Latest news with #TheJoyofSex
Daily Mail
23-04-2025
- Daily Mail
Chilling real reason women are allowing choking, slapping and even mock rape during sex: CLARE FOGES
What do you expect teenagers to be learning in sex education lessons in school? How to put a condom on a banana? Or how to consent to having your windpipe squeezed by someone much stronger than you, their fingers in a tightening ring around your neck, to the point where you are unable to resist, or start blacking out, or die? Teenagers in Bridgend, south Wales were recently treated to a presentation – funded by the local council – teaching them that 'consent (when it comes to choking during sex) should happen every time sexual choking is an option'. Message: this sexual practice is absolutely fine, kids, as long as you're both on the same page! 'It is never OK to start choking someone without asking them first and giving them the space to say no.' Irony of ironies that this PowerPoint was produced by the council's domestic abuse service, Assia. Are they out of their minds? Teaching 14-year-old girls that choking is just any other 'option' on the sexual menu? What about a little light beating? Or vigorous hair pulling? Is that OK, as long as a shy and embarrassed teenage girl is given five seconds 'space' to say no before being assaulted? I am not so much outraged as depressed at the world my four children are growing up in, where violent and degrading sex becomes ever more normalised. I grew up, thank heavens, in the pre-internet age, where the closest I came to hardcore material was an illicit copy of The Joy of Sex I found in my school library. While my eyes might have been on stalks at the pictures of a rather hairy couple contorted into all sorts of undignified positions, the message of the book was clear: 'Sex ought to be a wholly satisfying link between two affectionate people from which they emerge unanxious, rewarded, and ready for more.' How did we go from The Joy of (mutually satisfying) Sex to The Joy of Strangulation taught in schools? Hardcore online pornography is, of course, the main culprit. It has created a great sexual divide, with a line roughly scored through the middle of my own Millennial generation (born between 1981 and 1996). While there are of course many in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s who may keep a cat 'o' nine tails in the bedroom, I would wager that most would be alarmed if a new sexual partner suddenly morphed into the Boston Strangler. Yet to younger Millennials and Gen Zers (born 1997 to 2012), reared on the porn diet of spitting, slapping and 'mock' rapes, choking is standard practice. A BBC-commissioned 2020 survey, which spoke to more than 2,000 men aged between 18 and 39, found 71 per cent had slapped, choked, gagged or spat on their partner during consensual sex – with a third not even bothering to ask the woman if she'd like to act as a human spittoon/punch bag. In her book Escape: How a Generation Shaped, Destroyed and Survived the Internet, thirty-something journalist Marie Le Conte writes that, for her generation, choking is 'so mainstream' and adds: 'If I were to rank it, I would say it sits somewhere around the light spanking mark.' A 39-year-old friend recently re-joined the dating scene after the end of a 12-year relationship. She met a fun and handsome man on a dating app. After several dates, things progressed to bed, where during the act she realised the man's hand was on her neck. He squeezed, then tighter, and tighter, until she felt an unpleasant pressure in her head. 'Why didn't you just shove him off?' I asked. 'Well...' she faltered, 'it's what people do these days, isn't it?' The next morning this Romeo made a joke about being so turned on he got 'a little carried away', as though non-fatal strangulation is somehow an act of flattery, rather than a crime; the practice was made illegal when non-consensual as part of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. Men such as these – who may be nice guys in their everyday lives – have been desensitised by years of watching extreme porn. The sexual act on its own is too 'vanilla' to arouse them. In order for the pulse to keep racing, the ante needs to be upped by increasingly rough behaviour, including choking. A lot of them will say that the women they go to bed with like being strangled – or ask for it. But how much have women's expectations of what they should be like in bed been shaped by porn too – even by women's magazines? In 2016, Women's Health magazine stated: 'If blindfolds and role play have veered into vanilla territory for you and your partner, there are still plenty of sex moves that are considered extra freaky. Like choking.' And here's a truth about women that may be un-PC – we can tend to be people-pleasers. We want to impress the man we are with. In her brilliant novel Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn captured this male-pleasing tendency of young women: 'Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex...' These days the Cool Girl must also love choking, being spat on and called a slut. Otherwise you may be revealed as – horror of horrors – 'vanilla'. The more choking is normalised, the more young people will think this is risk-free. But it patently isn't. Strangling someone restricts blood supply to the head. Oxygen levels drop dangerously fast. According to a 2020 scientific paper, consciousness can be lost within as little as four seconds of arterial pressure. The normalisation of choking and other rough sexual acts is dangerous – and it is used as an excuse by dangerous people. We are at a strange place in terms of women's rights. While ladies run businesses, conquer boardrooms and reach the highest offices of state, in the bedroom empowerment is going backwards. Perhaps the two are related? Perhaps many young men – conditioned by the Andrew Tates of this world to believe that female empowerment is the cause of a lot of their own discontents – are using the normalisation of violent sexual acts to get their own back? They have been brainwashed by misogynistic crackpots to believe that their biological destiny is to achieve mastery over women, and here in one sweaty-handed, grasping stroke, is their chance to do just that. In future it would be best if Bridgend County Borough Council stick to filling in potholes rather than propagating the idea that, with consent, choking can be safe, risk-free and harmless. It is not, it is not, it is not. I don't care if it makes me sound 'vanilla'. The normalisation of strangulation is simply horrifying. Florence's perfect accessory... Florence Pugh wore one of her signature semi-sheer dresses at the premiere of the film Thunderbolts, set off with a dash of orange eyeshadow. But her best accessory? Granny Pat who, in her 80s, is Pugh's regular cheerleader at premieres. The Spanish war on tourists continues with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wanting a crack-down on holiday rentals. Are they mad? Tourism accounts for around 12 per cent of Spain's GDP. I had been toying with the idea of Mallorca this summer but the prospect of being met off the plane by placard-wielding protesters has put me off. It's adios for now. Don't ban Mr Whippy! A pantomime boo to the Royal Borough of Greenwich, which plans to ban ice cream vans around Greenwich Park. Do these interfering officials understand how important a Whippy is to the British summer? This wondrous white stuff is the taste of childhood, sunshine and happiness. In my 20s, I drove an ice cream van for a while and remember the joy on people's faces as my van approached with its tinkling tune. Let Greenwich people enjoy their 99s. Try feeding your own children! This week free breakfast clubs opened at 750 schools with a national roll-out soon. Much back-slapping from politicians about how this will improve life chances for kids. I'm not convinced. If some parents have no money for breakfast, should that be addressed via the benefits system? The PM said breakfast clubs will bring 'breathing space for parents'. But surely chucking a Weetabix and milk in a bowl isn't beyond us? We can't keep outsourcing the work of families onto schools.
Telegraph
16-03-2025
- General
- Telegraph
How healthy is your sex life? Do our quiz to find out
Sex and intimacy are often seen as the glue in a relationship, but what happens when things start feeling a little… unstuck? Whether you're in a decades-long partnership or navigating a newer connection, sex is rarely just about sex. It's about desire, communication, emotional connection, and – let's be honest – whether or not you're still actually paying attention to each other. A recent survey confirms that sex is on the decline. Among 35-to-39-year-olds, nearly two in five (38 per cent) hadn't had sex in the past week, despite considering themselves sexually active – the highest percentage of any age group. As the years go by, more people step away from intimacy altogether. Nearly one in five 40- to 44-year-olds report being completely celibate, and by the time they reach 74, that figure jumps to 57 per cent. So, how's your sex life doing? Is it thriving, just about hanging in there, or has it packed a suitcase and left the building? We asked sex therapists Miranda Christophers, Cate Mackenzie and Susan Quilliam to share their insights into what makes or breaks bedroom chemistry and help us design a quiz to ascertain the health of your sex life and what to do to reignite the flame. What's ruining your sex life? From desire discrepancies to hidden resentments, from changing hormones to simply forgetting to pay attention to each other, these are many elements that can either fan the flames – or put them out entirely, says Quilliam, a relationship expert, author of 22 books on sex and relationships including a recently revised version of The Joy of Sex. 'If you're struggling, start rebuilding the foundations of the relationship,' says Quilliam. 'Most of our interactions in long-term relationships are either transactional, functional, or critical. We need to bring back unconditional giving, small acts of praise, and real attention if we are to start to build a good foundation for our sex life to thrive,' she says. 'One of the most common presentations I see, regardless of age, is a desire discrepancy – a mismatch in sexual desire,' says Christophers, a sex and relationship psychotherapist, co-founder and clinical director of The Therapy Yard. That doesn't mean that a relationship has to fail though says Mackenzie, an accredited sex and relationship therapist. 'Most relationships have a high-desire and a low-desire partner and it's about acknowledging that. It's not about making them equal, but about meeting each other's needs enough so resentment doesn't build,' she says. But it's not just about mis-matched libidos, says Christophers. 'Bodies change, confidence changes, and while some people become more self-assured, others struggle with self-image and intimacy.' Add in perimenopause, menopause, hormones changes, career stress, and emotional baggage from the past, and suddenly, sex can start feeling like a distant memory, she says Quilliam warns that emotional undercurrents and resentment can be one of the biggest passion-killers: 'If you're over 50 and you've been in a relationship for more than two years, there's going to be some anxiety and anger.' Maybe it's the small betrayals (being ignored, feeling underappreciated) or the big ones (infidelity, unresolved resentment). Either way, she says, 'Sex is one of the first things to disappear when there are underlying resentments at play and it can leave your relationship in need of a serious MOT. The good news is that there is so much you can do to tune up your relationship,' she says.
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘They were trying to do 200 different poses during power cuts': Bridget Jones director takes on The Joy of Sex
Sex positivity, polyamory, threesomes: they may not be universal practices but the extent to which they are more acceptable these days has a lot to do with a largely forgotten British polymath called Alex Comfort. In 1972, the physician, expert on molluscs and gerontologist published The Joy of Sex, the first popular book in the English language that explained and celebrated the art of making love. A coffee table how-to guide with tasteful drawings of a naked couple in an imaginative range of sexual positions, it became a huge international bestseller and helped shift perceptions of sex some way along the procreational-recreational axis. The extraordinary story of how the book came to be written is the subject of a comedy film due to go into production later this year from Sharon Maguire, director of the first and third Bridget Jones films, two of the highest-grossing comedies in British history. Maguire was also the inspiration for the character Shazza, Bridget's close friend, played in the films by Sally Phillips. 'In a way, it's a film about what made the Bridget Jones generation, because her parents would have probably read The Joy of Sex,' says Maguire. 'But we didn't have it in my house, growing up, because it was Irish Catholic. Sex wasn't mentioned, never mind a book about it.' The film, also called The Joy of Sex, will focus on the love triangle between Comfort, his wife, Ruth, and her best friend from university, Jane Henderson, a librarian who became Comfort's lover and collaborator in cataloguing the choreography of their sexual adventures. The middle-aged couple took Polaroids of their bedroom exploits, which Comfort, thinking they could be used in a book, proudly showed his publishers, much to their distress. Instead, two illustrators were commissioned to depict the graphic scenes that the writer described, but they struggled to find appropriate models to draw. 'They employed some pornographic models but that didn't work because they kept putting their prices up and pouting at the camera,' says Maguire. That wasn't deemed suitable for the target audience of loving couples. Eventually, one illustrator, Charles Raymond, volunteered with his wife to re-enact Comfort and Henderson's sex life, while the other illustrator drew them. 'They were trying to do 200 different poses and it was during the power cuts,' laughs Maguire. 'Obviously, poor old Charles kept shooting his load. Although it sounds like a sex romp, it was all well-intentioned, because there really was nothing like it. No textbooks, even medical ones, no illustrations, no pictures.' Raymond was hippyishly hirsute, which initially deterred US publishers – Playboy thought the images featured a cave-dweller – but he no doubt helped establish beards as a symbol of virility in the 1970s. For a number of years, while Comfort conducted his practical research with Henderson, he divided his time between the two women: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays with his lover, and the rest of the week with his wife. 'It was that tempestuous triangle that led to the creation of The Joy of Sex,' says Maguire, 'but also, in a sense, to the unravelling of his life. The clashing psychologies of the three characters makes for this fascinating conundrum about love and sex and relationships that's wrapped up in a comedy.' Maguire is also simultaneously making a documentary about the book, and wants to get in touch with original readers who would now be in their late 70s or 80s. 'It's important to hear first-hand testaments and to bring to life the huge and positive impact of the book,' she says, 'because, seen through a modern lens, I'm not sure Alex would appear in the most forgiving light. So I want to hear from couples or throuples or even singles whose lives and relationships were enriched by the book.' Comfort was certainly enriched financially, although nowhere near as much as his publishers. But it led to the end of his marriage. His wife had tolerated sharing him with another woman but couldn't bear the public humiliation of what she viewed as his and Henderson's sex diary. Comfort held back publication of the book in the UK for two years while he divorced Ruth and married Jane. The newlyweds relocated to California, where Comfort, then 53, took up a post at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal thinktank in Santa Barbara. His son, Nick, once said of his father: 'He had a suffocating upbringing. When he found what life could be like in California, there was no stopping him.' Comfort was a prodigy who was largely home-schooled. At 14, he blew four fingers off his left hand when an attempt to make his own fireworks went wrong. The accident didn't stop him, aged just 18, from publishing a well-received book based on a trip he took with his father to South America and Africa. At Cambridge University, where he studied natural sciences, he was seen as a formidable intellect by his peers, but he was clueless about women, marrying the first one who approached him: Ruth Harris. Like many men of his generation, he found sex hard to talk about. While his wife greatly admired his mind, she was not interested in pushing back the sexual boundaries. 'The marriage was a ticking timebomb,' says Maguire, who believes that Comfort came to see sex as a liberating antidote to war. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion A conscientious objector, he was imprisoned in 1961 with Bertrand Russell for taking part in nuclear disarmament protests. But he grew to doubt the effectiveness of demonstrations. 'I think he genuinely thought that sex was a means of changing the mindset away from fighting and wars,' says Maguire. 'At first, when I started researching, I just thought that was his excuse to have a great time having sex. But I think that when he started having sex properly in his 40s, it was an epiphany.' Henderson, Harris's university friend, had re-entered the couple's lives, and she seemed to share Comfort's utopian ideas about the transformative powers of sexual congress. Comfort liked to compare sex to cooking. If knowing what to do in the kitchen results in better meals, he believed that knowing what to do in the bedroom would lead to a happier life. When he moved to California, he became a regular – sometimes with his wife, often alone – at Sandstone, a clothing-optional resort and celebrity sex club in Topanga Canyon that attracted the likes of Dean Martin, Timothy Leary and Daniel Ellsberg. Also in attendance there was the journalist Gay Talese, who wrote: 'The nude biologist Dr Alex Comfort, brandishing a cigar, traipsed through the room between the prone bodies with the professional air of a lepidopterist strolling through the fields waving a butterfly net.' The sunny libertine days did not last long. The scientist who saw sex as a great emancipating and pacifying force had failed to consider the risks of unlimited promiscuity. He was completely blindsided by Aids. In any case, by the end of the 1970s, Henderson had wearied of orgies and permissiveness and told Comfort that she wanted a conventional marriage. 'I think she had pretended she wanted an open relationship,' says Maguire, 'but I don't think she did.' In 1985, they returned to the UK, where Comfort struggled to re-establish his reputation. His studies in gerontology failed to attract the academic interest he had expected. Although he was the author of some 50 books, the only thing people wanted to discuss with him was The Joy of Sex, which had become, by his own admission, an albatross around his neck. In 1991, Comfort suffered a massive haemorrhage in his most prized organ, his brain. As he moved in and out of a coma, his wife died of a heart attack. Another stroke left him in a nursing home, living out his last years alone and paralysed but still in reasonable mental shape. Not blessed with telegenic looks, Comfort never became as well known as the bestselling book that bore his name. For all his reservations about its effect on his reputation, he would have been pleased, thinks Maguire, that unorthodox forms of sexuality are now 'more out in the open'. Yet the sexual revolution he envisaged never quite materialised. 'He must have believed the experiment in his life would become the norm,' says Maguire. 'But. of course, it didn't. For all the complications of sex and love and desire that we all experience, monogamy remains the norm.' If you have a story to tell, please email JOS@
