Size Matters

I found this interesting:

The owners of porn streaming site Pornhub are profiting from “revenge porn” and failing to remove videos once reported, BBC News has been told.

One woman, “Sophie”, said she felt “violated” after a video featuring her was viewed hundreds of thousands of times when it was uploaded online.

Campaign group #NotYourPorn said such content allowed Pornhub owners MindGeek to make greater advertising revenues.

And not for the reasons you filthy-minded people are thinking. Tsk!

Back when The Economist was written by experienced adults rather than noodle-armed hipsters called Jeremy, they ran a decent article on the perils of being number one in any industry. They pointed to McDonald’s being the poster child for all complaints about junk food, while Burger King was barely mentioned. Coca-Cola would get bad press about everything from brainwashing kids to murders in Latin America, but few such claims were made against Pepsi. Environmental campaigns in the US tend to focus on ExxonMobil rather than Chevron, just as Shell seems to be the main target for European protesters. When politicians and campaigners are on a supermarket bashing spree in the US, it’s always Wal-Mart which gets singled out, never Publix. The article listed several examples and said that on occasion it pays to be number two.

There are probably at least half a dozen giant porn sites out there, but Pornhub is the biggest and best known, so that’s why it’s been singled out here. I confess I had to do several weeks of selfless research to bring you this information (ahem), but most porn clips are not exclusive to one site. In other words, this particular piece of revenge porn would have been shared across dozens of sites, many of whom would not take the approach of Pornhub:

Pornhub said it “strongly condemns” revenge porn.

It added it had “the most progressive anti-revenge-porn policy in the industry”.

Revenge porn is pretty disgusting, to be honest. I know a young woman who split from some shithead of a boyfriend and he started posting videos of her all over the internet, and contacting people on her social media accounts. She had to go into hiding while her brother-in-law trawled the internet finding where they were hosted and asking for them to be removed. Of course, it is monumentally stupid for a young woman to allow her boyfriend to video her during sex, but young people do daft things, are easily manipulated, and nowadays everyone walks around with an HD video camera in their pocket.

So while Pornhub is coming in for some flack here, at least they appear to be doing what they can to avoid hosting revenge porn; I expect lesser-known sites are quite happy to do so. So why am I sticking up for Pornhub here? Well, as I explained before, one day we’ll all be on Pornhub as it’ll be the only free speech platform left.

“I’m on there for the message boards, honestly!”

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Penny Farthing*

Staying on the topic of deranged women in the modern dating scene:

I’m forever grateful that every boyfriend I had at Oxford dumped me. If any of them had asked me to marry them, I probably would have said yes and it would have ruined my life. In an alternate universe somewhere, there are divorce papers with my name on them.

And the fox didn’t want the grapes anyway: they were too sour.

Instead, my first foray into online dating in 2002 changed my relationships, career and world-view. I was 42.

I was completely honest about everything, including my age. To my surprise, I received an avalanche of responses from younger men. I realised I was every young guy’s fantasy – an attractive, high-flying woman, who wasn’t interested in children, marriage, or even a relationship.

Every woman I’ve talked to about online dating has told me they are surprised by the number of young men who wouldn’t mind getting ’round an older woman. This is so common that a lot of women state in their profiles that they’re not interested in younger men. Very few are flattered by this, as they realise all these lads are after is a quick and possibly interesting shag. Little did they know that if they thought such attention was a good thing they could have landed a Telegraph piece.

So began a sexual odyssey with young men aged 19 to 30-odd that would change the course of my life.

I can’t think of anything sadder than having the course of your life determined by meaningless sex with a string of people miles outside your peer group. Even ageing rock stars can claim their womanising is a fringe benefit rather than central to who they are.

I quickly discovered how differently millennial and, to a lesser extent, Gen X men view sex and relationships to us baby boomers.

I discovered this by reading articles and talking to people, but who am I to dispute your research methods?

I want us all to celebrate the messy, awkward, funny, wonderful sex we have in real life, to promote consent, good sexual values and behaviour.

This is like Peter Sutcliffe launching a Safer Streets campaign.

I am my own research lab – I date a lot of younger men simultaneously, though I have an extremely selective three-step process, which men I meet on dating sites need to pass before a date. First, sending me some more pictures beyond those on their profile; secondly, emailing until I can tell we have chemistry; then, speaking on the phone to check the same. They need to be a very nice person.

This is extremely selective in the sense that old oilfield hands only shag locals when on holiday in Thailand.

When we get to the point of intimacy, I am open with them about what I want.

To be fair, they’ve probably figured that out already having found your name and number circulating on a WhatsApp group somewhere.

I’ll happily debunk the myths they’ve learnt from porn about what “good” sex looks like.

Or a good set of teeth.

I know it might change the atmosphere between us, but I think: “I have to do this for every other woman he’s going to sleep with.”

She’s talking as though women in their twenties are completely inexperienced and therefore young men need her expert guidance in order to satisfy them properly. Which leads me to think she doesn’t understand the modern generation as well as she claims.

Even though I date casually, my relationships can often last, off and on, two, five or even 15 years.

That’s a booty call, not a relationship.

Interestingly, though they may go on to date women their own age, when those relationships end, many of them later come back.

For an hour, anyway. The irony is that Millennials stand accused of only being interested in meaningless sex while shunning stable relationships. This woman thinks she’s helping by having meaningless sex with Millennials in the absence of a stable relationship.

(Via a Twitter follower)

*An ancient bike.

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Willow Talk

With great power comes great responsibility:

One-word oxymoron: polyfidelitous. Yep, it’s another self-justifying polyamorite. Someone hit that big red Tim Newman alarm button.

So let’s take a look:

Willow noted that because divorce rates are so high, it suggests that there is something left to be desired when it comes to traditional relationship structures in the modern age. She expressed that polyamory would probably be more common if couples could let go of their own fear of losing ownership their partners:

Right, but:

Yesterday, on the latest episode of Red Table Talk, 18-year-old Willow Smith kept it a buck about how she really feels about monogamy, and challenged us to see it differently.

We’re supposed to take relationship advice from an 18-year old? One who says:

My last relationship was fueled by jealousy and blind rage; checking each other’s phones and fighting about our findings, angry at social media interactions and flirty onlookers alike. It took me a while to realize that weren’t in love, we were in possession of one another, totally and completely.

Such wisdom! The irony is that Willow Smith is the daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett, who have been married for 22 years. Given her father’s looks and popularity, and considering the usual longevity of Hollywood marriages, perhaps Willow should quit talking to gullible fools in the media and have a word with her parents about what makes a relationship work. Still, I guess taking relationship advice from teenagers is less harmful than promoting sex work to them.

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Sugar Babies

In March I wrote a post about the supposed problem of lonely men renting out their spare rooms to skint women in exchange for sex. At the time I said:

So sad, lonely bastards offer homeless women a roof and a hot shower in return for companionship and, possibly, sex. Unless there is assault or rape going on, what the hell is the problem here?

This being modern Britain, some campaigner or other wanted it made illegal. However, yesterday a reader sent me a link to this article:

Penny lives in a grubby student house; the carpet in her living room is flooded, there are missing tiles on the kitchen floor and the hob doesn’t work. The heating is so bad that, sometimes, it’s cold enough in the house to see her own breath.

If it were just down to her maintenance loan, Penny would struggle to cover her living costs each month. But rather than getting a more conventional part-time job, she has – like an increasing number of other students – turned to ‘sugar babying’ to supplement her income.

And sugar-babying is…

As a sugar baby, Penny enters consensual, transactional relationships with older, richer men – ‘sugar daddies’ – who she spends time with in exchange for ‘gifts’, sometimes in the form of cash.

Isn’t this perilously close to prostitution?

Whether the sugar baby-sugar daddy relationship is sex work is a contentious issue. While some sugar babies do have sex as part of their arrangement, other services are also provided – such as companionship.

So at best it’s escort work, otherwise it’s straight-up prostitution.

“I’d prefer to have a date and get food out of it rather than just go to a hotel room and have sex with them,” Penny says. “I don’t really want that because that’s quite prostitution-y.”

You think?

Penny’s most recent sugar daddy paid for their first meeting in drugs: “He gave me £80 worth of coke.”

A minute ago she was doing this because she was freezing to death.

She is, however, considering sex with her latest sugar daddy. They have been talking for months, but she has met him only once before.

Unless he’s sending her cash every week, how is this a sugar daddy? They just sound like two people who are useless at dating.

“We have spoken about having sex and he’s sent me a screenshot showing that he’s clean. I trust him that way.”

Eh? Don’t you normally need tests and results to show you’re clean? And since you brought it up, how clean are you, missy?

She has decided to stay over when she next sees him and though she is looking forward to it, she confesses she still has nerves. Her meetings can often take her to cities and train stations she’s never been to before, and given the fact he’s still virtually a stranger, it’s hard not to see how this leaves her vulnerable.

Has she considered working from a brothel or getting a pimp for protection?

There is no research into the risks specific to being a sugar baby.

Meaning, the researchers don’t use that term.

And yet, there are no laws relating specifically to sugar dating. In the event that sex is offered in exchange for payment in these relationships, it would, theoretically, be covered by prostitution laws and therefore be legal in England, Scotland and Wales.

Indeed, how would the law distinguish between being paid for sex as a sugar baby and being paid for sex as a prostitute?

This article is most interesting when contrasted with the one I wrote about in March. Back then, a man offering his spare room in exchange for sex was an abomination, exploitative towards women, and should be made illegal. But apparently a woman can get her rent paid in exchange for having sex and it’s all okay; indeed, she doesn’t even have to endure the indignity of being a prostitute if she calls herself a sugar baby.

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Padma Lakshmi and Trump

From the BBC, who report this on their front page purely because it’s anti-Trump:

US television host Padma Lakshmi has explained why she kept silent after allegedly being raped as a teenager.

In a piece for the New York Times, Ms Lakshmi, 48, says she was raped by a man over 30 years ago.

Okay.

But she said she began to feel the alleged attack was her fault, and that she understands why women might not disclose sexual assaults.

Here’s what happened according to the BBC:

The Top Chef host says she dated the man while still a teen.

In her account, she said they went to his apartment where she fell asleep, and woke up with him on top of her.

This article has been stealth-edited. The earlier version made clear she was 16 years old, her boyfriend 23, and the incident occurred on New Year’s eve after they’d been partying all night. Indeed, when you read the account she gave to the New York Times, this is the case. So why did the BBC change it? Perhaps because including such details will make people ask, “What the hell were you doing in his apartment?”

She explains how she started to feel it was her fault: “We had no language in the 1980s for date rape. I imagined that adults would say: ‘What the hell were you doing in his apartment?'”

Ahem.

“I didn’t report it. Not to my mother, not to my friends and certainly not to the police.”

Did your mother know you were dating a 23 year old man you’d met in a shopping mall? Apparently yes:

When we went out, he would park the car and come in and sit on our couch and talk to my mother.

I’m curious as to the ethnicity of her alleged attacker. Was he an all-American white boy who liked baseball and waffles, or was he another Indian (perhaps of the right caste) who would feel quite comfortable talking to her mother? Now 23 isn’t old, but 16 fails the “half age plus 7”  rule. I’d guess there was a strong cultural element to all this we’re not being told. Wikipedia gives us a clue:

Lakshmi grew up shuttling between her grandparents in Chennai and her mother in New York. She was sexually assaulted as a small girl. She wrote in the New York Times, “When I was 7 years old, my stepfather’s relative touched me between my legs and put my hand on his erect penis. Shortly after I told my mother and stepfather, they sent me to India for a year to live with my grandparents. The lesson was: If you speak up, you will be cast out.” 

So she’d been raised in a household with an absent father where family members sexually abused her, and the prevailing culture forced her into silence. That she ended up in bed aged 16 with an older man is therefore unsurprising: I expect the entire relationship was a giant cry for help.

The entire purpose of this article is to counter Trump’s questioning why Christine Blasey Ford didn’t report her alleged assault to the police at the time. From where I’m standing, it answers the question rather well: many of these rapes we’re hearing about from decades before may not have been rapes, and the women involved seriously messed up in the head. It’s indicative of the progressive mindset that the bad people in this article are the white patriarchs Trump and Kavanaugh, while Lakshmi’s Indian family who sexually abused her and then forced her into silence get a free pass.

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A Middle-Aged Sex Cult

Via commentator David Moore, this:

Koh Phangan is a small tropical island famous for its laid-back hippie vibe, healing workshops and full-moon parties. Cafés serve magic mushroom shakes and detox clinics offer colonics with organic coffee enemas.

The latest toxin that’s being flushed out is not a psychedelic drug, but a so-called “sex cult”.

Agama, one of the world’s largest yoga training centres that was a business magnet on the island for 15 years, is closed as it addresses sexual abuse allegations.

Its guru Swami Vivekananda Saraswati, a Romanian native born as Narcis Tarcau, is understood to have left Koh Pangan.

In July, 31 women publicly alleged sexual abuse at Agama. Fourteen women told the Guardian last week they were sexually assaulted by Tarcau, three of them said they were raped.

Hundreds of Kiwis have passed through the school.

One, a 36-year-old woman, did about 12 months total of yoga teacher training at Agama over five years.

She tells the Herald on Sunday of going to Tarcau’s house for a “healing meditation”.

“Afterwards, he kissed me and started taking off my clothes without asking,” she says.

“There was a lot of pressure for sex, even though I said no.”

She managed to leave before anything happened but what really disturbed her was a senior teacher’s reaction.

“[He said] ‘Like wow, how did you manage to leave without making love.’ I felt really naïve.

“Swami is very aggressive and manipulative. There was all this subtle pressure to sleep with him and other teachers the higher you go in the school. Men are told that women want to be ‘taken’.”

Women were also encouraged to have sex with other women in threesomes “because yin and yin together are good” but gay male sex was not encouraged.

“The brainwashing is subtle but relentless. If unwanted sexual advances or worse happened, and the woman wanted to bring it up, she was told either that she needs to be more open and work on her heart chakra, or that she is attracting this kind of experience. It’s her karma to work through this, especially if it happens more than once.”

A weirdo running a cult and persuading daft women to have sex with him is nothing new, and I imagine such men have existed since the dawn of time. But what differentiates this from, say, the Manson Family is the age of the women: one is 36, another mentioned in the article is 42, another in her 30s. These are not naive teenagers but women approaching middle age, yet some stayed in this place for years. I can’t help but think this Saraswati chap was exploiting the deep insecurity I wrote about here:

For most people, “travelling” – as opposed to simply going on holiday – is something you do in your twenties before settling down into a proper job and/or family life. But for single women, it’s something they do well into middle-age and perhaps beyond, usually going to exotic locations where they talk in lofty terms about spirituality (while scoffing at anything which even hints at formal religion). There must be a pretty big market for this: reasonably wealthy women who have nothing else to do during their annual holidays but jet off somewhere exotic for a few weeks or months of “finding themselves”. I don’t think they’re going abroad to get laid, but they do seem a bit lost, as if going to a nice location will help fill the gigantic hole in their lives back home.

In short, there is very little in this story – not the location, the retreat’s claimed purpose, the cult leader, the profile of the women who attended, nor what took place – which I find very surprising. I’m half-minded to think the reputation of the centre was well known and that served as an attraction, to some women at least.

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A sacred act within hours of meeting

Via reader Robert Harries, this article:

For our first date, he took an Uber to my apartment through a winter storm. As the snow fell outside, we sat close on my couch while he talked touchingly about poetry. Two hours in, I was hoping he would kiss me, and he did.

Woman invites stranger to her home and within two hours things get physical. Why do I get the impression we’ll shortly learn the man doesn’t consider her marriage material?

We had met on Tinder. I was nearly 30 and he was 24, but our age gap somehow seemed a lot larger than five years.

She’s 30 and this is her approach to dating?

Not because he acted especially young. It was more that when it came to sex and foreplay, he acted so differently from guys my age, asking for my consent about nearly everything.

“Is it O.K. if we go to the bedroom?” he said.

Erm, that’s not asking for consent, it’s a suggestion you stop fooling around on the sofa and get down to business on a bed somewhere.

I smiled and led him there.

Of course.

He tugged at the hem of my sweater and said, “Is it O.K. if I take this off?”

I nodded. Underneath I was wearing a thin tank top.

“Can I take this off, too?” he said.

I laughed. “Of course!”

Jesus wept. Is this how Americans have sex nowadays?

He kissed my collarbone. I breathed into his neck and pulled off his shirt. He fingered the clasp of my bra.

“Is it O.K. if I take this off?” he said.

I think I snorted. “When you asked about the sweater, that was my yes from the waist up.”

“Just answer the question, ma’am,” said his lawyer, standing at the end of the bed holding a video camera.

He looked scared. Somewhere in our five-year age gap, a dramatic shift must have taken place in sexual training. I sensed this would be a different kind of hookup than I was used to, but I couldn’t predict how.

For his part, he was surprised they’d not discussed money.

I lay down on my bed, and he lay beside me.

“Is this O.K.?” he said.

“I invited a guy from Tinder to my empty apartment on a snow day,” I said. “Let’s just assume you have blanket consent.”

So where does this leave the feminist argument that consent is an ongoing process and can be withdrawn at any time?

“I’m not comfortable with that.”

I looked at his earnest eyes, hair flopping into his face,

Unsolicited advice for women: if you want a man to behave like one, don’t pick someone with floppy hair.

Hadn’t I already said yes several times? Wasn’t I lying there with him, my leg tossed over his, my whole body arcing toward him?

Maybe he was having second thoughts? Most sensible blokes would be wondering, with things being this easy, what the catch was.

Then he raised my arm above my head, put his lips to the soft skin of my inner arm, and licked me from armpit to elbow.

This is what happens get when you invite floppy-haired man-children into your bed.

I pulled my arm away.

See?

I had been single and sexually active for more than a decade and considered myself to be sexually liberated,

Single for more than a decade? Colour me surprised.

but I could not remember anyone having done that to me. “It’s just really intimate,” I said.

She sounds as though she’s more used to being bent over a dumpster in a back alley.

Now he was the one who laughed. “That’s intimate?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

He and I seemed to have such different understandings of which acts were assumed to be acceptable and which required voiced consent.

It’s almost as if getting to know one another a little before having sex might be a good idea.

At one point, he put his hand on my throat and asked if the pressure was O.K.

WTF? This on a first date? Perhaps things have changed since my day after all.

“I’ll tell you if I die,” I joked.

There’s a strange man in my bed with his hand on my throat. Time for a joke!

At another point he kissed me from forehead to toe and said, “I think that’s everywhere.”

He’d grown tired of his choking-the-new-date routine when you started joking instead of getting wide-eyed with terror.

At the end of the night, he said, “See you soon,” and took an Uber back to his apartment through the snow.

He didn’t even stay the night? Oh dear.

I just wasn’t used to being taken care of in that way.

There are low bars, and then there’s this.

Sex makes me feel unsafe, not because of the act itself but because my partners so often disappear afterward, whether I waited hours or months before the first time.

Imagine my shock.

Yet something else about his asking also made me uneasy. It seemed legalistic and self-protective, imported more from the courtroom than from a true sense of caretaking. And each time he asked, it was as if he assumed I lacked the agency to say no on my own — as if he expected me to say no, not believing that a woman would have the desire to keep saying yes.

Well, yes. Feminist have set about to destroy the relations between men and women and this is the result. Take it up with Laurie Penny and her ilk.

Still, I liked that he was trying to keep from hurting me unawares. He texted that night, reassuringly. I decided I would call his asking lovely. I decided I would try to learn.

Reminder: this is a 30 year old woman.

The second time he was in my bedroom

You almost whooped for joy?

“Because I’m the one who could make you do something you don’t want to do,” he said. “Not vice versa.”

But that wasn’t what he was trying to do. He and I were enjoying a mutually desired sexual experience, and by making that distinction he was importing the language of coercion and assault into sex that was healthy.

There’s something very Darwinian about this, isn’t there? I think we can safely assume neither of these two are going to reproduce.

While he was waiting for his Uber to arrive…

…having wiped his knob on my curtains…

I did not see him soon. I texted him a few times in the days that followed, playfully at first, then more pressing. He ignored me.

Facepalm.

At first I couldn’t believe he didn’t answer, and then I was devastated. My roommates didn’t understand why I was so much more hurt than usual.

“Because he kissed the soft part of my arm,” I said. “And then he disappeared.”

What?

They looked at me blankly.

Yeah, I’m with them.

“Because he asked for my consent, over and over. So sex felt like a sacred act, and then he disappeared.”

“A sacred act?” one roommate said, laughing. “Girl, you sure don’t treat it like one.”

Heh, I’m beginning to like her friends.

When he asked so many times about my desires, when he checked to be sure he was honoring and respecting me, then sex, however short-lived, became a reciprocal offering. But the moment we pulled on our jeansthat spell of reciprocal honor and respect was broken.

He was covering his arse, my dear, making sure you weren’t going to cry rape and go running to the police. No respect was broken because there was never any in the first place.

And she was right, in a way. Asking about my feelings during sex didn’t extend to caring about them after sex. Consent is not a contract of continuation.

Nor is any relationship according to some feminists, even a marriage. Should we therefore be surprised that men aren’t showing much interest in commitment once the sex is over?

But in the days and weeks after, I was left thinking that our culture’s current approach to consent is too narrow. A culture of consent should be a culture of care for the other person, of seeing and honoring another’s humanity and finding ways to engage in sex while keeping our humanity intact. It should be a culture of making each other feel good, not bad.

Oh, so there are benefits to entering into relationships with mutual obligations after all? How does this square with feminists who thinks “nobody owes anyone shit” and that women have the right to abandon a relationship on the spot and cut off all communications with their former partner for any reason, or even none at all?

And if that’s the goal, then consent doesn’t work if we relegate it exclusively to the sexual realm.

I wish we could view consent as something that’s less about caution and more about care for the other person, the entire person, both during an encounter and after, when we’re often at our most vulnerable.

Well, yes. There was a time when men were expected to demonstrate good character, compassion, and a willingness to engage in a long-term commitment before women slept with them, but feminists decided that was too oppressive.

Because I don’t think many of us would say yes to the question “Is it O.K. if I act like I care about you and then disappear?”

Which is why it’s not a good idea to have sex with strange men before you’ve ascertained their intentions. As Rob Harries remarks, the author of this piece went to Yale; I’d be willing to bet her grandma was much, much wiser.

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Driven to suicide by bullies, or his mother?

There’s something missing from this story:

A nine-year-old boy has killed himself after enduring four days of homophobic bullying at school in Denver, Colorado, his mother says.

Leia Pierce told KDVR-TV that her son, Jamel Myles, revealed to her over the summer that he was gay.

She said Jamel wanted to go to school and tell his classmates because he was “proud” to be gay.

I’ve spent a good portion of this summer staying with families, and the thing that always amuses me about children under ten is how hopelessly, wonderfully innocent they are. They really have no concept of adult life and its vices, and that includes sex and sexuality. Now children can feel attractions of one sort of another, and homosexuals when they reach adulthood say they always knew they felt “different”, but they don’t have the faintest understanding why. This is why sex crimes against children are so abhorrent, they are incapable of understanding what is being done to them. The only way a child of nine can possibly be “proud” to be gay is if his parents, or others around him, have exposed him to sex or drummed sexuality into him long before he’s capable of grasping the concept.

She said that when he had told her he was gay, he looked “so scared”, but she reassured him she still loved him.

If your nine year old son is telling you he’s gay, you should perhaps ask yourself what environment he’s grown up in. Now there is no mention of a father here; what’s the betting this woman raised her children in an ultra-woke environment where they were exposed to swathes of adult sexuality and encouraged to indirectly participate, i.e. talking about it, seeing naked adults, or declaring pride in one’s supposed orientation? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a single mother has forced her son to adopt feminine traits at an age where he cannot possibly understand, let alone object.

“My son told my oldest daughter the kids at school told him to kill himself,” Ms Pierce said.

“I’m just sad he didn’t come to me. I’m so upset that he thought that was his option.”

It sounds as though the child had serious mental problems, probably as a result of his upbringing. What does the mother have to say about that, I wonder?

But there’s another issue here. Supposing it’s true that this child went to school boasting he’s gay and the other kids bullied him so much he committed suicide. What are we going to do about it? That young children can be notoriously cruel is hardly new; most of us read Lord of the Flies at school. Either schools attempt the impossible task of getting under tens to not bully the odd kid, or they start locking up nine year olds for homophobic bullying (or at least sending them home, and perhaps jailing their parents).

There is another option, of course: stop sexualising children so much they are proudly gay at age nine and bragging about it in the school yard. If we let children be children instead of extensions of their parents’ deep insecurities and unwilling participants in their political activism, this wouldn’t be a problem. However, I don’t hold out much hope. The way we’re heading under our current rulers, paedophilia will soon be celebrated (unless the perpetrator is Catholic) and normal parents locked up if their child so much as teases someone in an unapproved manner.

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Power Balance

A reader sends me a link to this article discussing sex and consent in the modern era. The author is making the case that the sexual revolution has been a failure for women and, in their own words, made them less safe. It’s an interesting hypothesis, but undermined considerably by this statement:

Most importantly, we have learned that men almost always hold power in sexual situations with women and the subsequent narratives about those situations.

Anyone who thinks women don’t hold power in sexual situations probably shouldn’t be writing on the subject.

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Sex and the City didn’t air on Discovery

I often remark on here that rather too many women thought Sex and the City was a documentary. I’ve now found an article that shows I wasn’t exaggerating:

When the last episode of “Sex and the City” aired in February 2004, I hosted a viewing party for 200 guests. It was my swan song as well: Eight months later, I would move to New York, where, armed with my “Sex and the City” DVDs, my transformation really began.

Based on what I knew from “SATC,” I expected the city to sweep me off my feet. I envisioned nonstop brunching and shopping.

What always surprises me about these stories is the lack of friends and family who try to talk some sense into them.

I lived on food bought for me on dates and the occasional bodega tuna sandwich. For clothes, it was wrap dresses from Diane von Furstenberg sample sales combined with loans from designers who took pity on me — like Betsey Johnson, whom I’d interviewed at Fashion Week. Different men I dated gave me YSL shoes and status purses, just like Big did for Carrie on “SATC.”

She’s relying on “dates” for food and clothes. Yay for female empowerment!

I also subscribed to Carrie’s ethos when it came to men. There was no such thing as a bad date — only a good date or a good brunch story. In my writing, I gave my boyfriends nicknames (one was “Prom King”) just like Carrie and her friends did.

I went out with a prince: Lorenzo Borghese from “The Bachelor.” I even dated the British ex-boyfriend of “Sex and the City” creator Candace Bushnell — the original Carrie. He was one of a few men who comprised the composite character Mr. Big.

A common feature among women who spent a decade sleeping around is their belief that anyone is in the slightest bit interested in their exploits. Seriously, does anyone care who she was shagging in New York a decade ago? She didn’t even manage to screw a household name.

Between 2004 and 2011, I filmed nine TV pilots — many of which were reality shows, and all of which were a derivation of some kind of “SATC” role for me. I was always the Carrie. In one pilot, I hosted for Animal Planet; the premise was that your dog would choose whom you’d go out with.

One can’t honestly say at this point that getting the dog’s input is a bad idea.

Their core complaint about me was that I was a quote-unquote “fame whore.”

I suspect many of your female contemporaries thought that description contained one word too many.

Finally, I cut my ties to New York and moved to San Francisco full-time in 2013. I tried being a tech columnist and writing a personal-growth book called “Experiments in Happiness.”

Which sits on my shelf beside Paul Gascoigne’s book “Experiments in Sobriety”.

These days I work as a change activist, mounting summits for world leaders and serving as an adviser to startups and entrepreneurs looking to better the planet.

So she’s found religion. Sadly she’s not locked herself away in a convent.

I’m finally living a life of integrity, and I’m attuned to my values. I never heard about values on “Sex and the City.”

Well, no.

I dated a woman for a while, a beautiful entrepreneur who was also jilted by New York — that’s definitely not something you saw Carrie do.

How edgy. No sign of mental disorder here at all, oh no.

But dating is not front and center in my life anymore, although it was all I talked about in my 20s. That’s pretty one-dimensional.

You think?

Last year, I ended a two-year relationship with a man who ultimately couldn’t commit and wanted to be polyamorous.

Heh! I suspect he could commit, only not with someone who spent a decade shagging random men in New York in return for food and clothes. And why wait two years? Desperation much?

Again, “SATC” and the “lessons” it taught me is the culprit.

It wasn’t supposed to be a lifestyle manual. And as Daniel Ream often points out, the book was far more realistic in its portrayal of single life in New York than the TV series was, and ought to have served as a warning.

The show wasn’t a rubric on how to find a lifelong partnership.

You don’t say!

If I was more grounded and had honestly assessed whether this man was a good partner for me, I don’t think we ever would have dated.

So it’s the fault of a TV show which concluded in her early twenties that she dated an unsuitable man in her mid-thirties? For all the talk of female empowerment, a lot of these modern women don’t seem to have quite grasped the whole personal responsibility thing, have they? Nor do they seem to understand that the choices you make in your twenties stay with you for life.

Crushed and needing to regroup, I took a sabbatical and lived in Bali for eight months on a healing journey.

Heh.

I was also celibate during my time there.

Much to the disappointment of knuckle-dragging Australian youths in beer singlets.

I do wonder what my life would have looked like if “Sex and the City” had never come across my consciousness.

I don’t know, but I’m confident if you got lost in the Arctic wilderness you’d blame Ice Road Truckers.

Perhaps I’d be married with children now?

Given your appalling judgement, immaturity, and lack of impulse control I’d say that’s highly unlikely.

Who knows, but I can say for sure that, as clever and aesthetically pleasing as the show was — and, as much as I agree with its value of female friendships — it showed too much consumerism and fear of intimacy disguised as empowerment.

Modern feminism is rather good at disguising all manner of vices and self-destructive behaviour as empowerment.

Whom you’re dating, what you’re wearing, or how good you look at that premiere — none of that s–t matters unless you genuinely love yourself. Solid relationships are what really matter.

Who knew?

Truth be told, I wish I had never heard of “SATC.” I’m sure there are worse role models but, for me, it did permanent and measurable damage to my psyche that I’m still cleaning up.

As useful a description of the effects of modern feminism as you’re likely to find.

Two months ago, I started seeing someone I never would have dated 10 years earlier.

A whole two months? How long to you think she can hide the disgust?

Back then, I wasn’t looking to get married or seek a lifelong partner, and that was a mistake. This man is a very reasonable choice, and I’m at a place in my life where reasonable is very sexy.

Two. Months.

Now, I feel like genuine me — I’m no longer a Carrie Bradshaw knockoff.

No, you’re now Samantha. Congratulations!

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