For those looking for inflight fun, without having to squash into a tiny toilet, a new Las Vegas venture has the answer. But will the idea take off?
Name: The mile-high club.
Appearance: Sexy, up in the air.
Continue reading...Category Archives: Sex
‘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?
Continue reading...How Covid killed the one-night stand – and made us all kinkier
There has been a sharp drop in one-off encounters, researchers say, but more people are enjoying friends with benefits and getting experimental in bed
A one-night stand, people used to say, is like a short story: if it is any good, you want it to go on for longer; if it isn’t, you could have done with 15 minutes’ more sleep. To which the retort is: sure – but a lot of people really like short stories.
A lot of people, in the pre-pandemic days, used to really like one-night stands, too. The sex therapist Jenny Keane hosts a wide-ranging sex chat through her Instagram account. On it, one woman wrote appreciatively: “The sex is purely focused on pleasure. You’re not thinking about your relationship dynamics, them not doing the dishes. It’s about being served and cared for physically. It can be a very empowering and beautiful thing.”
Continue reading...Panting, moaning and ‘pussy-gazing’: the couple who podcast their ‘elevated sex’ sessions
Lacey Haynes and Flynn Talbot want to improve the world’s love life – starting by doing it live on air in every episode
Lacey Haynes is a women’s “intuitive healer”, and guides couples in yoga-informed “elevated sex”. When she opens her front door, the first thing I notice about the Canadian podcaster is her fashionable faux fur slippers and chic blunt fringe. Where is the western wellness guru uniform of linen tunic, elephant-print trousers and culturally inappropriate head jewellery, I wonder?
Inside the living room, I spot the hot-pink sofa that Haynes’ Australian husband, Flynn Talbot, a men’s life coach and fellow elevated sex practitioner, calls “love island”. Fans of their podcast – Lacey and Flynn Have Sex – will know it as one of many locations around their house where they take the title literally, recording themselves having sex in the bedroom, on the kitchen barstool, and beyond.
Continue reading...My winter of love: I was convinced no one wanted me. But there was a gorgeous man who did
The night of the party, I put my heartbreak aside. With nothing to lose, I walked up to a man and told him he was the most handsome one in the room
In a warehouse in Ladywood, Birmingham, with a papier-mache spine down my back and breath like a dustpan, I walked up to a man and said, without any preamble: “You are the most handsome man at this party.”
It was December 2004, the theme of the party was dinosaurs and, being a fan of puns, I had decided to go as a thesaurus. In my little room in Lupton Flats – the cheapest halls of residence at Leeds University at the time – I’d sat on the floor, beside my single bed, and patiently glued down layers of paper into a string of points. Reluctant to sacrifice my actual thesaurus, I had rooted around my reading list for another book, eventually choosing The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Listening to Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and drinking PG Tips, it had taken me at least two hours to make the dinosaur spine, which would attach around my neck like a backwards pendant. Slipping it on and looking in the mirror, I wondered if anyone would even notice me.
Continue reading...We’re in our 70s and he’s perfect – except he doesn’t want sex…
A compatible friend needs treasuring. You might need to look elsewhere for sex
The question I met Tom online. We have now been dating for nearly two years, sometimes on Zoom as we live three hours away from each other. This is long-term relationship potential – except, from my side, for one thing.
I am a deeply sexually alive person. Sex is an immense joy to me. Not only the explicit physical acts of it, but also the sharing, the play, all the openness and openheartedness. Tom is divorced and I suspect has not had much sexual experience. I think he is sexually repressed. I have always been open with him about wanting our relationship to become fully sexual. It never has been.
Continue reading...The most unusual movie sex scenes – ranked!
Lady Gaga and Adam Driver give us animal grunting in House of Gucci and Agathe Rousselle mates with a car in Titane – but that’s tame compared with some of the sexual themes cinema has found to explore
In 1933, the Austrian star Hedy Lamarr (who also had a remarkable parallel career as an inventor) appeared in the Czech erotic drama Ecstasy playing Eva, who gave us the first female orgasm in movie history. This is simply an extended closeup on her face, after her lover’s head has disappeared from the bottom of the frame, as she abandons herself to pleasure and rapture. There were some telling cutaways – to her hand, fondling some material, and also one of her pearl necklace dropping to the floor. Afterwards, Eva languorously smokes a cigarette, doing her bit to establish one of cinema’s great post-coital tropes.
Continue reading...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?
Continue reading...Let’s talk about sex: how Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP sent the world into overdrive
A cultural ‘cancer’, soft porn … or the height of empowerment? A revealing documentary examines the debates around one of the raunchiest – and most talked about – rap records around
As winter forces many of us to ditch nights out with friends in favour of nights in on the sofa, Belcalis Alamanzar’s iconic words ring out across the digital ether: “A ho never gets cold!”. In a clip that went viral in 2014, the rapper better known as Cardi B parades up and down a hotel corridor, clad in a plunging, barely-there bralette and tight-fitting skirt. For women who wear little and care about it even less, Megan Thee Stallion has made a name for herself in the same vein. Together, Meg and Cardi would go on to birth a movement with their hit 2020 single, WAP, an ode to female sexuality and “wet ass pussy” which brought a slice of the club to the worlds’ living rooms at the peak of lockdown.
In three minutes and seven seconds of poetic dirty talk, the pair walk us through the spiciest of bedroom sessions, except – contrary to patriarchal norms – they are firmly in the driver’s seat. From fellatio to make-up sex, Cardi and Megan leave their targets weak. With the video quickly becoming a talking point around the world, their sexual desire (and that of women in general) became the subject of fierce debate. While many praised their cheeky candour, others were unimpressed, with Fox News’s Candace Owens going as far as to call Cardi a “cancer cell” who was destroying culture.
Continue reading...Dan Savage: ‘When politicians leave sex alone, I’ll leave politics alone’
Dan Savage is the world’s most influential sex columnist, who regularly offends both conservatives and liberals with his radical views. On the 30th anniversary of his column he tells Eva Wiseman how, for all the controversy, what he’s really interested in is how to make long-term relationships work
Dan Savage is not easily shocked, but recently, well. A few weeks ago he got a letter. A 24-year-old man wanted advice – he’d taken his partner, bisexual, older, to meet his parents for what both thought would be the first time. Except, it turned out he’d met them a decade earlier, when he’d joined them for a threesome. On Zoom from Seattle, Savage chuckles darkly and adjusts his cap. “I was like, oh God,” he says. “It’s all my fault! I felt implicated. Because I helped create a world where middle-aged, married, straight couples can have threeways.” He shrugs. He’s right.
His advice column started as a joke; soon it cracked open, and revealed a map to new ways of living. When Savage Love launched 30 years ago in Seattle’s alternative weekly newspaper The Stranger, the idea was that a gay man – Savage, then 26 and working in a video shop – would give sex advice to straight people. “Hey Faggot!” each letter began. Early questions were easy. “Things like, what’s a butt plug? How do you give a good blowjob?” Straight people had always intuited that their gay friends knew more about sex than they did, “which is true, not because gay people are magic, but because we have to communicate about sex. Straight people get to consent and then… stop talking.” “Use your words!” he tells straights today, often. With the 1990s came the internet, and suddenly most of the answers were immediately Googlable. But the letters kept on coming. “Right away, it was no longer a ‘how to’ column but a ‘why?’ Why did they do that? Why did I do this? And what happens now?”
Continue reading...The great turn-off: has Covid put single men off sex?
Eighty per cent of American men say sex is less important to them now than it was before the pandemic. What’s going on?
Name: Flaccid fall.
Age: It is a relatively new thing, since the pandemic.
Continue reading...Emotional infidelity: the devastating, destructive love affairs that involve no sex at all
An affair doesn’t have to be physical to be intense – or to ruin a relationship. Guardian readers open up about bonding, betrayal and what happened next
Chloe had encouraged her husband to accept the new job. “I told him: ‘Life is too short to be unhappy.’”
The effect on him was transformative – but not in the way she had imagined. “One minute, he was a family guy, the next, he was always working late and going in early.” She found out why when she visited him one day at work.
Continue reading...‘I feel hurt that my life has ended up here’: The women who are involuntary celibates
What is it like to go without a partner when you long for one – and when even a fleeting sexual connection feels impossible?
When a woman named Alana coined the term “incel” in the late 90s, she couldn’t have predicted the outcome. What started as a harmless website to connect lonely, “involuntary celibate” men and women has morphed into an underground online movement associated with male violence and extreme misogyny.
In 2014, Elliot Rodger stabbed and shot dead six people in California, blaming the “girls” who had spurned him and condemned him to “an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires”. There have since been numerous attacks by people who identify with incel culture, including Jack Davison, who killed five people in Plymouth this summer, before turning the gun on himself. In the darkest corners of the internet, incel groups have become a breeding ground for toxic male entitlement, putting them on hate crime watchlists across the UK.
Continue reading...Viva la vulva: why we need to talk about women’s genitalia
Ignorance about the basic biology of vulvas is still shockingly high – yet there are huge health benefits, physical and emotional, to be won with better understanding
If you have a vulva between your legs, could you identify the seven separate structures in a mirror? If your partner has a vulva, can you identify theirs?
For over half the population, the vulva is a significant part of their body; an exit and an entrance, a site of pleasure and, often, pain, that speaks to core human function and need. In 2021, it can feel as if we’re on the cliff-edge of emancipation from the history of oppression and ick surrounding female genitalia. The booming sex toy market, a growing awareness of hormonal cycles and the messy reality of periods, a sharper focus on female pleasure and evolving conversations about menopause all point to real progress. Yet there remains a well of misunderstanding in society about what’s down there (clitoris, labia majora, labia minora, urethral opening, vaginal opening, perineum and anus, by the way), with tangible consequences.
Continue reading...How do we talk to teens about sex in a world of porn?
Teenage boys’ easy access to violent sexual images is creating a crisis for them – and for women, argues the anti-porn campaigner
Violence against women is never far from the news, but currently it is high on the agenda – and porn features again and again as a factor. From the murder of Sarah Everard to the paltry sentence handed down to Sam Pybus, the latest man to use the so-called “rough sex defence”, it seems the world is riven with misogyny.
Sarah’s killer Wayne Couzens was attracted to “brutal sexual pornography”, the court heard during his trial. Pybus – who was sentenced to four years and eight months last month for manslaughter after strangling a vulnerable woman during sex – was also known to use violent porn. Tackling porn culture is clearly a key part of tackling sexual violence towards women. I have campaigned to end the sex trade for decades, and am well aware of its role in the sexual exploitation of women.
Continue reading...From bawdy fun to fantasising with Demi Moore: the best erotic podcasts
If it’s audio kink you’re after, there’s a podcast for that. Rhik Samadder picks out the best out of the horny bunch
The biggest noise on the audio porn scene is Dipsea, whose range of consensual, sex-positive stories are written by women, for women. The stories, all between 10 and 20 minutes long, are streamlined, yet grounded in character and situation. By the time things descend into panting, the idea is that attuned listeners will be, too. The app has more than 400 stories behind a paywall: straight and queer and diverse in content, with a few enticing freebies concerning military-style yoga instructors and massages between friends. Anyone whose primary erogenous zone is inside their head will find succour here.
Continue reading...The relationship sabotage scale: quantifying why we undermine ourselves in love
Developed over the course of five studies, the relationship sabotage scale is designed to give analytical rigour to a term more common in pop culture
Do you feel constantly criticised by your partner? Do you sometimes check their social media profiles? Will you admit to them if you know you’re wrong about something?
If you strongly agree or disagree with some of these statements, you might find yourself with a high score on the Relationship Sabotage Scale.
1. I get blamed unfairly for issues in my relationship.
2. I often feel misunderstood by my partner.
3. I constantly feel criticised by my partner.
4. My partner makes me feel a lesser person.
5. I get upset about how much time my partner spends with their friends.
6. I believe that to keep my partner safe I need to know where my partner is.
7. I often get jealous of my partner.
8. I sometimes check my partner’s social media profiles
9. When I notice that my partner is upset, I try to put myself in their shoes so I can understand where they are coming from.
10. I am open to finding solutions and working out issues in the relationship.
11. I will admit to my partner if I know I am wrong about something.
12. I am open to my partner telling me about things I should do to improve our relationship.
Items should be randomised.
The scale is a 7-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree), is employed where high scores indicate high levels of the measured dimensions.
Defensiveness subscale = 1, 2, 3, 4.
Trust difficulty subscale = 5, 6, 7, 8.
Relationship skills subscale = 9, 10, 11, 12.
Reverse questions 9, 10, 11, and 12 to represent ‘Lack of relationship skills’.
Subscale scores between 4-11 (low)
Subscale scores between 12-20 (moderate)
Subscale scores between 21-28 (high)
Continue reading...‘I feel a bit rusty’: Has Covid killed our sex lives?
The end of lockdown was supposed to herald an explosion of pent-up desire and a bonkbuster of a summer. But it’s been way more complicated than that
This year was meant to be a replay of the roaring 20s, your hot girl or boy summer. We’d be hedonistic, bacchanalian and, above all, getting laid. All the pent-up energy of lockdowns, the only time it has ever been illegal for people from different households to have sex, would explode in one helluva bonkbuster summer. But has it panned out that way? Or has Covid ruined our sex lives?
Continue reading...‘Now I know love is real!’ The people who gave up on romance – then found it in lockdown
Dating apps can be difficult and daunting at the best of times, and many users give up on them entirely. But for some the pandemic was a chance to reassess their priorities, and they were able to forge a much deeper connection
When the country first went into lockdown, I – reluctantly – reloaded my dating app. With the world on pause and friends navigating the choppy waters of home schooling, I needed something to pass the time. I had never had much luck with the apps but, this time, I connected with Bart, a Dutch PR manager who lived in Windsor. To begin with, I assumed our conversation would follow the same pattern as most of my chats on the apps – last a few days, then fizzle out. To my surprise, this time was different. Instead of ending in the great bin-fire of Hinge matches lost, a friendship grew. We began to have regular Zoom cinema nights – watching the same film online and chatting about it afterwards. As we got to know each other, I began to notice how kind and thoughtful he was, and I appreciated his interest in my life. Slowly I found myself opening up, something that had not happened for years.
Before the world turned upside down, I was happy with my single life. I have never wanted children, and spent my time with friends, occasionally dipping my toes into the murky pool of online dating. The process was always the same. Dates lasted an hour or two, before I would slink off home to catch up on Love Island. Every few years I would find that elusive spark but it was always with a charismatic, gym-honed banker who would allude to a string of heartbroken ex-girlfriends and send me aubergine emojis at 3am. I knew this penchant for unavailable men was unhealthy, but despite my efforts, I somehow never managed – or bothered – to break the cycle.
Continue reading...Fetish fashion! What’s behind Kim Kardashian’s wild new look?
The socialite arrived at the prestigious event dressed head to foot in black - complete with a full head covering. Is it a tribute to Kanye’s new album or bondage chic?
Name: Fashionable fetish wear.
Appearance: Chic bondage apparel, probably in black.
Continue reading...