Sex
Story Stream
The Sex War March 05, 2025
Among conservative men, one often hears the claim that feminism has contributed to the destruction of Western civilization. Ideas such as “toxic masculinity” were openly ridiculed. It is certainly the case that divisive feminist rhetoric made the fat...
Anora is a Movie about Marriage March 03, 2025
You could make the case that Anora, Sean Baker’s critically-acclaimed anti-Cinderella story, is a movie about exploitation. The protagonist, after all, is a Brighton Beach sex worker....
Notes on Right-Wing Cancel Culture March 03, 2025
This week, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo published chat logs from an internal employee messaging service at the National Security Agency. “These logs,” he wrote, “dating back two years, are lurid, featuring wide-ranging discussions of se...
Beware the Impurity Spiral January 31, 2025
Doomscrolling through the timeline this week, my eye was caught by an arresting headline. “I WAS A PASTOR. NOW I MAKE BANK ON ONLYFANS AND HAVE NEVER FELT MORE FULFILLED” it blared. Clicking despite myself, I found the story of Nikole Mitchell; a “Pa...
The Matrix or Lord of the Rings. Choose Wisely. January 30, 2025
Is life worth living? Are the forms of Western life conducive to happiness? These questions are best asked in the form of a novel, and raising such questions is Michel Houellebecq’s strength. Annihilation, published in French in 2022 and translated i...
Anora’s Body and Soul January 27, 2025
Sean Baker’s “Anora,” which recently won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and is a strong Oscar contender, is not an easy film but rather a complicated jumble of conflicting themes, ideas, and tones. It’s also the sort of movie your mom tol...
‘Babygirl’ Doesn’t Get What’s So Powerful About Sex January 22, 2025
Achieving erotic vision on the silver screen is not an easy task for a film director. It can quickly fall into an abyss of total embarrassment or pornography. A new film, “Babygirl” (2024), doesn’t fall completely into either abyss, but it never trul...
'Landman' Is a Dumb Waste of a Great Premise January 14, 2025
Shortly into the first episode of Landman, Billy Bob Thornton’s protagonist, Tommy Morris, is talking with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Ainsley, at a college football game. He’s just met her quarterback boyfriend, and Tommy asks her if they’re be...
The Sordid Scene January 14, 2025
A thirty-something indie rocker gallantly holds the hair back for his much younger girlfriend as she rails a line of coke off the coffee table in the opening moments of Matthew Gasda’s gleeful, scathing play Dimes Square. The pair flirt, bicker, talk...
Who Should We Emulate? January 13, 2025
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” This aphorism appears in Meditations, a collection of philosophical musings written by Marcus Aurelius, a 2nd century Roman emperor.Aurelius is considered one of the less tyrannical, ev...
"BACKBONE" by Karl Zinsmeister January 13, 2025
Middle America is in rebellion today. Ordinary people are objecting to bureaucratic coercion, manipulations of speech, redefinitions of sex and family, racial nostrums, strictures on economic freedom, and pressure to conform with new progressive narr...
Is Anyone Shocked by 'Babygirl'? January 13, 2025
Not since Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut has a female movie star offered such an awkward portrayal of sex as Nicole Kidman in Babygirl. The movie is meant to be daring, a Last Tango in Paris for our time, but its essential premise would work in a Do...
Canceled for Telling the Truth About Sex December 10, 2024
Iam in my final year as an undergraduate student in philosophy at the University of Leeds. I am a gender-critical feminist—that is, I believe that women are adult human females, and that this is the basis of their oppression. I do not believe in the ...
'Hardly Working' Brews Up Millennial Malaise December 05, 2024
On the occasion I decide to spend $4.50 on a drip coffee from an artisanal shop, the barista serving me is usually a bubbly woman with a septum piercing and a tasteful forearm tattoo—or, if male, a pasty environmentalist with flabby arms. Obedient an...
Break the Sex Strike December 03, 2024
In the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, American women horrified by the prospect of lost reproductive rights and the apparent triumph of hegemonic masculinity have taken to social media to announce their intention to swear off men. “All I have to ...
The Gender War Wants to Divide You November 15, 2024
“Your body, my choice. Forever.”It’s a line intended to infuriate, and it did. It’s a line that the men who said it — Nick Fuentes, anonymous troll accounts — want women to think is indicative of the broader culture that won the election. They want y...
Ladies, Stop Sex Striking for Kamala November 14, 2024
Babe, wake up: We’re doing sexual blackmail for feminism again.Amid outrage over the fall of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, certain liberal women developed a novel strategy for creating a blue wave of backlash in the upcoming midterms. The problem, women ...
“Anora,” an American Fantasia November 08, 2024
It’s something of a cliché that married men run off with strippers to escape the sexless banality of their domestic lives. Yet the fantasy can work both ways; a wealthy john can fulfill the dream of material comfort and health insurance. Both sides s...
The Boys in the Bandwidth November 05, 2024
Red and blue Americans are locked in a hostile custody battle right now. But if they agree on anything, it’s that “the gender gap has never been wider,” as one piece in the New York Times just summarized. For both the Harris and Trump campaigns, that...
The Many Forms of Rachel Cusk November 04, 2024
To judge by the critical response, Rachel Cusk’s new novel has left readers feeling betrayed. The nature of the betrayal depended upon what aspect of her work the critic once esteemed. For Dwight Garner of the New York Times, reviewing Parade meant r...
Houellebecq’s Last Warning November 01, 2024
It has become a bit of a cliché to point out that Michel Houellebecq is something of a prophet. The 68-year-old French writer’s debut novel Whatever (1994) gave us Raphael Tisserand – a 28-year-old virgin who considers murdering a couple on a beach o...
Sally Rooney’s Millennials Grow Up October 07, 2024
Some of Sally Rooney’s best writing is about power in relationships: who has it and who doesn’t, who wishes they had it, and who has it but doesn’t know they do. Early on in Intermezzo, her fourth novel, she restages a scenario that will be familiar ...
Sex and Conservative Hot Girls October 07, 2024
“Who is the conservative hot girl, and what does she mean for politics?” Newsweek asked earlier this week. To answer this question, the article purports to speak with “experts” on the matter who ended up, (shocker), chalking it up to “gender stereoty...
The Revenge of the Conservative Hot Girl October 04, 2024
There’s a new weapon in the culture wars and its assets are considerable. In America, Republicans have become obsessed with the “conservative hot girl”: an unreconstructed, curvaceous and unashamedly flirty young woman who counts as Right-coded simpl...
Secret Gardens September 17, 2024
It’s a reasonable assumption that thousands of people around the world have imagined themselves in the situation I found myself in last week, waiting in a five-star hotel in London for Gillian Anderson to talk about sex.Right from when Anderson first...
