Sex

Thursday

Ruth Scurr

When the music changes

In 2011 the New York Times’s chief dance critic, Alastair Macaulay, asked: How should we react today to ‘Bojangles of Harlem’, the extended solo in the 1936 film Swing Time in which Fred Astaire, then at the height of his fame, wears blackface to evoke the African-American dancer Bill Robinson? No pat answer occurs. Zadie Smith’s fifth novel is a brilliant address to that question. In the prologue the unnamed narrator, who has recently lost her job as assistant to a Madonna-like star, goes to the Royal Festival Hall to hear an Australian director ‘in conversation’ and sees a clip from Swing Time — ‘a film I know very well,

Thursday

The Spectator

A deadly silence | 27 October 2016

From ‘Secrecy and disease’, The Spectator, 28 October 1916: The war might have damned us, as Germany planned, but it will end in saving us. Afterwards we shall be a more highly organised nation than we once thought necessary or desirable, and we shall see all things rather differently, but we shall be much stronger. A very noticeable example of the change of heart and outlook is the attitude of people towards this question of venereal diseases. The war has brought us much too closely into contact with real and hard things for us to shrink blushing, as people too often used to do, from a question which concerns the

Emily Hill Emily Hill

‘Hillary Clinton is a disaster!’

Talking to Camille Paglia is like approaching a machine gun: madness to stick your head up and ask a question, unless you want your brain blown apart by the answer, but a visceral delight to watch as she obliterates every subject in sight. Most of the time she does this for kicks. It’s only on turning to Hillary Clinton that she perpetrates an actual murder: of Clinton II’s most cherished claim, that her becoming 45th president of the United States would represent a feminist triumph. ‘In order to run for president of the United States, you have to spend two or three years of your life out on the road

Maggie Fergusson

Tormented genius

Married as I am to an antiquarian book dealer, and living in a house infested with books and manuscripts, I’m constantly having to edit my own little library so as to be able to breathe. But three volumes have survived successive culls — Pax Britannica, Heaven’s Command and Farewell the Trumpets — Jan (or James as she was when these books were written) Morris’s trilogy about the British empire. It is, Morris says, ‘the intellectual and artistic centrepiece of my life’, and it opens on the morning of 22 June 1897 with Queen Victoria visiting the telegraph room at Buckingham Palace on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee. She was,

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 6 October 2016

The first and only time I went to a meeting of Sex Addicts Anonymous, this chap stood up and gave a blow-by-blow account of his sexual history. He had started life as a heterosexual, he said, and became hopelessly addicted to pornography and prostitutes. Then he decided to give gay sex a try and soon became addicted to encounters with multiple partners in public parks. I forget how many times he said he was having it off every day, but it was heroic. He was out there day and night in all seasons and in all weathers and would go without lunch and dinner. In winter, he said, he was

Stuart Evers

Smoke and mirrors | 6 October 2016

Nell Zink’s route to publication became something of a story in itself: one that involved an email exchange about birds with Jonathan Franzen, which led to Franzen’s subsequently championing her work, and ended with not one but two novels — Mislaid and The Wallcreeper — published together in a lavish, design-savvy edition. But it was Zink’s style and ideas that drew fervid, hyperbolic praise. Fresh and undeniably original, this is fiction at odds with much of American literary convention, Zink’s prose refusing to conform to received ideas of how novels are constructed; time shifts, perspective changes and characterisation, for example, are all treated casually, almost with disdain. The word ‘genius’

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

First aid

In the 1980s, supermarkets stocked a fruit juice named ‘Um Bongo’ with the strapline ‘They drink it in the Congo!’. This is the starting point for Adam Brace’s examination of Britain’s relationship with the Congolese (whose word ‘mbongo’ means money). A group of do-gooding Londoners host a festival to celebrate the Congo’s culture and history but they rapidly become mired in controversies about age-old injustices and white-to-black ratios on steering committees. The Congolese party includes a few rogue terrorists whose death threats the British publicists find rather glamorous and titillating. The characters rarely reach beyond the obvious. The Londoners are bloodless yuppie go-getters. The Congolese are suspicious, chippy and mistrustful.

Andrew Barrow

Thoroughly modern Melanie

This exhilaratingly lowbrow first novel concentrates on money and lust or, to put it more bluntly, sex and the City. Its young heroine or chief victim — or is she actually the villain? — has already joined an investment bank and had her first one-night stand a few minutes before this savage saga begins. Melanie is in her early twenties: a beautiful, sexy, grumpy, materialistic, high-octane whizz-kid who hated Christmas Day even as a child. As we soon learn, she’s far keener on sex than romance and makes no secret of her addiction to alcohol. But that’s only half the picture. She’s also an adrenalin-rich workaholic with a bafflingly instinctive

Thursday

Frances Robinson

Bring back bonkbusters!

Life is starting to look a lot like the 1980s: Russia is flexing its muscles, the Labour party is tearing itself apart, and there’s a woman in No. 10. Political thinkers are falling over themselves to over-analyse the geopolitical precipice upon which the world seems to be balanced. But life doesn’t have to be serious all the time, so it’s worth reflecting on another aspect of heading back in time: we’re due a revival of the-bonkbuster. Frances Robinson and Camilla Swift discuss the return of the bonkbuster: Jilly Cooper’s new book Mount! is published next month, and features the return of Rupert Campbell-Black, 30 years after he first appeared in

Saturday

Julie Burchill

In praise of bisexuality

I’ve never seen a National Treasure whose head I didn’t have a strong urge to shove down the nearest toilet. So when I read that Christopher Biggins had entered the latest Celebrity Big Brother house for a rumoured £150,000 – far, far less than what I was offered, to put it mildly – I fair hugged myself with glee at how cheap they’d got him. I had every reason to dislike him already; many years ago, when I was showing off about what I’d be like if I was a gay man – ‘Rupert Everett, probably, or Oscar Wilde, or Arthur Rimbaud’ – my husband fixed me with a cold glare (for

Thursday

Matthew Adams

The age of accusation

Mark Lawson’s latest novel, set in Britain in the recent past, presents us with a nation in the grip of ‘moral fever’. Here, the ‘giving offence to anyone at all over anything’ is considered ‘a capital crime’; the ‘post-Savile sexual witch hunt’ has trained people to ‘reinterpret heartbreak as violation’; and retribution comes not just in the form of established legal proceedings, but also of the ‘modern madness of amateur arraignment’. Lawson wants to show how pernicious this culture can be. To do so, he presents us with two characters, both academics, who are out of step with it. Ned Marriot, a media don, is the darling of his university’s

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 14 July 2016

One moment Trev and I were grooving on the dancefloor, Trev with his head bowed, his eyes closed, and his arms extended like a glider; the next, it seemed, Trev was telling the taxi-driver to drop us off outside an 18th-century townhouse with its front door on the high street. As I got out of the taxi, I fell over for the third time that evening. I’d fallen down on the dancefloor while dancing to ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ by the Chainsmokers. And before going out I’d taken a flyer in the garden at home after contesting a 50–50 ball with my six-year-old grandson, distinctly hearing a crack as my

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 7 July 2016

I walked into the bar and there was Trev standing in front of a giant screen showing Germany v. Italy and chatting up two overawed teenage girls with his usual aplomb and startling frankness. Pleased to see me after all this time, he dismissed them with a kind word and we went to the bar to start drinking. He had voted to leave, he said. Then his cousin Danny came in with Tina, Danny’s latest, with whom he is head-over-heels in love. Danny falling in love with someone has been a big shock to the local community, and it was indeed sad to see him so abjectly enamoured with my

Deborah Ross

Erectile dysfunction

Anthony Weiner is the American politician who made a comeback after a sexting scandal and stood for New York mayor. He was topping the polls, when a second sexting scandal broke, which proves what, probably, none of us had suspected all along: that thing you do where you send women pictures of your erect penis must be awfully hard to quit. This fly on the wall documentary was, happily, already filming Weiner and his fascinating wife (Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s long time aide) when his career imploded, and the result is as supremely entertaining, painfully funny and queasily riveting as you might have hoped, with one caveat: why is it

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Let’s talk about sex

At one time, Damien Hirst was fond of remarking that art should deal with the Gauguin questions. Namely, ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’ Hirst would sum up with a deft shift from post-impressionism to Michael Caine: ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’ The new exhibition of work by the American artist Jeff Koons at Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery might raise the same query in a visitor’s mind. Among other sights, you are confronted by a number of brand-new vacuum cleaners, mounted over neon lighting tubes; soon afterwards by a shiny blue sculpture, six metres high, representing a monkey made out of twisted balloons. Then

Thursday

Matilda Bathurst

There’s nothing transgressive about opera using sex to sell tickets

Fluffy bunnies. Human-size, pink and white fluffy bunnies. Twerking. The image has never left me, ever since an ill-fated date to see Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at Glyndebourne in 2012. Over salmon during the damp interval, my date confirmed that he liked the bunnies, I didn’t. Having established myself as a purist and a prude, we parted ways. Since the onslaught of arts cuts, opera-goers have had to harden themselves to scenes of sex and violence – the oldest trick in the book to ramp-up ticket sales. The bunnies hopped on to the stage in the same year that ENO unveiled their notorious Don Giovanni condom ad; two years before,

Thursday

Nicola Barker

Strategies for seduction

The rough English translation of Kamasutra is pleasure (kama) treatise (sutra). In the West, since it was first (rather surreptitiously) translated and published back in 1883, the book has generally been associated with a series of beautiful, ancient illustrations of a couple determinedly coupling in a variety of fascinating — and often utterly improbable — positions; as essentially ‘the erotic counterpart to the ascetic asanas of yoga’. But there is so much more to it than that, as Wendy Doniger doggedly contends in this, her fine collection of frank, brief, clear-eyed essays. Doniger believes the Kamasutra to be not only a precious and under-appreciated part of the Sanskrit canon, but

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Sex worker

‘Of course,’ said my husband in his worst smirky way, as though waiting for an appreciative chuckle, ‘as soon as she found out he was a politician, she broke off the affair.’ That was not the only unoriginal remark about poor old John Whittingdale, who last week admitted to going out with a woman for six months without realising that she was a prostitute. Hearing about the thing on Sky News, I thought its use of sex worker for the woman was an eccentric example of political euphemism. But then I found the BBC using sex worker, and even reputable newspapers. The Times too called her a sex worker. In

Thursday

Taki

High life | 7 April 2016

   New York Even after all these years, I’m still at times floored by the scale of the place. And it’s always the old reliables that stand out: the silvery arcs of the Chrysler Building, the wide avenues, the filigree of Central Park, that limestone monument to power, the Rockefeller Center. Curiously, the recent trend for tall, slender and glassy housing among money-laundering Russians and Chinese does not mix with the city’s motto of ever bigger and grander. It’s as if the transparency of the glass structure is teasing the authorities about the origins of the owners’ wealth. Come in and take a look, we have nothing to hide. Last

Tuesday

Theo Hobson

Channel 4’s Sex Box is vandalising our culture

Some people seem to want to discuss their sex lives on television, as in the show Sex Box. Couples are interviewed before and after they have tried something new, right there in the studio (although hidden from view). This week, the couple were close friends, and were trying out being lovers for the first time. The interviews are full of therapeutic empowering chat, plus saucy joking. I consider this sort of thing a form of cultural vandalism, rather like what Isis got up to in Palmyra. Something frail and important is being damaged in a quick burst of self-righteousness. What is being damaged is the delicate tradition that associates sex with profound privacy.