Sex
Who isn’t genderfluid?
Sex has always been less binary than it looks – but we’ve never been this boring about it
Poet as predator
Craig Raine says that Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography of Ted Hughes gets it wrong on every level
Love, loneliness and all that jazz
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg), the prolific, Oscar-winning auteur, New Orleans-style jazz clarinettist, doyen of New York delicatessen society,…
Cock and bull
It’s hard to know whether the actor James Norton was being naive or disingenuous when he claimed in publicity interviews…
Barometer
How many cheats? More data on members of extramarital dating site Ashley Madison were put online. How widespread is adultery?…
Barometer
No sex, please Several friends of the late Sir Edward Heath asserted that he could not be guilty of sexually…
Bisexuality is now everywhere (and nowhere)
I’m not aware of knowing many bisexual people. Or indeed, off the top of my head, any bisexual people. Which…
Mirror, mirror
The uglier the man, the more he demeans women
Poldark porn
My favourite moment in The Scandalous Lady W (BBC2, Monday) was when the heroine played by Natalie Dormer was shown…
Asexual
There was a time when my husband, who often addresses the television, would habitually react to Edward Heath’s appearance on…
Caught on the net
Going online does not make you invisible – as the adulterers who used the hacked site Ashley Madison are discovering
‘Shocking is too easy’
No one does transgression like the filmmaker John Waters. Jasper Rees talks to him about political correctness, post-ops and pubes
Low life
After hitting me with the cancer diagnosis, the urologist offered me the choice of a longer life in exchange for…
Are schoolgirls fair game for teachers?
Mr Malcolm Layfield, the former violin teacher at Chetham’s music school, will have been celebrating this week after being found…
Tinder feelings
Can mobile dating apps move beyond the promise of a one-night stand?
Your problems solved
Q. A wonderful and generous woman invites me, on a regular basis, to dinner parties at her house. What is…
The topless feminists
Can you really fight the male gaze by exposing your breasts?
Hand over fist
And so, in the end, I went with my sister, Toni, to see Fifty Shades of Grey and we saw…
Click and flick
Romance is being killed off by the brutal marketplace of dating apps such as Tinder
Barometer
Teen queens The Duke of York denied allegations in court papers that he had had sexual relations with a girl…
Reem
Joey Essex is a celebrity who appeared in the ‘scripted reality’ programme The Only Way is Essex, named not after…
S&M and B&Q
I never got beyond page 20 in Fifty Shades of Grey. No one got shot in the first chapter, and…
Rough-Huhne
I love Grayson Perry. You might almost call him the anti-Russell Brand: a genuinely talented artist who also has some…
The Greeks and rape
A footballer serves his sentence for rape, insisting on his innocence. Debate rages whether he should play again. To us,…
Barometer
Paisley power Paisley pyjamas were in the news. While associated with the town in Renfrewshire, whose mills produced the patterns from 1805,…
