What women want when they pay for sex: ‘Just kindness’

In his four years as a sex worker, Dan Moon saw women whose needs were more than physical. He brought a listening ear – and an open heart – which led to him ‘falling in care’ with his clients

It’s not that men never noticed Ellie*. “I was just not one bit interested,” she says. While her friends were out collecting “horror stories” and boyfriends, then later, husbands and children, her focus was “finish school, go to uni, get a job, do all that stuff”. That focus paid off with a career in science, but by the time she turned 37 she was still a virgin, “and I felt like a part of me was missing”.

Sally* was never interested in marriage or children, but she has had “some lovely relationships along the way”. Her struggle has always been with monogamy. “Because for me, that was never important.” For the past decade, the 54-year-old marketing executive has been happily partnered to “a really open-minded person”, which meant she “didn’t need anything more than that newness of sexual adventure”.

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‘Gay life is better now. Absolutely’: five generations on coming out and what came next

From a student in the 60s for whom sex was illegal to a recent arrival on the gay scene, four men and a non-binary queer person on how their lives – and sex lives – have changed

Plus six high-profile queer figures on their experiences

‘We didn’t realise we were killing each other’

George Hodson, 73
I went to university in London in 1967, the year the decriminalisation bill went through. It was no longer illegal to have gay sex in England and Wales if you were over 21, but it was still frowned upon. I was 18, so it was still illegal for me, but I never thought much about the legality. I was too busy enjoying myself.

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My cheating boyfriend told me he was a sex addict. Was it a disorder – or just an excuse?

When I found out my partner had been lying for years, my whole world shattered. Did calling it an addiction mean I had to forgive him?

The vacuum cleaner is laid out like a snake on the living room floor – an image of domesticity I will come to remember as representing the unravelling of that home. I have always loved this room for its large, south-facing windows that could bring warmth to my face even on the coldest of winter days, but the summer sun today is suffocating. It is one of those mornings when the leaves are perfectly bright and the sky clear light blue. The outside world is beautiful, but mine seems to be breaking apart.

Just moments earlier, I was arguing with my partner about the division of household labour. Frustratingly, I have fallen into a stereotype – vacuuming around him while he’s on his phone. But this morning is different. He asks me to sit with him on the sofa; he wants to tell me something big, something personal. I leave the vacuum cleaner on the floor.

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Can you make an AI understand love? The experimental games festival about relationships

Play a cat trying to please its human, uncover pickup artists’ dark arts or find out how being pregnant feels at Now Play This in London, designed to make us look at video games differently

Outside Somerset House this week, you might notice that two lampposts are blinking at each other. Unless you are fluent in Morse code, however, you probably won’t clock that they are performing Act II, Scene II of Romeo and Juliet. The installation by Geraint Edwards welcomes you to Now Play This, an experimental games festival, where you could also play a game about getting over a breakup by wielding a sword while riding a motorbike through a neon city, or listen to artist Laurence Young give a talk about getting his mother into the fantasy video game Elden Ring. Inside, attendees lounge around a digital fire, browsing books of love poetry.

Now Play This – now in its ninth year at Somerset House – can be relied upon to bring people together in unexpected ways. It has hosted everything from giant ball mazes to outdoor playground games and a game about chucking fascists out of your garden. But this year’s theme, love, has created an especially open, even intimate atmosphere. On a giant arcade cabinet in the largest exhibition room, you can play Breakup Squad, a game about keeping your friend away from their toxic ex at a party; outside, you can play Triangulate, a puzzle game where three players are given random instructions (“point at someone with one leg; rotate slowly; hold hands with a different person”) and have to negotiate how to use their bodies to find a solution that works for everyone.

Now Play This is at Somerset House, London, until 9 April

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‘It stopped me having sex for a year’: why Generation Z is turning its back on sex-positive feminism

The movement championed the right to enjoy sex and was supposed to free women from guilt or being shamed. But now many are questioning whether it has left them more vulnerable

Lala likes to think of herself as pretty unshockable. On her popular Instagram account @lalalaletmeexplain, she dishes out anonymous sex and dating advice on everything from orgasms to the etiquette of sending nude pictures. Nor is the 40-year-old sex educator and former social worker (Lala is a pseudonym) shy of sharing her own dating experiences as a single woman.

But even she was perturbed by a recent question, from a woman with a seven-year-old daughter who had caught her new partner watching “stepdaughter” porn involving teenage girls. Was that a red flag?

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Our long-term relationship is stale. Is this something that happens to everyone? | Leading questions

It doesn’t matter what is normal, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith, you have to decide what you want for yourself

I’ve been with my boyfriend for almost seven years, and our relationship has gotten stale. We both feel that we are not very happy, but we don’t want to break up, as we love and care for each other.

We’ve both been working from home throughout the pandemic, and work long hours. No doubt this has impacted our relationship, and our sex life is poor. I just feel like relationships should be more than this, that they should add something to your life. Right now we are more like flatmates.

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The secret to great sex? It’s not what you think …

There’s more to good sex than complicated positions or wild lust. The authors of a groundbreaking study explain what really makes it great

Far from what films and TV shows might tell us, truly magnificent sex has very little to do with daring feats of seduction or screaming orgasms. In fact, according to the latest research, erotic intimacy is more a state of mind than a physical act.

In a recent study, Magnificent Sex, psychologist and sex therapist Dr Peggy J Kleinplatz and her colleagues at Ottawa University in Canada realised that, while whole library sections were dedicated to bad sex (and how to make it better), there was almost no literature dedicated to great sex. What did it feel like? Who was having it? And what made it so great?

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By changing young people’s attitudes, we can tackle violence against women | Cordelia Morrison

The school workshops I run have shown me that damaging attitudes towards sex, gender and equality start early

Recently, I delivered a healthy relationships workshop at a primary school. We started by playing a drama game, where we asked the children to pretend to be different types of people. A superhero? Lots of air-punches. What about a girl? The girls laughed awkwardly, while the boys pouted, pretended to cry, and fell to the floor.

“Why are you down there,” I asked the boy nearest me. He beamed, and said: “Cos girls are scaredy-cats and they, like, faint and stuff.” “OK,” said my co-facilitator, “how do the girls in the room feel about that?” A pause. Shuffling. One girl eventually volunteered: “It makes me feel sad. And it’s not fair. We’re not all the same.”

Cordelia Morrison is relationships officer for Tender, a charity working to prevent domestic and sexual violence in the lives of children and young people

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By changing young people’s attitudes, we can tackle violence against women | Cordelia Morrison

The school workshops I run have shown me that damaging attitudes towards sex, gender and equality start early

Recently, I delivered a healthy relationships workshop at a primary school. We started by playing a drama game, where we asked the children to pretend to be different types of people. A superhero? Lots of air-punches. What about a girl? The girls laughed awkwardly, while the boys pouted, pretended to cry, and fell to the floor.

“Why are you down there,” I asked the boy nearest me. He beamed, and said: “Cos girls are scaredy-cats and they, like, faint and stuff.” “OK,” said my co-facilitator, “how do the girls in the room feel about that?” A pause. Shuffling. One girl eventually volunteered: “It makes me feel sad. And it’s not fair. We’re not all the same.”

Cordelia Morrison is relationships officer for Tender, a charity working to prevent domestic and sexual violence in the lives of children and young people

Continue reading…

By changing young people’s attitudes, we can tackle violence against women | Cordelia Morrison

The school workshops I run have shown me that damaging attitudes towards sex, gender and equality start early

Recently, I delivered a healthy relationships workshop at a primary school. We started by playing a drama game, where we asked the children to pretend to be different types of people. A superhero? Lots of air-punches. What about a girl? The girls laughed awkwardly, while the boys pouted, pretended to cry, and fell to the floor.

“Why are you down there,” I asked the boy nearest me. He beamed, and said: “Cos girls are scaredy-cats and they, like, faint and stuff.” “OK,” said my co-facilitator, “how do the girls in the room feel about that?” A pause. Shuffling. One girl eventually volunteered: “It makes me feel sad. And it’s not fair. We’re not all the same.”

Cordelia Morrison is relationships officer for Tender, a charity working to prevent domestic and sexual violence in the lives of children and young people

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