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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 […]

On this site I have written extensively about unconscious shame – an invisible sense of shamefulness that cripples us through low self worth, anxiety, and emotional and sexual dysfunction. The idea of some overarching disease that’s so prevalent few are aware of its existence is not new. Since the late 19th century a number of […]

In an incendiary article in Foreign Policy magazine titled Why Do They Hate Us? [link no longer works] Mona Eltahawy lays bare the “pulsating heart of misogyny in the Middle East” with a catalogue of politically or culturally sanctioned sexual abuses against Arab women. From the Egyptian criminal code to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report to […]

On Friday, 28 October 2011, 33-year-old Dutch engineer Vincent Tabak was convicted of murdering his neighbour, Joanna Yeates, in her Bristol apartment. The prosecution’s evidence showed that the burly Tabak gripped Yeates by the throat with one hand; the slightly-built 25-year-old was unable to resist and died from asphyxiation. Tabak dumped Yeates’s body in an […]