Blog

“You’re looking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade”. So begins a brave and inspiring TED talk from Monica Lewinsky. For those of you who weren’t following American politics in 1998, Lewinsky—then a White House intern—was the third point of a triangle that also included President Bill Clinton and a Cuban cigar. The […]

“Makes Saturday is better with some #underboob”, runs a Facebook post from drunkenstepfatherdotcom. But for Thai actress and model @saramalakul, tagged in the said post, Saturday (or whatever day of the week it is when the Thai police arrest her) may not be better. For, in the latest Asian aversion to the depraved Western tendency […]

As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, hopes of a freer and more egalitarian society arising from the flower power revolution and the Summer of Love gave way to disillusion and disenchantment. The ongoing quagmire of the Vietnam War, Watergate and the 1973 oil crisis were the touchstones of this new era. The downbeat […]

Last Friday, the eve of Valentine’s Day, red roses spontaneously appeared in the windows of many of the shops lining the Chiswick High Street. The roses marked the passing of a local vagrant, 77-year-old Anne Naysmith, who notably lived for over two decades in a clapped-out black Ford Consul. What marked Naysmith out from a […]

Valentine’s Day is upon us and as a result the price of a blood-red rose skyrockets. Misty-eyed lovers feverishly scribble anonymous cards to the various paramours they are desperately besotted with (or simply fancy shagging). Few pause to ponder the origins of a festival that looms large in the modern calendar. Valentinus The clue lies in […]

Agence France-Presse—who can be trusted on such matters—advise that two American sisters were arrested at the Angkor Wat temple complex after “they lowered their pants and took pictures of their buttocks”. Lindsey Adams, 22, and Leslie Adams, 20, follow in the still-warm footsteps of three Frenchmen who were recently deported for the same crime and […]

One of the most poignant memoirs of the World War II Holocaust, Anne Frank’s Diary, has recently become the battleground in an entirely different kind of war. Anne Frank’s Diary Gail Horalek, the mother of a young teen in Michigan, has labelled the book as “pornographic”. Her daughter experienced discomfort at reading passages where young Anne, […]

Over a decade ago I read a prediction that in the future the world’s people would divide in two. This process was referred to as “no more sitting on the fence”. Those who did not consciously choose the side of the fence where the grass is greener would unconsciously end up on the more barren […]

Our society regards porn users as vile, weak-willed, despicable beings that choose to gorge themselves on sexualised images of women. The key word here is ‘choose’. There is still widespread disbelief in medical circles that sex and pornography addiction even exist; to date neither is recognised in the clinical bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual […]

Once upon a time there was a far-away land called Sweden, where circa 1998 there were 2,500 prostitutes gainfully employed keeping the Big Bad Wolf in a post-coital stupor. To reduce sex trafficking, a law was passed criminalising the Big Bad Wolf for buying sex. Swedish prostitution laws A dozen years later the number of […]