sexualshame

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

It’s a common situation, common enough that it no longer shocks or surprises. A woman discovers that her partner is using pornography. There is no way of knowing how many couples this situation affects, for the simple reason that most of them keep it secret. Some women tell their close friends, others post on porn-related […]

During my adolescence, in what I only later realised was a subtly but significantly dysfunctional family, rock music was the main fault line between my father and I. I was a shy, sensitive, unconfident teenager: my rebellion was of the ingrown toenail kind; the kind that turns upon itself and festers unseen. By contrast, my […]