Sex

Isn’t this a lovely comment?

During a talk at the Cambridge Union last month, Megan Barton-Hanson – who is bisexual and appeared on the 2018 series – said the programme needed a “whole gay season” to avoid tokenism.

Umm, teh gayers are some 2% or so of the male population, perhaps 1% of the female, and we’re to avoid tokenism by running a season of a sex show about them?

There is this which seems like a reasonable issue though:

Last month, executive producer Richard Cowles told the BBC that bringing in LGBT contestants was “not impossible and it is not something that we shy away from … but there is a logistical element which makes it difficult”.

Well, yes. There are those flavours within being gay. As far as I’m aware – not having ever seen any of it – the show’s interest is in seeing who will pair off with whom. We could employ old tropes and prejudices and think that an all male gay one would have the answer “Everybody” and an all female gay one “Nobody but there will be lots of talking about it”.

Or we could abandon such vilenesses and think in more detail. By selecting bear and twink, bull and femme, even top and bottom and so on, we’d rather be directing who paired off rather than awaiting to see. Which isn’t really the point of the show.

And then there’s the one more thought. Given the 98% of the population’s heterosexuality and the presumed vicarious experience the show offers who would be the viewing audience?

This was the Mosley modus operandi: ignore the unpleasant facts staring you in the face; challenge instead the basis on which those facts might be relayed. It was the tactic deployed when in 2008 he sued The News of the World for reporting his involvement in a sadomasochistic orgy, in which he had whipped prostitutes dressed in striped pyjamas while counting in German.

I thought he was the one being whipped?

Just as a matter of business practice I would have thought it rather easier to find professional ladies to do the whipping rather than be the whippee.

One of the country’s leading preparatory schools has alerted parents that boys as young as ten are having “pornographic” conversations.

Eaton House The Manor, a £21,000-a-year school in Clapham, south London, has warned that some boys in Year Six have been caught using “sexualised” language.

The school wrote to parents to explain that it has become “increasingly apparent” that a small number of boys have “either engaged in conversations of a pornographic nature whilst at school or indeed been subjected to listening to conversations of a pornographic nature”

It’s a little twee to be worried about boys and sexual language, isn’t it? Ten year olds might quite know what it all means but this is hardly unusual, is it?

Disabled people can be taken to prostitutes by care workers, judge rules

Exclusive: Hugging expected to get go-ahead by June 21

Only 7 or 8 weeks to wait……

And although many female celebrities like Kylie and Kendall Jenner received huge offers to enter the porn industry after turning 18, few mainstream media personalities have accepted the offers or even acknowledged these “jailbait” narratives that have existed for decades.

So what changed?

They were already famous. Unlike their older (half-) sister who did the sex tape before, and to become, famous.

Are single-sex schools the safe option after abuse scandal?
Harrowing testimonies may lead parents to opt for girls-only schools for their daughters

I am old enough to remember when single sex schooling was blamed for everything wrong in the world. As folks grew up in these terribly artificial environments so they never did learn how to react to the other sex and so the world was horrible.

Conservatives – that’s conservatives, not Conservatives – pointed out that there might be a point to that, yes, but then there was that whole adolescence, puberty, raging hormones and sex thing to think about as well. On balance the separation at that time was beneficial.

Stick in the mud prudes they were and are of course.

Now we’ve tried that mixed sex thing including in boarding schools we seem to be coming around to the idea that maybe the stickinthemuds had a point.

Who knows, we might end up getting back to the idea that a school should teach the diddums to read’n’write next…..

We have turned sex into a dangerous, fraught experience for teenagers
Even if nothing bad has happened to them, girls will fear boys and feel compelled to police all intimate interactions

It is indeed true that sex is a wondrous sport, one of the grand enjoyances of our human state. It’s also true that sex is at least potentially dangerous because it’s us humans – well mostly us humans – playing the game.

Anyone who doesn’t grasp this has clearly been observing some other species all these years……

The prime minister ordered the review after a former government ministerial press officer, Brittany Higgins, 26, last month alleged that she had been raped by a colleague in a ministerial office in March 2019. The federal police are now investigating Higgins’s allegations.

Vile, foul, criminal, jail ’em.

In a video seen by The Sydney Morning Herald, a man performs a sex act on another man in an office. The green carpet visible in the video matches the carpet from the floor of the House of Representatives’ wing of the parliament, the newspaper said.

There’s sorta a hint of a suspicion that these might not be the same people.

A Harvard University professor has sparked outrage among fellow academics and campaigners after claiming that women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military had chosen to work in wartime brothels.

J Mark Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School, challenged the accepted narrative that as many as 200,000 “comfort women” – mostly Koreans, but also Chinese, south-east Asians and a small number of Japanese and Europeans – were coerced or tricked into working in military brothels between 1932 and Japan’s defeat in 1945.

In an academic paper published online late last year, Ramseyer claimed the women were sex workers who had voluntarily entered into contracts – a view supported by Japanese ultra-conservatives seeking to whitewash their country’s wartime atrocities.

Some women do volunteer for such. In this particular instance some will have even if – as I assume – many didn’t.

‘We are desperate for human contact’: the people breaking lockdown to have sex

Sex is one of those driving human forces. Folks will do all sorts of things to get it…..pissing off a bureaucrat being a fairly minor barrier.

The Danes have kindly produced a consent app for citizens who may wish to have sex with one another.

The app allows “permission for one intercourse, valid for 24 hours”, but adds that it can be “withdrawn at any time”. Well, indeed. Very swiftly, I would suggest, having met some Danes.

And so we await the court case where one participant claims she was drunk when she tapped the button on the phone, thus rendering the consent meaningless.

Proffer the phone, with the open app, around the room until there is a yea. Akin to the older technique of simply asking random strangers “Hi, fancy a fuck?”

According to those who have tried it this produces a lot of slaps and yet a constant stream of slap and tickle.

Just two months after coming out as transgender, Elliot Page — the actor formerly known as Ellen Page — is divorcing wife Emma Portner.

Either she’s no longer a lesbian or her soon to be ex-wife wishes to remain one…..

ALICE THOMSON
Sexuality should never be a source of shame

Of course it can and should be. What changes is which expressions of it are considered shameful.

Harvey W – not his full name in order to protect – didn’t consider tossing off into a pot plant shameful when he probably should have as the compensation bill is showing.

Being gay? Sure, no shame in that these days. The Rev Dodgson’s interest in little girls would have him locked up these days, just for having the piccies, and Epstein’s ephebophilia would have been largely legal in the UK and entirely so in Portugal.

That is, fashions change in shame even if the underlying sexuality is always with us.

This is one of those difficult ones:

A man has been charged in connection with “sex for rent” allegations in what is believed to be the first case of its kind.

Christopher Cox, a landlord from Cranleigh, in Surrey, is due to appear in court next month to face two counts of inciting prostitution for gain and one count of controlling prostitution for gain.

The charges follow a dossier of evidence that was passed to Surrey Police in 2019 following an ITV investigation for a Jeremy Kyle programme.

The phenomenon of ‘sex for rent’ emerged several years ago with claims that unscrupulous landlords were using the housing crisis and soaring rents to entice desperate and homeless women to sleep with them in return for free or cheap accomodation.

Really not sure that “you can share my flat if you share my bed” is one of those things that can or should be illegal.

Further, if someone does voluntarily make the trade – it’s not wholly and entirely unknown among humans for sex to be offered as a way of gaining something that is not-sex – then defining when this is to be illegal would seem to be fraught with problems.

Senior crown prosecutor Claire Prodger said: “Following an investigation into so-called ‘sex-for-rent’ allegations, the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) has authorised Surrey Police to charge Christopher Cox with two counts of inciting prostitution for gain and one count of controlling prostitution for gain.

Clearly there will be cases at the other end of the spectrum too. “You can have this flat if you Tom for the rent” etc.

But where is that dividing line to be usefully drawn?

How to explain this Honey:

What’s so “unsexy” about asexuality?

“Sexy” is lubricious, gusset dampening, wood making.

Someone who’s entirely uninterested in the whole subject ain’t.

At the end of 2019, Nelly Sutro was living in New York, facing the fast-paced grind of city dating life. Fed up with apps, ghosting and rushed drinks with strangers after work, she complained to her friend Lina about the situation.

Unbeknown to her, Lina had been in touch with another friend, Ryan Lacey, who was based in Germany for his US army job, and also struggling to meet someone. “She connected us on Instagram and suggested that we chat,” says Nelly. “She thought we’d be really good together.”

The pair hit it off but

OK, new tech and all that, but still friends making the introductions.

A Turkish court has sentenced the leader of an evangelical sex cult to one thousand years in prison for a litany of sexual offences and fraud.

Adnan Oktar, who promoted creationism on his conservative Islamic TV channel, was known for surrounding himself with scantily dressed women whom he called his “kittens” before his arrest in 2018.

A quick images search for Mr Oktar plus “kittens” shows that he was in favour of certain physical characteristics. Few of them were likely to drown face down.

There might be no meaning to this at all. Or perhaps Mummy weaned him a little early.

Ms Babbit’s husband did not travel to Washington, DC with her.

Presumably having something sewn back on.

With the Covid crisis putting paid to New Year’s Eve celebrations and many other opportunities to seek romance in person, dating apps have thrived.

But while such tech has long been associated with hookups, a study suggests those who couple up after swiping right have as satisfying a relationship as those who met via traditional encounters – and might even be keener to settle down.

“We actually find that in certain ways couples that met through dating apps have even stronger long-term family formation or relationship intentions than other couples that met either offline or through other digital ways of meeting,” said Dr Gina Potarca, author of the research from the University of Geneva.

People who actively set out to find a relationship have more interest in a relationship than those who bumble through life and perhaps just bump into a relationship.

We might even mutter something about revealed preferences here…..

There’s plenty that Bridgerton gets wrong about the Regency – in the first half-hour alone, we have young women referred to as “the Right Honourable” rather than “the Honourable”. One area where it almost gets things right, though, is just how much sex everyone is having.

Well, sorta.

According to The Secret History of Georgian London by Dan Cruickshanks, during the Georgian period one in five women in London was earning a living by working as a prostitute.

That book – yes, I’ve read it – is nonsense. The numbers just don’t add up. There never are enough men looking for paid nookie to support 20% of the female population. Not as prostitutes that is.

There’s a lingering perception today that before the Sixties, sex was something that gentlemen did, to their shame, with wenchy types, and that grand women had to suffer through when they became wives. Of course, this is largely untrue. Humans have always been humans, and we’ve always had the same urges. Admittedly the advent of contraception made life somewhat easier for those who wanted to indulge in extramarital bonking without becoming a parent, but it’s a complete fallacy that sex didn’t exist before 1969.
…
The auctioning of virginity was commonplace. The famous courtesan Charlotte Hayes, who lived and worked in London in the mid-1700s, a little before Bridgerton is set, sold her virginity for £9,000.

Well, no, not really. The sale of virginity when going on the game was indeed a part of going on the game. But that’s a useful illustration of something important about the age. Virginity was considered important. In fact, for a woman about to get married for the first time it was essential in most classes. For humans have always been humans and paternity of children mattered. Thus the complaints of a woman being “ruined” if promised marriage if and then she does and the marriage doesn’t arrive.

That vibrancy of sex life being celebrated did exist, sure. But among those who had been married already – among the women that is – and usually after they’d dropped a sprog or two.

Much more interesting than just the claim that the past was randy like the present are the observations about how it differed in the expression of the randiness.