This week, Marina Hyde on Matt Hancock’s career move into the jungle (1m35s); Joe Stone asks ‘Can a psychologist fix my diet – and transform my life?’ (10m15s); Zoe Williams talks to veteran LGTBQ+ and human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell about his recent expulsion from Qatar (25m08s); and Louis Staples’ offers advice on how to have a healthy digital break up (40m48s)
Category: Relationships and sex education
‘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?
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.
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?
Fertility, porn, imagination… it’s time for a new approach to sex education | Eva Wiseman
Far fewer babies are being born so we should be teaching boys – not just girls – how to make informed choices about fertility and relationships
Do you ever get that thing, that slightly psychedelic thing, when you hear an idea so good that it changes how you encounter the rest of the world? When it installs itself like a migrainous aura in your vision, colouring unrelated thoughts, its simplicity offering whispered suggestions for other ways a problem might be solved? It happened for me with porn.
An essay by Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan offers a solution to the many problems with pornography, and rather than the suggestion that people just switch off their phones or even that schools teach “porn literacy”, it is to offer young people a kind of “negative” sex education. “It wouldn’t assert its authority to tell the truth about sex,” but remind them that, “the authority on what sex is, and could become, lies with them.” Lessons in the lost power of sexual imagination. I could not love this more.
The Lovers’ Guide at 30: did the bestselling video make Britain better in bed?
It featured an erect penis, and could be bought on the high street. The groundbreaking film changed attitudes to sex and censorship – paving the way to the Pornhub era
The second sexual revolution began 30 years ago, on 23 September 1991, with the release of an educational videotape called The Lovers’ Guide. The revolution’s unlikely figureheads were a film producer who had been making how-to videos about gardening and pets and cooking, and a 56-year-old doctor, while their ally was an American former TV and theatre director who had become Britain’s chief film censor.
The producer was a man called Robert Page, who had been approached by Virgin – which had recently started making condoms – to make a sexual health film for men that explained how to use one. There were two difficulties with that. The first was that no erect penis had been shown on screen in Britain. The second was that Page had no interest in making a film about penises. The censor – James Ferman, the director of the British Board of Film Classification from 1975 to 1999 – took care of the first issue.
‘Sex isn’t difficult any more’: the men who are quitting watching porn
Addiction to pornography has been blamed for erectile dysfunction, relationship issues and depression, yet problematic use is rising. Now therapists and tech companies are offering new solutions
Thomas discovered pornography in the traditional way: at school. He remembers classmates talking about it in the playground and showing each other videos on their phones during sleepovers. He was 13 and thought it was “a laugh”. Then he began watching pornography alone on his tablet in his room. What started as occasional use, at the beginning of puberty, became a daily habit.
Thomas (not his real name), who is in his early 20s, lived with one of his parents, who he says did not care what he was doing online. “At the time, it felt normal, but looking back I can see that it got out of hand quite quickly,” Thomas says. When he got a girlfriend at 16, he started having sex and watched less pornography. But the addiction was just waiting to resurface, he says.
Sex Education Xplorers (SEX) review – a biology lesson for the 21st century
Summerhall, Edinburgh
Mamoru Iriguchi and Afton Moran raid their dressing-up box to give us a cheery guide to the evolutionary history of reproduction, and what it says about gender fluidity in humans
I imagine the curriculum has changed since my day but, even so, I’m pretty sure not many biology lessons look like this one by Mamoru Iriguchi. With a dressing-up-box aesthetic and a naive enthusiasm, the Edinburgh performer casts the audience in the role of 14-year-old pupils at “Summerhall secondary school”. Ably assisted by Afton Moran, using hand-knitted pubic hair and clownfish costumes as visual aids, and making natty use of a computer monitor that turns real-world objects into screen animations, he takes us through the evolutionary story of reproduction. It’s an illustrated lecture that traces the journey from the earliest sea creatures to the appearance of land animals and onwards to the present day.
The show has a rough-and-ready charm, performed with more enthusiasm than subtlety, and an appropriately adolescent sense of humour. It takes a wide-eyed approach to the allure of human nudity (no other creature is turned on by nakedness) and the magic of organisms that can reproduce by severing parts of their own body.
Aid cuts make a mockery of UK pledges on girls’ education | Zoe Williams
The government’s words at the global education summit are completely at odds with its behaviour. Whatever the event achieves will be despite its UK hosts, not because of them
With all the fanfare Covid would allow, the global education summit opened in London this week. Ahead of the meeting, the minister for European neighbourhood and the Americas was on rousing form. “Educating girls is a gamechanger,” Wendy Morton said, going on to describe what a plan would look like to do just that.
The UK, co-hosting the summit with Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, plans to raise funds for the Global Partnership for Education, from governments and donors. The UK government has promised £430m over the next five years.
Chanel Contos to meet Scott Morrison to discuss sex consent education reforms
Sex education is currently taught too late, with 50% of children already sexually active when it begins in year 10, Contos says
Prime minister Scott Morrison will discuss reforms to combat rape culture with Chanel Contos, whose petition calling for earlier sex education in schools prompted hundreds of testimonies from former Sydney schoolgirls about sexual assault earlier this year.
Speaking after briefing other federal MPs on Thursday, Contossaid concepts such as sexual coercion are still “not understood by the wider community” although policymakers, including the curriculum authority, were now taking them seriously.
Related: The trouble with boys: what lies behind the flood of teenage sexual assault stories?
