history

A recently unveiled statue of Mary Wollstonecraft has caused outrage by depicting the pioneering feminist writer naked. The statue depicts a nude woman emerging from an amorphous mound of organic matter. The BBC described the statue as “a swirling mingle of female forms.” The problem isn’t the statue. It’s the underlying unconscious shame that precludes our ability […]

On the night of 25 June 1906, architect Stanford White was murdered at the rooftop restaurant of New York’s Madison Square Gardens. The subsequent trial revealed a double life where White had been seducing underage girls. Confronted with this lurid publicity, his family retreated into silence. As his great-granddaughter Suzannah Lessard recounts in The Architect of […]

In Hessa – my first experience of porn I wrote about seeing porn at 10 when I was exposed to a softcore sex comic in Switzerland. The comic was part of a series called ‘Hessa’: The Hessa series spanned 47 episodes from 1970 to 1972. They followed the improbably sex-sodden adventures of Obersturmbahnfuherin (I think I got […]

On 19 February 2020 buses carrying 72 coronavirus evacuees were pelted with rocks in the village of Novi Sanzhary, Ukraine. Villagers clashed with riot police for several hours before the evacuees—none of whom had tested positive—reached the sanatorium where they are now quarantined. In Britain, several Chinese people have reported being targeted with racist abuse […]

As I walked along a grass verge recently, a man approached, smoking a cigarette. He dropped the cigarette, crushed it with his heel and strode past exhaling smoke. He’d just polluted the environment. He had also polluted himself. What struck me was that he was completely oblivious of both. It is written in the Vedas, […]

There is a common belief that viewing porn conditions men to objectify women, turning them into emotionless sex objects. This is a fallacy. The objectification of women happened at the dawn of patriarchy. This conditioning has been handed down from one generation to another via epigenetic inheritance. The formation of patriarchy As I wrote in […]

In a post a few months ago I posed the question, Does patriarchy traumatise the feminine? At the time, I was pretty certain that it did—that patriarchy arose through the institutionalised denigration of the feminine: It’s hard to imagine how the goddess-worshipping hunter-gatherer cultures of the Neolithic period gave way to patriarchy. What was that […]

Edwin Longsden Long’s 1875 painting, The Babylonian Marriage Market, is monumental in more ways than one. Firstly, in size: the painting measures 10 feet by 5 feet 8 inches. Secondly, in value: in 1882 it sold for £6,615, at that time a record price for a painting. Thirdly, and most importantly, it provides a window […]

Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawing, the Vitruvian Man, has always fascinated me. Drawn around 1490, Da Vinci’s drawing is named after the Roman architect Vetruvius. He not only stipulated the physical proportions of the ‘ideal man’ but also hypothesised that such a figure would fit inside both square and circle. The complex geometry of the Vitruvian […]

Some years ago, I read that the children of the Roman aristocracy used to wear a small penis-shaped charm called a fascinum. The charm signalled that they were members of the nobility and if anyone messed with them, they would be messed with—seriously. (The word ‘fascist’ derives from fascinum.) It intrigued me that the symbol […]