friendship or a working relationship with a woman, it’s parked. But it’s an interesting barrier. When you’ve gone through it and arrived at the other side, it’s never a problem again. Well I’m not saying it is a problem at all, it’s rather a delicious thing really, ‘what might have been?’ or ‘what could be’. It’s a natural animal element of sustaining life.’ Mr S has to wonder what Snow’s colleagues and female guests will make of this ‘delicious

Monday

Steerpike

The President, his mistress and the Mob

There was a moment when it looked like French Closer had done President Hollande a favour. His poll ratings have been abysmal and the economy has tanked. What better distraction than a little ooh la la? Scandals such as these reveal the character of a nation and its politics. If a British minister had dispatched his chauffeur to fetch post-coital croissants, there would have been delirious uproar about the misuse of taxpayers’ money. But the French have never really cared about politicians wasting their money: National Assembly Deputies take home the equivalent of £211,000 in pay, and enjoy completely unaudited expenses. Most Parisians seem more surprised that the much derided

Sunday

Rod Liddle

State sanctioned sex

After bullying from the government, our major internet providers are now ‘filtering’ pornographic websites, so that children don’t get to see them. However, a BBC Newsnight study revealed, with great alarm, that this filtering often blocks access to sexual advice sites aimed at children. Such as, for example, BishUK, which contains helpful advice on how youngsters can pleasure one another and how absolutely marvellous it is to be gay, you really should try it. ‘If you are going to have vaginal or anal sex with toys, fingers or penises, I think that you should know how to make it as pleasurable as possible as well as making it safe….’ one

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

How Grand Theft Auto prevents crime and violence

It was about a week ago, at 8 p.m., when our blackout happened. In the 1980s people would have headed for the bedroom or out to loot the local off-licence. In 2013, however, our first reaction was to check the battery health of our mobile phones. This relationship between sex, crime and consumer electronics may be important. The recorded fall in sexual activity among those aged 16 to 44 in the recent National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles was widely attributed to the ‘growth in social media’ and to our new habit of taking smartphones and tablets to bed. Plausible as this sounds, I don’t think the survey proves

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Is the permissive society causing pain and harm?

It was a curious coincidence, don’t you think, that the sexual conduct findings that the Lancet published today coincided with the publication of a report from the Deputy Children’s Commissioner, Sue Berelowitz, about child-on-child sexual violence? The two stories were juxtaposed uncomfortably in the news. In the case of the Lancet survey, which is conducted every decade, it was comically hard for broadcasters to know how to play the findings, which were a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand women are becoming more like men and admitting to significantly more sexual partners – ‘of both sexes!’ marvelled John Humphrys, on the Today programme – than before. So

Thursday

The Spectator

Is addiction a disease?

Tonight, the Spectator will host a debate on the motion: ‘Addiction is not a disease’.  Damian Thompson, Theodore Dalrymple and Dr Aric Sigman will lock horns with Trinny Woodall, Dominic Ruffy and Vic Watts to decide whether addiction is a medical condition or a pattern of immoderate behaviour. The extraordinary story of Reverend Flowers is likely to feature in the discussions. As Melanie Phillips writes in this week’s Spectator cover piece: ‘So what about all those drugs and orgies? The behaviour which even his former rent boy described as ‘debauched’? How could a man with such predilections have got away with being a Methodist minister for 40 years? Flowers claims the

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

Yes, let’s have a debate about teenage sex and the age of consent

Whenever a public figure says ‘we need a debate here’, as Professor John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, has done, it doesn’t need much in the way of translation to interpret this as ‘let’s change the law to my way of thinking’. Alas, the debate he started so promisingly about lowering the age of consent to 15, with the pundits all nicely worked up, has been nipped cruelly in the bud by Downing Street. David Cameron, possibly taking the view that he has upset social conservatives quite enough with the gay marriage issue, has said the government isn’t going there. And given that Labour policy is getting quite