Sex

Eight years ago, I had an erotic epiphany. It was around midnight: I had sex on the brain and porn on my laptop. Suddenly, everything felt wrong and a wave of sadness washed over me. I felt like some sleazy man from a Michel Houellebecq novel. I no longer wanted to be that kind of man. So I made a solemn vow to abstain for at least 60 days. Back then, I thought I was the only man in the world who had taken such a vow. (And in case you’re wondering, I lasted 45 days that first time and now remain free of porn.) Little did I know then

A Pennsylvania grand jury report released last night has revealed that the Catholic Church in six dioceses systematically and sneakily covered up sexual abuse by priests on a horrifying scale. The American Church has now been plunged into the worst crisis in its history. The 884-report comes less than a month after the revelation that ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington DC, was a compulsive predator. His serial molestation of seminarians was an open secret, and cannot possibly have come as a surprise to some of his friends in the US hierarchy. The grand jury report – which examined only a tiny fraction of America’s nearly 200 dioceses –

Sir Christopher Chope is not, perhaps, a household name, but he is a man of quite considerable courage. By raising an objection to the preposterous private member’s bill, brought by Wera Hobhouse, a LibDem MP, to make upskirting – taking pictures up girls’ skirts –  a specific criminal offence, he has seen off a bill which was a preposterous waste of time. The Government and Wera H has been hoping to get through the bill on the nod but it could only happen if no one in the chamber had the bad taste to object to it being passed without debate. Sir Christopher, one of parliament’s tough nuts, took the

Quite a long time, five seconds, when you count it. And ever since Netflix reportedly warned its employees not to stare at a colleague for longer than that, the paradoxical effect is, inevitably, to make you stare and count. The company’s new guideline is, of course, all part of corporate America’s response to the #MeToo scandal and if the Netflix directive is anything to go by, it’s going to result in the human race dying out in the US, because no one will be able to make a pass at anyone else, ever. It’s not that the individual prohibitions are onerous or particularly unreasonable; it’s that the collective effect can

When you think about Peter Stringfellow, aka ‘Stringy’, it’s hard to think about anything other than topless women. Stringy, who’s just died aged 77, made a fortune first out of music clubs – early bookings included the Beatles – and then out of women who’d mislaid their tops. Not the most salacious of pursuits, you might think. And the sleaziness of the image wasn’t helped by the foot-long mullet and the taste for leopardskin-print outfits. Certainly, on the outside, all those trashy clichés rang true in 2000, when I interviewed Stringy for The Spectator shortly after his 60th birthday. On his birthday, he sat on a gold throne in his

When Facebook and co stop selling on our details to third parties, will it be the end of spam? For half an hour every evening my otherwise chatty husband is lost to me as he deletes hundreds and hundreds of emails. My PA does the same, and so do I. The waste of time is criminal. But I doubt the spam will stop. If junk through the front-door mail box isn’t illegal, I guess junk through a virtual mailbox can’t be either. Grrr… Technology was supposed to save us time, remember? What a joke. It just frees you up to deal with more junk. Desperate for sun and time for