Rick Owens, the avant-garde goth designer, has legions of dedicated, cultish fans — informally known as the Tribe — who not only admire his careful balance of asceticism and esotericism, but embrace his aesthetic as a lifestyle rather than merely a fashion label. He is beloved by the fashion world too, with admirers including Anna Wintour, Vera Wang, and Bella Freud.

Perhaps the most famous of his disciples, however, is Kanye West, who once described Owens as “a major source of inspiration”. He even dressed his first wife, Kim Kardashian, in his designs: the sheer, cream two-piece ensemble she wore to the 2018 CFDA Fashion Awards accentuated her figure in a way that was both grungy and glamorous. Kanye clung to the aesthetic, but he took it in his own ostentatious direction, dressing his second wife Bianca Censori in ever more revealing outfits, where the clothes became secondary to the performance of wearing them — and ultimately wearing nothing at all. Whereas Owens’s designs always seem somehow fresh and cerebral, carefully balancing nihilism with a sense of mysticism, West’s project increasingly lacks any redeeming sense of subtlety.

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There was a crassness to Kanye and Bianca’s stunt at the Grammys, which was more jarring than the nudity itself. The spectacle was too contrived, too formulaic. If the intention was to titillate, somehow it failed. The stunt seemed, if anything, anti-erotic; it exhibited not deviance or innovation, but just a sense of trying too hard.

It also seemed to pierce the careful equilibrium between exploitation and consensual personal fetish. Soon after, Kanye bragged of “dominion” over his wife, then burst into a series of antisemitic rants and attempted to sell Swastika t-shirts on his website. Fashion and fascism became uncomfortably enmeshed. Whereas Owens once played with dystopian themes, West’s stunts seemed symptomatic of a real personal decline, his wife leaving him days later.

In the backlash that followed, it seemed for a while that Kanye had given kink a bad name. By sliding from a play of domination into full-blown Nazism in a few days, he confirmed the suspicions of BDSM-critics; an enthusiasm for fetish had just masked his more dangerous beliefs and desires. And yet it seemed unfair to conflate the issues too readily; one man’s affection for both kink and fascism did not marry the two.

That same week, I picked up a copy of Anastasiia Fedorova’s book Second Skin, which explains how kink is not just for show or exploitation, but is also a compulsive way to be intimate, to develop oneself, to explore for the sake of exploring. The erotic is “a way of seeing”, and her book is concerned with those for whom fetish is not just a passing fashion or a sly form of manipulation, but a mode of optimistic transformation. “I am not my usual self,” she writes. “I have stepped into unchartered territory, where I can temporarily embody something different.”

It doesn’t have to appeal to everyone: it is not for everyone, and that is the point. In this secrecy there is something rare and therefore covetable. Perhaps this is why the wider culture pays attention and seeks to monetize it; for every counter-cultural movement or community that comes to represent something desired, there is always the risk of dissolution and co-option.

As with Owens’s fashion, it is a challenge to be inclusive and subversive at once, to be successful without one’s aesthetic attracting strange interpretations. In the case of the London kink scene, many of the club nights Fedorova writes about were shut down due to complaints of obscenity, even as the wider culture seemed to embrace a tepid or brutalized version of the same aesthetic. There is a revived conflict over what is allowed and what is not, in clubs and in awards ceremonies, magazines and relationships. Can Censori be naked at a party? Is choking permissible? Can West sell Swastika t-shirts online? Must you scorn the man who licks spit off the floor, must you talk at all? It is apparently all up for debate.

What is accepted or not is constantly being challenged. As the psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues, we learn our romantic scripts not just from the people who have brought us up but also from the communities and culture around us, and even from particular partners. Our wider cultures determine our behavior in sex and love, and crucially what we do and do not allow ourselves and one another. The script can be revised. We need not get caught in repetitive cycles — though many, quite contentedly, do.

When it comes to BDSM, it would be naive to believe that personal sexual practices are contained from the outside world in every such relationship, or that sadomasochistic dynamics cannot be a front for deception and real abuse, or that communication may not always be clear enough to prevent true harm. Played out against a landscape of endemic violence against women and girls, even the most seemingly secure and intimate relationships can be vulnerable to the contagion of the outside world, not to mention the repressed or concealed facets of one another, whether BDSM is involved or not. But it is precisely because we are so influenced by the world around us that we must be honest in exploring our desires, as well as exploring what reviles us and why.

Many of us don’t want to bear witness to another celebrity’s exposure, whether sexual, or political, if it’s not in the script we have passively agreed to. West and Censori broke the social etiquette we were familiar with, and it hit a nerve. When we discuss whether a woman such as Censori could genuinely choose to be a part of a humiliating spectacle, perhaps we are really expressing an irritation that, with the prevalence of visual media, we cannot help but watch it. We, the audience, are part of the spectacle because we can’t stop consuming it. The voyeurism is no longer a choice, and there is no safe word, no exit.

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And this is why, conversely, kink is so popular: it offers a way out, new options, an alternative way to be and feel when the media bombard us with pictures of wars and fires, images that seem like it really is the end of the world. We might not really be free, or safe, but in the right light, in some playful unexpected moment, we may feel that we are free regardless. There may be some fleeting satisfaction in this self-awareness.

“Enjoy your symptom!” writes philosopher Slavoj Žižek. This, to me, seems to be at the heart of the rise of this particularly dystopian, hyper-visible brand of fetishism that characterizes our cultural moment. Owens captures a communal neurosis in a way that has garnered him loyal followers, who have found in his fantastical world a mirror of their anxieties, and a freedom from the real world. The fetishized sickness is a contained sickness, a controllable one — a sort of pain management. In this containment, contagion unites rather than alienates its patients.

In psychoanalysis, the “symptom” is a substitute for one’s instinctual impulse that, through repression, has become displaced and distorted, so that it resembles a compulsion or sickness. Noticing or treating the symptom may give some satisfaction, but it cannot fully cure the deeper issue. And yet we can enjoy the symptoms, in a sense; we can probe the things that attract and repulse us, we can understand ourselves a little better through our fantasies.

Owens presents a fantasy world where what we fear is turned into something not only attractive but shared; he takes the ethos of fetishist counterculture and creates a wider movement. But the key to its success is still a sense of mystery and containment, a holding back; too blatant, and at the wrong moment, the spell breaks. Something must always be left to the imagination; some things must stay repressed for others to be enjoyed.

For women, this problem is sharpened by the twin pressures of sexual violence and pornography. Last week, the Edinburgh sexual crisis centre Beira’s Place reported that growing numbers of young women were seeking counselling after having been choked during sex. The Times responded with harrowing testimony from the mother of Emily Drouet, a fresher at Aberdeen University who killed herself in 2016 after being physically and mentally abused by her ex. In court this ex, who was known as the “alpha male” on campus, admitted to seizing her by the neck. Elsewhere in the story, a sex worker blacks out after being strangled by a trusted regular, who then rapes her unconscious body. “She thought she was in control,” says a sexual crisis worker. How many of us have said the same?

Women are now rarely shamed for sexual desire; on the contrary, they are shamed for not having appetites for acts which, not too long ago, were quite fairly viewed as degrading or disgusting, or both. As sex is “liberalised”, the scenarios we conjure up during intimacy are becoming more harrowingly patriarchal. It would seem that sex-positive feminists are, on this issue, becoming strange bedfellows with pornographers and the ever-escalating super-stimuli they concoct. These feminists have also taught us, among other harmful falsehoods such as “you can buy a woman’s consent, and she’ll happily sell it to you like the liberated businesswoman she is!”, that it is perfectly normal for men to desire to inflict physical harm on the women they sleep with. This in itself should remain, as it was not too long ago, extremely controversial. After all, if feminism is all about choice, then we must be absolutely sure that the choice to be brutally choked by a boyfriend is one we make out of genuine desire, and not ambient pressure and shame about being called frigid.

What, exactly, is so empowering about being choked? And why is it that the most radical, liberating acts of the modern sexual repertoire are those which rehearse the most oppressive, shackling truths about being a young woman in a modern city — that at least one of the men a few paces behind you at night might want to strangle you, to debase you? It might be that our male partners simply don’t notice the endless news stories that underlie these fears: most recently, the trial over the 37-year-old NHS worker Natalie Shotter, who was orally raped to death on a park bench. Having seen such stories, a woman’s instinct when feeling a hand creep up her neck and tighten out of nowhere might reasonably be to slap it away in rage. If feminism cannot stop women being made to do things that disgust, hurt and frighten them, what is it for?

Once, sex itself was transgressive — so much so that Anne Boleyn succeeded in changing the national religion by withholding it. Now, we are in an arms-race of sexual extremity, propelled by the internet and an ever-more-casual dating culture. Most of the young women I speak to say they’ve been choked without permission. Many of them chirp, “but I don’t mind, of course!” with a coquettish glance. Then, upon further questioning, they begin to ask themselves whether they do actually like it — or whether they’ve simply been going through the motions. It’s an uncomfortable realisation.

Here, the Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray has something to say. In a more convincing echo of John Berger’s theory that “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”, Irigaray writes that women derive “vicarious pleasure” from pleasing men — though indifferent, or even repulsed, themselves. Sex is a “masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own… she does not know, or no longer knows, what she wants”. When Irigaray was writing in the Eighties, modern kink culture was still contained — it was born in the gay leather bars of the Fifties, working its way into top-shelf magazines such as Bizarre and the mainstream via The Rocky Horror Picture Show before becoming a routine, even perfunctory, part of internet pornography. Today, Irigaray’s once radical take seems depressingly conventional and hard to argue against. Young, inexperienced women, made to feel prudish or illiberal for not wanting to feel scared or unsafe during sex, go through the motions of ever more extreme acts; the validation they receive, apart from those — I suspect, a minority — who genuinely enjoy “breath play”, is the “vicarious pleasure” Irigaray envisioned.

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Sex is the most political thing in the world; the idea of it being a space free from the power dynamics of gender, where being “submissive” and “dominant” is entirely disconnected from the fact of — in heterosexual arrangements — one partner generally being easily able to overpower the other, is pure fantasy. There is nothing wrong with finding those physical realities themselves erotic — and with discussion, and trust, people should do whatever the hell they like. But for the submission, even hurting, of every woman a man sleeps with to be so routine as to be unannounced suggests little to no interest in what women want. This is not the noble act of subversion which kink is so often breathlessly told to represent. Nor is the claim of sex as a politics-free zone — chill, babe, all the other girls do it! — evenly meted out; in one rattling breath, young women are told not to take unconsensual slapping, choking or spitting as a sign of a troubling thirst for sexual violence — so judgemental! — but also to respect a partner’s proclivity for those things as a sainted feature of their identity. It is this mindset which has fostered a culture in which a middle-aged bloke feels comfortable standing at a bus stop on Battersea Rise with a furry tail and gimp mask — a recent sighting in the wild to which not only I, but an entire busload of Year 7s, was recently treated.

The thing about sex is that precisely because it is so swamped in political factionalism, it is the subject, perhaps aside from death, most prone to the airiest theoretical concoctions, the most pretentious, hopeful bullshit. Take Audre Lorde’s vision: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life-force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” That such a lofty take has avoided outright ridicule — and has, I suspect, worked its way into the notebooks of nose-ringed undergraduates since Uses of the Erotic was first published in 1978, goes some way to explaining the aesthetic problem that “prudish” feminists have when saying that maybe not every woman should be choked. “Sex-positive” feminists insist that to question kink or to avoid degrading acts is to live within “negativity” and to be joyless. How different is this from the million times we’re told we’re “no fun” for refusing things — that the last girlfriend did it, why can’t you?

While there is a place for dreamy empowerment narratives about sex, a feminist needn’t assert it in every avenue of her life, least of all the office. In reclaiming female sexuality in this way, Lorde connects it to the general virtues of women, women who dance, love, work. What about the off-duty feminist, prone and alone in her bed as I am now, who is currently doing none of those things? What about the vast stretches of time when, rather than ravenously exploring subversive sexualities and wresting eroticism from the clutches of our oppressors, we just want to scroll on Twitter instead? I am making the case for a more brutal vision of female sexuality, one which — alongside seeking no doubt world-shaking experiences — sometimes simply cannot be arsed, and is equally blunt about brushing off coercion to do things which are, frankly, grim. Let’s uncouple kink from virtue and bring it all back to basics: do I like this, do I like them? And if you don’t, get the hell out of there.

To Elliott, this incident didn’t come as a complete surprise: it was the second time his property had been subjected to vandalism in three months. In October of the previous year, someone had sprayed the word “SCUM” across the facade of his house.

In both cases, the perpetrator’s identity was a mystery, but his or her motivations were not. Elliott had been accused of rape in 2017, in an entry on the now-notorious Shitty Media Men list — a Google document of crowd-sourced, anonymous allegations of bad behaviour. The apparent crimes were usually (but not always) sexual. The list triggered investigations into the conduct of various male professionals in the media world, including The Atlantic’s Leon Wieseltier, who was fired afterwards, and The Paris Review’s Lorin Stein, who resigned. Elliott, who in addition to the rape allegation was accused of sexual harassment, coercion, and unsolicited invitations to his apartment, says that his agent dropped him after he was named, and that friends and professional opportunities alike suddenly disappeared. At the time the list emerged he had been hoping to launch a career as a screenwriter (his memoir, The Adderall Diaries, had been recently made into a film starring James Franco). His move to New Orleans came after he concluded that this was no longer possible, that he needed a fresh start.

Elliott isn’t the only man to maintain that the allegations against him are false. “I didn’t do what I’m accused of on the list. But obviously I wronged somebody to the point that they want to mess with my life,” one anonymous man told The Cut in 2018. But in a world where the accused talk about quietly moving on from the list as an act of feminist solidarity — in that man’s words, “taking one for the team” — Elliott is alone in his relentless desire to clear his name.

One of his earliest attempts came in the form of an essay in Quillette titled “How An Anonymous Accusation Derailed My Life”, which was published in September 2018. The response was heated. But it was the lawsuit he filed a year later, just before the statute of limitations for such a case expired, that caused the biggest uproar — maybe even more so than the list itself. “Stephen Elliott Continues to Be a Shitty Media Man,” read one representative headline. It was not the alleged rape, but the news that he was suing the list’s creator, Moira Donegan, for defamation, that triggered the vandalism to Elliott’s home and car.

Elliott reported those incidents to the police, a fact he tells me he recently shared with Lila Shapiro, a journalist from New York Magazine who was writing a five-year retrospective on all things Shitty Media Man. But when that story was published last week, there was no mention of the vandalism. Rather than bringing readers up-to-date, the story dwelled deeply on the circumstances surrounding the original creation of the list — and in Elliott’s case, assembled prior reporting, previously published accounts, and testimonials from his former friends and colleagues to paint a picture of him as a man with a long, fraught history of overfamiliar, boundary-challenging behaviour.

Elliott was the kind of colleague who would hold your hand, climb into your lap, overshare about his sex life and ask impertinent questions about yours, oblivious to how uncomfortable he was making you. He doesn’t dispute this — “I can be needy, I can be clingy,” he tells me, though he believes that there’s some context missing: “The cues I misread were more like, I thought we were friends. It’s never a sexual situation.” But this is the thrust of the piece, more or less: in choosing to focus on Elliott’s personality, his way of moving through the world, it suggests that we can elide the problem of his having been accused of a crime that not even his fiercest detractors actually seem to believe he committed.

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Full disclosure: Elliott and I have several friends in common, and my husband and I met him once for a drink near his home in New Orleans when we were there in 2019. I found him appealingly guileless, but I also did not struggle to understand why some people don’t; Elliott is notoriously open about the topics most people keep under wraps, and it’s not hard to see how that frank vulnerability could seem, or be, manipulative under the proper circumstances. (The New York Magazine piece includes a quote from memoirist Elissa Bassist, who describes failing to set firm boundaries with Elliott because “I was so afraid of hurting his delicate feelings”.) Even his defence against the allegation that he raped someone is kind of a kinky overshare: where other men on the list described racking their brains to figure out which sexual encounter might have spawned the accusation, which woman had come to see what happened as nonconsensual, Elliott says he has no such back catalogue of encounters to pore over because he doesn’t have penetrative sex with women.

That, he tells me, is what makes the framing of this story so frustrating. A woman who felt uncomfortable about Elliott’s over-familiar behaviour “has a right to her interpretation. What you feel about what happened, it’s not invalid. It’s not really objective,” he says. “What is objective is rape.”

But this is what’s so strange about this case: not that Elliott’s sexual history makes the rape allegation implausible, but that nobody seems to care. Hence the focus on his documented history of making women uncomfortable, which is supposed to be understood as different in degree but not in kind from the felony of which he’d been accused. No charges were ever brought against him, and no other women alleging rape or even sexual misconduct ever came forward, anonymously or otherwise. As novelist Claire Vay Watkins said: “Stephen Elliott did not rape me, did not attempt to rape me. I am not anywhere close to implying that he did. I am saying a sexist negation, a refusal to acknowledge a female writer as a writer, as a peer, as a person, is of a piece with sexual entitlement.” It’s a neat rhetorical trick: in one breath, Watkins emphatically does not accuse Elliott of raping her, while also emphatically suggesting that he’s the type of guy who would.

The New York Magazine piece seems to confirm this with a previously unpublished and fairly shocking allegation from a woman identified as R.D., who said that when she walked into a writing class hosted by Elliott, he “stopped the class and dove at me and threw his face into my tits and started moaning”.

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Elliott has been generally candid since his cancellation about when and how he’s crossed the line with women: yes, he was pushy about asking to sleep in women’s beds. Yes, he put his hands in people’s pockets. But this, he says, categorically did not happen — and he also says something else: “Does that even sound plausible to you?”

He has a point: the story is outrageous. But not only that, it’s the one testimonial against Elliott that genuinely supports the conflation of a creepy person with a rapey one. Amid multiple reports of Elliott wheedling and whining to sleep in women’s beds (but then relenting, albeit poutingly, when told no), here was a legitimate instance of nonconsensual sexual contact, an incident that seemed to truly bridge the gap between “boundary challenged” and “violent felony committed”.

In other MeToo stories, this is where you would often see a quick journalistic aside: that another member of the class remembered witnessing this incident, or that R.D. told a friend about it at the time. Corroboration lends credibility, especially when the accused flatly denies it. But the this story contains no such note, and here’s where things get weird: Elliott says that not only is this story false, but that the accuser (whose identity he learned during fact checking) is someone with whom he had a multi-year sexual relationship. He also says that the woman in question violated him by carving the word “owned” into one of his buttocks with a needle while he was tied up and either blindfolded or wearing a hood, he isn’t sure which. (A friend of Elliott’s from the BDSM scene confirmed to me that he told her about the ass-carving incident several years ago during a conversation about his experiences as a submissive. R.D. did not respond to a request for comment. Shapiro declined to answer questions about her reporting process via email.)

Of course, none of this is to say definitively that Elliott didn’t abruptly halt a writing class to molest a newly-arrived student, nor can we know for certain that said student later carved the word “owned” on Elliott’s rear end. The only thing clear from these conflicting accounts is that the truth, buried as it is in a miasma of old grudges, kinky sex, and a transformative reckoning with the norms that govern relationships between men and women, is extremely complicated. But this is what’s striking about the Shitty Media Men list — and to a certain extent, the coverage of it ever since: it not only eschews nuance, but displays a practiced incuriosity as to what the truth might be. And when questions arise as to the veracity of the list, or the fraught implications of making it, the response is to downplay its seriousness until it sounds less like a groundbreaking movement for social justice and more like something a bunch of girls did at a slumber party. “That first night? It was the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life,” says one woman quoted in the New York Magazine piece.

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Illuminated here is the fundamental tension at the heart of MeToo: it is very difficult to demand that sexual assault be taken seriously, but simultaneously insist that false allegations thereof are no big deal. At the peak of the movement, it was not unusual to hear that it was “worth it” for a few innocent men to be ruined for the sake of social progress. In Elliott’s case, there’s also a heavy element of victim blaming: a representative tweet from literary influencer Maris Kreisman expressed that it was “infuriating but also mildly fun to watch Stephen Elliott place blame on everyone but himself”, as though being falsely accused of a serious crime were simply the natural, even entertaining, outcome of having a difficult personality. And indeed, it’s hard to imagine any other criminal allegation being treated this way, with the accused expected to fall on the sword for the sake of the greater good, guilty or not.

There’s something about this that recalls the famous scene in the movie The Fugitive, where Richard Kimball, played by Harrison Ford, is cornered at the precipice of the Cheoah Dam. He turns, pleading, desperate: “I didn’t kill my wife,” he shouts.

His pursuer replies, “I don’t care.”

That’s when Kimball jumps, but it’s not the leap that’s shocking; it’s the apathy that precedes it. The notion that innocence doesn’t matter, that the truth doesn’t matter. Stephen Elliott isn’t accused of murder, but there are nevertheless echoes of that same apathy in the public exhortations — of critics, of former friends, even of fellow accused men — to just stop fighting, already. To accept the rape accusation as a fair cop for all the discomfort he might have caused. To “conduct yourself with grace in the court of life”, as one former colleague puts it, “rather than the court of law”.

But for whatever it gets him (and it’s not likely to be much), Elliott’s determination remains a thorn in the side of that satisfying narrative about women coming together to take down the bad men once and for all. The idea that there should be serious consequences for serious crimes — and by extension, serious repercussions in the event that an accusation is made falsely or frivolously — isn’t just alarming, but a buzzkill. The idea of wielding one’s power responsibly, and being held accountable when you don’t, is not part of the patriarchy-smashing vibe we’re trying to cultivate, here. And on this front, it’s impossible not to notice the role reversal, and the parallels, between this and how women have long suffered for reporting sexual harassment.

The Shitty Media Men list might have been the outrage du jour, but it wasn’t until Elliott filed his lawsuit that people really got angry. Why did he have to ruin the fun? Why couldn’t he just take a joke? Why, in the age of MeToo, are you taking accusations of sexual assault so seriously?

What has happened to Lena? That is one of the questions that rushed through my head when, after two attempts, I made it through Sharp Stick, her first feature since 2011. Others included: what is wrong with this film? Is it a test of the inanity of contemporary critics? Or is she baiting us to cancel her? Or has she, all along, been just as idiotic, just as narcissistic, just as myopic as her crudest haters insisted?

I feel insane even describing the film’s plot. The protagonist Sarah Jo, a 26-year-old caretaker for a child with Down’s Syndrome, begs his man-child father to take her virginity (she had an emergency hysterectomy at age 17, which sexually stunted her). This causes her to instantly transform into an infantile nymphomaniac. Soon enough into the sometimes mushrooms-fuelled, sometimes porn-fuelled, affair, the mother — a sharp-tongued and overbearing businesswoman portrayed by Lena herself, in some strange self-hating gesture — finds out. (Actually, she finds out on the floor of the kitchen after she slips in a pool of her own amniotic fluid.) Sarah Jo is fired — and finds solace in an ethical porn star who resembles her ex-lover. (He addresses the camera with words like “I feel so connected to you” and “I admire your commitment to women’s personal expression”.)

Worried she’s bad at sex, Sarah Jo embarks on a journey of self-discovery that involves hanging elementary-school arts-and-craftsy checklists of extreme sexual acts around her room and soliciting men on fetish apps to participate in them. At one point she jumps out of the bushes and screams at the family she used to work for, “I did bukkake!” The disabled child and newborn react with distress.

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The film has received some praise, which has appeared in Instagram ads featuring suggestive photos of the film’s completely conventionally attractive star, Kristine Froseth, who has modelled for Chanel, Armani and Prada. Vanity Fair called it “Supremely Funny”; Rolling Stone claimed it was “both absurd and enlightening” (in fairness, they were running an interview with Lena; to be honest might have been impolitic). But, in a refreshing show of lucidity in the face of a star-studded film that was very diverse — perhaps to clumsily rebuke critics of Girls’s whiteness — most outlets have panned it. To quote The New York Times’s Manohla Dargis: “There’s no point in enumerating all the reasons I dislike it”. 

Perhaps critics feel unusually free to be honest about this awful film because of a perplexing controversy around its creation. Apparently Forseth, who plays Sarah Jo, reached out to Amy Gravino, the autism activist — known for her “Why Autism is Sexier Than You Think” TedTalk — about consulting on the film. Then the creators suddenly decided that Forseth’s character would not be autistic. According to Gravino, though, the character is “clearly” coded as autistic, and the “dehumanising” film participates in the “infantilisation of people on the spectrum”.

Sarah Jo is certainly childish: she’s constantly smearing yoghurt all over her mouth, and a baby-talking bartender has to teach her how to drink as she holds a wine cup with two hands like a sippy-cup. She dresses in the kind of upmarket baby clothes that are now so often found draped on the underweight and affluent. When her sister asks her to stop openly scratching her genitals, her mother asks: “Is it a wiping issue?” And it goes beyond credulity, into broad comedy, for this 26-year-old — adoring daughter of a potty-mouthed, aged-out tart and loyal sister of a viral TikToker who can’t identify the father of her child — to respond to “Can I go down on you?” with (bug-eyed smile, high-pitched squeal): “Down where?!”

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Along with a screener, the film’s marketers sent me Lena’s “Director’s Statement”: it was, I was told, “worth reading”. The last three films I’ve written about have brandished a similar exegesis: is this phenomenon an expression of condescension toward audiences, or fear of their wrath? Appropriately, the Statement revealed that this is an ideologically unimpeachable film: during the pandemic, the chronically ill Dunham came to reflect on her life. In Sarah Jo, she developed a character who experienced her physical challenges — a complete hysterectomy due to chronic endometriosis — and emotional challenges — “often feeling as if life and romance, and womanhood on the whole, are a secret that everyone is in on except for me.”

Contemplating the portrayal of sexually active women in film, Lena thought about how they so often end up either murdered or at least subjected to “a torture of judgment, of questioning, of self-doubt and loneliness and regret over choices that should ultimately just be part of the fabric of self-actualisation in that same way it can be for their male counterparts”. So, she “began to imagine a character whose sexual journey would be totally unique, unmarred by shame or self-hate or the projections of others. She would use sex not to destroy her body but to heal it from a history of medicalised trauma and cultural projection”. Hence, Sarah Jo’s “private and judgment free sexual journey”.

How to portray that? As Lena concludes: “I pushed myself to write this script with honesty and a certain demented purity. When I asked this story what it needed from me, I simply heard Sarah Jo telling me ‘Please don’t try and make me cute.’ And so, I let her rage.”

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I suppose there is a certain “demented purity” to Sarah Jo — but is it truly countercultural to show a woman empowering herself through watching porn and speedrunning through the “categories” with faceless strangers? In a world where yonic prosthetics are advertised on public transport, do contemporary media narratives actually discount female pleasure? Is it all that subversive to show a Scandinavian model begging for another go in up-to-the-minute fashions? Girls, by contrast, was brave enough to show Lena Dunham naked — naked and dismayed.

Indeed, Lena’s brilliance has always been her attention to the disappointments of sexual liberation. I remember seeing her first film, Tiny Furniture, at the local arthouse theatre when I was 17;  amid so many EU-funded multinational WWI dramas and mumblecores about dumpy Portlanders with regrettable tattoos, it was shockingly relevant. Its last scene is one of the greatest portraits, today, of the false promise of hook-up culture: Lena’s character finally seduces the hot guy, which means him pulling down her pants and using her for a few moments in an abandoned drain pipe. 

What happened to that Lena? Of course, she’s always seemed like a terrible person — but her early work portrayed her failures with a clear-eyed precision that cut through the noise. She seemed to know that all her characters were awful. Why is she now saying, “I think we have enough messaging in society, and probably in my 20s I contributed to it, that said, like, ‘porn is ruining sex, and it’s making it so hard for people’”?

Sharp Stick is entertaining in the sense that it offers the rubbernecking fascination of the worst trainwrecks. But the coming-of-age via kink here is so devoid of any plausibility, let alone subtlety, that this seems almost like a dystopian send-up of a 2010s sex romp. If this bizarre, borderline paedophilic fantasy is a failure, though, it’s not a vindication because Lena has always been so awful; it’s a shame because she used to be so exceptional. Either Lena is truly the most brilliant performance artist of a generation, or one of its biggest casualties. 

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Wherefore this fantasy of frictionless sex, of anonymous encounters with randy internet strangers? Why on Earth would this be the way to heal from sexual injury? I suppose the director of Sharp Stick couldn’t really convince herself either: the film concludes in textbook white knight fashion. Sarah Jo’s saviour is a handsome porn-industry PA who won’t have sex with her without getting to know her (which she’s not interested in). Instead, he goes to epic lengths to “heal her trauma”. In a gesture of saintliness, he shares her fan mail with the ethical porn star she’s obsessed with, who tells her to be “proud of your fucking scars”. Finally, she accepts his love: going off-checklist and allowing him to gently caress her. 

I suppose this is a familiar problem with feminist art: do female characters really want the hyper-efficient, attachment-free anti-intimacy of their masculine counterparts? As Lena bemoaned in her Director’s Statement, women don’t get an Alfie — but do they want one? Even Carrie Bradshaw ended up with Mr. Big, and in Sally Rooney’s latest, a few hundred pages of light BDSM neatly tie up in two couples, plus a baby on the way. The marriage plot certainly originates in a world of primogeniture and patriarchy; but perhaps abandoning all sentiment and sensitivity is a patriarchal fantasy as well.

I don’t believe Lena could resist a little nuance: the free-wheeling mother here is a cautionary tale, as is the sister who, as her mother callously acknowledges at what appears to be an abortion party, can’t bring a baby into the “living realm”. The (lazily repetitive) montage of Sarah Jo and her multitudinous partners is far from alluring; the film’s only erotic scene is the final, tender, vanilla one. 

Perhaps the title, here, is a giveaway: as Sarah Jo says of her sexual quest, it will be like “When I was a kid and the doctor was taking blood and the doctor said ‘This will just be a sharp stick’, and I knew it would hurt more than they said, so I beat them to it in my mind and that was my power”.

“I knew it would hurt more than they said”: this, I think, is Lena’s final assessment of so-called sexual freedom.

Maintaining this division is fundamental to maintaining the belief that a thing called gender identity — and gender identity only — explains individuals’ decisions to transition. It’s a belief in gender identity that allows the broadcaster Natasha Devon to write: “A trans woman is just as much a woman as I am — just a different sort of woman, with different needs.”

Once you accept the existence of some kind of internal, inherent womanhood it becomes possible to argue that physical sex is a triviality that must be looked past. The flesh is a faulty representative of the true self within, and the path to enlightenment comes when you learn to trust other people’s accounts of themselves over your own lying eyes.

With the principle of gender identity in place, you can even argue that it’s female people who are the blithely privileged ones, while male people (who, of course, must not be called male) have the wisdom instilled by disadvantage. The trans writer Julia Serano — who used the term “subconsious sex” in preference to “gender identity” — put it like this:

“Many cissexual people seem to have a hard time accepting the idea that they too have a subconscious sex — a deep-rooted understanding of what sex their bodies should be. I suppose that when a person feels right in the sex they were born into, they are never forced to locate or question their subconscious sex, to differentiate it from their physical sex. In other words, their subconscious sex exists, but it is hidden from their view. They have a blind spot.”

In short: if you have doubts about whether your sex is, in fact, best defined by an immaterial sense of self which you have never personally experienced, then you should stow your questions because all they betray is your own good fortune at not being trans. Lucky you, you must just love your gender role.

And if you suggest that the category we call trans might actually be a mix of several different things manifesting in distinctive ways within certain groups — if, say, you suggest that a woman with a complicated history of trauma fleeing femaleness might not be having exactly the same experience as middle-aged male posing in makeup — then god help you. Above all, never conceive that some instances of male transition might contain something distinctively sexual.

In 2003, the academic Michael Bailey published a book called The Man Who Would Be Queen, a dishy pop-science take on transsexuality (before that term was verboten) based on his own lengthy and sympathetic engagement with the trans community. It put forward the argument, drawn from sexologist Ray Blanchard, that males who transition fall, roughly, into two types.

The “homosexual transsexual” (usually young, gay and effeminate) is attracted to men and seeking to be attractive to men. So far, so much what most people suspected about the motivation for transition. But the second type was a more psychologically complex proposition. The “autogynephile transsexual” was often older, usually straight, tended to have a history of crossdressing — and was driven by an intense attraction to the idea of himself as a woman.

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Does it matter why people experience themselves as being trans? For the individual concerned, perhaps not: when one reaches the point of misery with one’s physical body at which transition seems the only liveable choice, the backstory probably feels very much beside the point.

But for clinicians, studying the reasons for something as unusual as the drive to change sex can be important in helping direct patients to the most appropriate path. Gender reassignment surgery is a drastic process, and it makes sense to explore whether someone’s issues might be resolved by another means. And more than that, it’s just interesting. Humans are strange and complicated creatures. Understanding them is more than a life’s work.

As far as trans activists of the early noughties were concerned, though, this specific thing was not supposed to be understood. For addressing the theory of autogynephilia, Bailey was subjected to a life-ruining campaign of harassment. His professional reputation was assassinated; his family was abused. In her exhaustive and riveting investigation into the controversy, Alice Dreger found that even before Bailey’s critics had read the book, they’d concluded that its contents would be dangerous.

It became vital to establish that the autogynephilia theory was, as Serano wrote, “based on dubious evidence and has never been scientifically substantiated”. It could even, said Serano, be considered sexist — an outcome of “our cultural tendency to sexualize femininity and femaleness in all its forms”. And yet, infuriatingly for the cause, the sex keeps seeping into transwomen’s accounts of themselves.

It’s there is Caitlyn Jenner’s The Secrets of My Life, when she writes about the thrill of seeing her reflection in full feminine dress: “Sometimes I wonder if dressing up like this is the equivalent of having sex with myself, male and female at the same time.”

It’s there is Juno Dawson’s teacherly book The Gender Games, which breaks off from informing readers of the correct way to think about gender to tell us how, when living as a gay man, Dawson had felt “a very conscious urge to get fucked, to be penetrated as a woman would be”.

It’s there, extravagantly, in Andrea Long Chu’s Females: A Concern, which defines the “barest essentials” of “femaleness” as “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”. It’s there in Torrey Peters’ spiritedly indecent novel of queer families and sissy fetishes, Detransition, Baby. (One trans reader’s first reaction to the novel’s compulsive bean-spilling was to say: “I’m upset that the cis are going to read it”.)

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And it’s there in Grace Lavery’s memoir Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. “There’s also the fear that what I write will be used against trans people in some way,” sighs Lavery, before jumping in anyway and describing the desire to be “fetishized… as a slutty girl is” and “assaulted as a girl is”.

Where you won’t find it, on the whole, is in testimonials by trans men. Gabriel Mac, in New York Magazine, concludes post-transition that he is in fact asexual. Thomas Page McBee’s autobiography Man Alive describes a history of terrible abuse leading to nightmarish depersonalisation: “I felt like a marionette, otherworldly and wooden.” The experiences fantasised about by Lavery did not confirm McBee’s femininity but broke the bond between self and body.

Trans men do get horny — the startlingly frank diaries of bathhouse denizen Lou Sullivan are one example, the career of porn star Buck Angel another — but there’s an undeniable sex divide here. Living as the opposite sex can be arousing for male transitioners, while female transitioners often experience it as something more like a respite from the demands of being a body.

This is, or should be, expected. Paraphilias — or fetishes — are wildly more common among male subjects than female ones. But it’s a paradox too. It means that male-to-female transitioners are, on the whole, becoming women in a specifically masculine way; and female-to-male transitioners are becoming men in a way that is characteristically feminine. The change of gender only reasserts the starting point.

Without wanting to traduce my whole sex, women can be sometimes wilfully naive about the force of masculine sexuality — and the range and strangeness of masculine desires. Paraphilias are not only more common in men, but also much more acceptable, on the whole, to men than they are to women. Tell a woman about the weird shit that gets you off, and you run a high risk of leaving her disgusted. It’s that disgust, I think, that leads some women to downplay the importance of sex for male people who want to be seen as women.

But it’s easier to believe comforting falsehoods about a universal gender identity (whatever one of those is) than to accommodate the sticky mess that male sexuality can be. As Debbie Hayton has written in these pages, in an essay entitled “Why I became trans”: “the concept of gender identity has been comforting and politically useful for autogynephilic transsexuals in a society that stigmatises unusual male sexuality”. This feminine coyness creates a strange situation where trans women can tell the dirty truth about themselves until they’re blue in the face, and kind-hearted women of the Natasha Devon tendency will pretend they never heard them.

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It’s why the Marie Claire review of Detransition, Baby doesn’t mention the kinky stuff but does suggest that “cisgender women can learn a great deal about gender, motherhood, and queer identity from Peters”. It takes skill to distil wholesome self-improvement from a novel where one trans woman character declares “I want a man to love me so much he murders me”, but part of the art of femininity has always been the ability to prettify unpleasantness.

It’s not ladylike to comment on indecent things. The proper role of women is to demurely support the masculine quest for satisfaction. Amy Bloom’s superb 2002 “Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses” — which predates current doctrines about gender identity — describes a subculture in which husbands can revel in their feminine side by dressing up.

But they can only do this because their wives are there to do the less attractive but equally feminine work of looking after them. Wives help with makeup; wives advise on clothes. Wives continue to do all the things wives traditionally do. “For twenty years he couldn’t help with the dishes because he was watching football. Now he can’t help because he’s doing his nails. Is that different?” grouches one woman who, despite her obvious dissatisfaction, has still gone along to support her husband on a crossdressing retreat.

The horror at the idea of women bucking their allocated role as support humans explains why some feminist writers have received shocked pushback when quoting the trans women I’ve referenced above. A male writer can self-disclose with impunity, but when a woman draws attention to it, suddenly everyone gets uncomfortable. The quotes must be “out of context” — surely Chu can’t really mean the essence of woman is an “expectant asshole”? And yet that is what Chu wrote, so that is what we must believe was meant.

Is there anything wrong with a weird sexual predilection? In itself, no: what happens between brain and genitals to get the latter going is the definition of a private affair. So there really ought to be no cause for embarrassment about the fact that some trans women have a sexual component to their transition. If the activists keep lying about it, it’s because they’re the ones who are ashamed of it.

They were from a particular subculture within the lesbian movement, known for flaunting their predilections for sadomasochism, pornography, and public sex. They were outrageous by most people’s standards — including my own. These women argued that the practice of S&M was rebellious and liberatory; that it allowed women to break free of the expectation to be sexually submissive.

Memories of it all came flooding back as I watched Rebel Dykes, a film about that particular tribe. It follows a group of close friends who met at Greenham Common peace camp and became part of that significantly rebellious lesbian subculture. There are clips of the women having public sex shows at BDSM nightclubs; marching in full regalia on anti-Thatcher rallies, and joining forces with gay men to demand action around AIDS.

Of course, my tribe of lesbians was at odds with the rebel dykes. We campaigned against male violence and abuse of women, and, like the US feminist Robin Morgan, believed that “pornography is the theory; rape is the practice”. We railed against acts of sexual sadism and fought hard to dispel the misogynistic myth that women enjoy being abused and degraded during sex. In my view, the S&M that the Rebel Dykes celebrated was simply a re-enforcement of the way violent men treat women.

For their part, they painted us as dull and sexless, dismissing us as joyless prudes. Roz Kaveney, a transwoman involved in the ‘kink’ scene back then, would mock my tribe, saying that lesbians like me thought that “holding hands in 20 different positions” was hot sex. That’s another thing that struck me about the film: the parallels between now and then. Lesbians and women who are critical of porn and S&M and sexual exploitation today are treated in exactly the same way as we were back then: portrayed as anti-sex prudes.

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The talking heads in the film have great fun re-visiting their youth, spinning tales of drunkenness, sex with multiple partners, and direct action. They talk about Greenham Common women’s peace camp, where a group of them broke into the squaddies’ bar and stole all the booze. But the film mainly focuses on the squatting culture in London, and the so-called “lesbian sex wars” that raged through the UK in the early to late Eighties. Those wars were fought over the turf of porn, kink, S&M, and public sex.

In April 1985 I went along to the very first extraordinary general meeting (EGM) of the newly founded Lesbian and Gay Centre in London. The centre should have been a haven for the entire community, with its café, bar, bookshop, creche, meeting rooms, media resource, offices for rent to lesbian and gay projects and enterprises, and a regular disco. It could not have been more perfect, on paper. But its management committee was involved in a huge dilemma. Who could use the centre, and for what, and which views would be acceptable to be aired in the premises? At that stage, the management committee was an all-white group of men and women, and they were keen to make it more accessible to a diverse crowd.

The main item on the agenda at the EGM was the S&M issue. Although the Management Committee had initially allowed groups advocating for and practicing S&M to meet at the centre, they had reversed that decision following complaints from the Lesbians Against Sadomasochism (LASM). These women objected to the sight of leather, chains and Nazi regalia in a space that was supposed to be protective of persecuted minorities. The packed meeting was extremely tense, and nothing was resolved.

The film includes fascinating, grainy footage of the event. One clip shows Linda Bellos, a black, Jewish, working-class lesbian opposing S&M ideology, while a young S&M dyke in the audience, also black and working-class, was being nudged by white women to speak up “as a black lesbian”. The attempt by both sides to use identity politics as a way to claim more credibility and ‘right to speak’ was counter-productive, as each time a Jewish woman, for example, said how offended she was at symbols of Nazi Germany (such as the peaked leather cap) being used in S&M role-play, one from the other side would claim she was ‘subverting’ its meaning.

In a subsequent meeting, the extremely polarised issue of dress codes came up. A group called the Sexual Fringe, which represented the S&M contingent, wanted an “anything goes” policy whereas the hard-core feminists wanted to ban leather jackets (something I was opposed to, on the grounds that leather jackets per se were not in any way offensive). The main topic of conversation was whether certain items of clothing and accessories could be seen as racist, fascist or antisemitic. There were some sadists who liked to lead women (who identified as masochists) around on all fours on a leash. There were others who liked to wear chains, swastikas, whips and handcuffs. This was an unusual meeting in that certain things were resolved, for once. It was agreed that the swastika should be banned, and it was also agreed, albeit grudgingly, that leading a woman around on a chain on all fours should also be banned.

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Generally, though, neither side saw eye to eye. When the fetish club Chain Reaction was opened by the S&Mers in London in 1987, home to everything from mud wrestling to exhibitionist sex shows, and strippers. LASM picketed the club. We handed out leaflets explaining why, as far as we were concerned, eroticising pain and humiliation was the very antithesis of women’s liberation. Our leaflets read: “there can be no defence of a practice which is racist, anti-Semitic and woman hating. How is this different from what men do to women?” But the party went on inside. Nothing was resolved.

At another meeting, in 1988, Joan Nestle, a “sex positive” lesbian heavily into butch/femme role play spoke. There was a massive debate between the feminists and the pro-S&Mers during that meeting, and I could see why so many were captivated by Nestle. Funny, charismatic and honest, she appealed to so many of the working-class women in the audience who felt judged by the hard-core feminists. More than once in the film, references are made to how middle class the anti-S&M feminists were in contrast to the Rebel Dykes, but this gives an inaccurate impression. I was one of many working class protesters against S&M, and the sexual libertarian movement that inspired much of the Rebel Dyke standpoint was rooted in French post-structuralism — hardly a topic for down The Dog and Duck.

The Rebel Dykes loved being provocative and bad taste riffs were common, verging on harassment. For example, when Lisa Power, a Stonewall founder who is interviewed in the film, started the lesbian sex-toy business, Thrilling Bits, she named “our smallest and most inoffensive vibrator ‘the Sheila’” after anti-porn feminist Sheila Jeffreys, which was a pretty ugly move. The black dildo in the Thrilling Bits collection was named “the Whitney”, (after Whitney Houston) but interestingly this was not mentioned in the film.

The arguments over S&M, public sex and anti-Semitism raged in America, too. I visited San Francisco in 1985, having been told that a new magazine, aimed at lesbians, had been launched into this crucible. It was called On Our Backs. The title itself was poking fun at the feminist magazine, Off Our Backs (meaning “women, there is no need to be on our backs for the patriarchy”). On Our Backs took a pro kink, pro porn stance, and featured S&M content.

I requested an interview with the editors of On Our Backs, and turned up looking like something out of Bunty magazine. In my pale blue linen trousers and white cotton blouse and Birkenstock sandals, I exuded an air of innocence that sharply contrasted with the image of the leather-clad editors. Looking me up and down, one of the women told me that she had considered asking me to pose for the magazine, but had now decided against it. I was not offended, merely relieved.

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During the conversation I asked the women if they had a line in the sand that they would not cross in terms of pornographic and sadomasochistic content. One of them gave me an example: “We had a story submitted by a woman to fantasised setting fire to her I lover, and it was very graphic, but we couldn’t decide between us whether or not it was too extreme to run it, so it is still sitting in our in-tray.” If it was not already obvious to me that there could be no peaceful coexistence between feminism and S&M practitioners, that moment crystallised it.

The film, rather than draw any conclusions about the Rebel Dyke scene is a nostalgic trip down a particular memory lane. A number of the interviewees, including Roz Kaveny and Lisa Power, are still actively campaigning to discredit feminists — in particular those of us who critique pornography, kink, and extreme trans ideology.

That’s what struck me particularly forcefully: that not much has changed. Today, feminists who oppose porn and prostitution as forms of violence against women are seen as anti-sex and ‘whorephobic’; the Queer movement is enthusiastically embracing kink as an identity as part of the alphabet soup of LGBTQQIA+. But the Rebel Dykes did not have the institutional support that the feminist hating Queer Isis of today does.

For all the S&M lesbians saw themselves (and clearly still do, going by the views expressed by the talking heads in the film) as edgy, progressive and sex-positive, they were anything but. Buying in to the misogynistic myths that women love to be hurt and humiliated during sex — that pain is erotic; that pleasure can be derived from the steel-capped boot on the neck — is nothing short of capitulating to patriarchy. I will continue to fight for the liberation of women from sexual violation, because for me, the true rebels are those who refuse to see masochism as anything to celebrate.

Those she went on dates with frequently turned out to be married, or single and committed to a polyamorous lifestyle. Most, like her, weren’t aiming for a conventional monogamous relationship. One man, around her age, had recently left his wife and two daughters to live in a bedsit and sleep with as many “girlfriends” as he could muster. Rana, a 47-year-old who tells men up front that she is only interested in having lovers, and will never again embrace monogamy, says that every last one of them has joyously accepted her terms.

Once, boomers’ sex lives were seen as an embarrassing topic; now, they’re exciting, worthy of attention from HBO, even. The remake of Sex and the City, And Just Like That, in which original cast members are now in their 50s, starts this week, and it has been heralded by some as the best instalment yet. “Let me tell you,” said star Sarah Jessica Parker in a recent interview, “there’s still a lot of sex in this version of Sex and the City.” As the series will make abundantly clear, sexual glamour is no longer the preserve of the young, although that’s partly thanks to technologies that keep people looking younger longer. Porn has also helped shift the relationship between age and sexiness, certainly for women, thanks to the rise of the Milf category.

Long a feature of the intellectual elite, the rich and the landed, sexual libertinism among the middle-aged is hardly new. It is newer for the middle classes, though, who became, in the West, less monogamous after World War Two. John Updike, in the Sixties, became known for a set of novels in which bored and angry married people, of varying degrees of affluence, took to sleeping with other people, including their friends’ wives and husbands. “Welcome to the post-pill paradise,” he wrote wryly in Couples (1968), set in 1963. (Working class morality before the Seventies was likely to preclude sexual and marital high-jinxery.)

But the picture of suburban, middle-class libertinism has changed. In the Sixties, the typical practitioner was younger, bored and miserable: the average age of couples getting married was lower, and women had fewer opportunities. But this stereotype has been replaced by a breed of boisterously exploratory 50-somethings in unashamed pursuit of personal fulfilment. This is partly because most moral strictures around sexuality have been eroded — including the final taboo of fidelity, which can now be dressed up as “ethical non-monogamy”, a phrase that now recurs on dating apps.

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We have the progressive young to thank for this: Sietzke, a 57-year-old divorcee with four lovers, tells me that “people my sons’ age” — they are 25 and 28 — have “also helped by making it easier to bring these things up, to talk about them openly”. But “ethical non-monogamy” actually leaves some young people, especially women, frustrated or worse in their quest to find someone to settle down with; it’s actually well-to-do older people who seem to be reaping the sexual fruits. Some of these are bitter: STI rates in the over-50s doubled between 2002 and 2012, and have kept steadily rising.

And so we are at a strange pass. As the olds are merrily fucking, rates of sexual activity in the young have dropped. The preoccupation with being ‘correct’ is perhaps to blame, as well as the sheer barrage of terminology evident on all apps, but particularly on Feeld, the “dating app for couples and singles”, which describes itself as “a space where you can explore your identity” and “start connecting with open-minded humans”. Scrolling through an account, I struggled to understand what the men were saying. “A Dom [dominant] looking for FWB [friends with benefits], etc etc, I don’t prefer ONS [one night stands]…” wrote one. Another, defined as a “Man Queer”, introduced himself thus: “Playfights, cuddling, kissing, lake swimming are all good things. Maybe you want to do them? Say hi, make me feel pretty J.” A pan-sexual 29-year old’s “interests” were “crossdressing, pegging, cum play, lingerie, eye contact”.

The men might have been lovely people, but the way they presented themselves romantically was alien and didactic, even to me, a fairly liberal 39-year-old. The rise of these highly specific demands come, I suspect, from the infiltration of an identitarian politics into the bedroom — one that prizes kink and the erosion of boundaries as ‘inclusive’. Living on the internet has also given many young people a sense of entitlement to instant, bespoke results. Schooled in getting exactly what they want, they’re met with the confounding reality that humans are messier and needier than is convenient.

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Back in the over-50s pool, there seems to be less taxonomising of self and kinks, and those who have had children seem less phased by the complications of having ‘lovers’ rather than either casual hook-ups or a conventional relationship. Many are simply going for broke, hoovering up what sensual pleasures they can — because they can. “As you get older — it’s sort of an Eastern idea — you sort of think, all you’ve got is now, which is much more valuable than a future I really think,” says Sietzke. In other words, age is a freeing agent. “There’s a liberation that comes from being older,” says Rana. ”You know life doesn’t last forever, so there’s an added incentive to give anything a try.”

Rana also points to the fact that being “financially independent” helps. Young people, understandably, are more likely to be focused on the future, and with getting on the housing ladder out of reach for most of them, especially those in the south, the quest for a partner is also a strategy for accruing financial stability and property — and a basis for having children. After her divorce, in her early 50s, Sietzke recalls being constantly told by well-meaning folk that she would meet someone again. It irritated her. “Finding someone is such a construct — someone? What do they mean by that?”

When you’ve had marriage and kids, this perspective makes sense. But for the millennials yet to pull off financial stability and a family, the old, unsexy quest for ‘someone’ may feel more natural. Libertinism is perfect when your traditional romantic life, and its fruits (children), are behind you. Those with the desire for a family and a home in front of them may feel that the joys of free love are not theirs to enjoy. Yet.

Behind the social pressure to add seasoning to your sex life lurks a particularly ugly compound word: “cisheteronormativity“. Roughly speaking, it means that human sexual expression is constrained by oppressive, patriarchal norms including heterosexuality (and being “vanilla’). We should bin these, the argument goes, and accept that the range of human sexual and gender expression is infinite, and that queer sexualities have always been around.

Certainly, tales from classical antiquity support the idea that unconventional tastes have a long history. According to Suetonius, the Roman emperor Nero (37-68AD) enjoyed dressing in the skins of animals and savaging the genitals of bound slaves. And the emperor Elagabalus (204-222AD) is said in the Historia Augusta to have (among many other things) attempted self-castration, enjoyed performing in live sex shows during banquets and scandalised Roman society by raping a Vestal Virgin.

Instead of clutching our pearls, theorists argue that we should celebrate the full rainbow of erotic expression. In this spirit, recent queer scholarship has promoted Elagabalus from his classical depiction as a depraved maniac who appointed ministers based on penis size to a transgender icon.

But the debate doesn’t just concern how we read ancient history. It also invites questions about the boundaries we set on sexuality today. Should anything be taboo? Last week, Lauren Rowello argued that these boundaries are nowhere near liberal enough. Not only should sexual fetishes be openly on display as part of Pride parades, she claims, but she believes it important for her children to see it – because kids should be taught that “that alternative experiences of sexuality and expression are valid”.

Normalising the public display of kinky proclivities, she argued, encourages children to pursue their own desire and pleasure: “We don’t talk to our children enough about pursuing sex to fulfill carnal needs that delight and captivate us in the moment.”

The dreary alternative to this is the old-fashioned “respectability politics” that used to be used to oppress gay people. This view is perhaps best summed by the Edwardian actress Mrs Patrick Campbell: “Does it really matter what these affectionate people do — so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!” But Rowello argues that the fact gay people are now imposing the same ‘respectability’ on kinky people means they’ve sided with the oppressive, bourgeois forces of stodgy old heteronormativity.

Whether or not Elagabalus viewed himself as bursting the bounds of bourgeois oppression, Rowello’s vision of “carnal needs” as an end in themselves dates from the beginning of the Enlightenment. Notably, we owe these ideas to the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), an egalitarian, anti-Christian and proponent of absolute freedom, who served under the revolutionary regime as “Citizen Sade”. His prolific literary works interweave attacks on Christianity and conventional morality with philosophical musings about the nature of freedom and graphic descriptions of kinky sex.

He was, in other words, a very modern kind of liberal indeed. It’s no surprise to find him among the first high-profile advocates of sexual liberation. As one of his characters puts it in Juliette (1797) “Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other”. It’s not such a big step from here to Rowello’s advocacy of “pursuing sex to fulfill carnal needs that delight and captivate us in the moment”.

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But de Sade also thought the usual rules of political equality, which he embraced so eagerly as Citizen Sade, didn’t apply to sexuality. In Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) he wrote that “every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.” That is, buried deep in every free and liberal citizen is the longing to dominate and be obeyed, and this is most freely expressed in a sexual context.

De Sade thought the best way to square freedom and equality with these naturally violent and domineering sexual instincts was to have a class of women whose job was to act as outlets. As the historian Peter Marshallnotes, he advocated the establishment of free public brothels where men could sate their sexual desires and longing to dominate – because in his view, not gratifying these desires would result in criminal acts.

Today, of course, we don’t do anything as crude as compel women to act as human disposal units for men’s baser urges. Or at least, we insist on ‘consent’. That is, by ensuring that the violence, rape and humiliation visited fictionally on weeping, unwilling women by de Sade only ever happens IRL to women who like it. The byword for advocates of ‘BDSM’ is ‘safe, sane and consensual’.

I dare say there are some for whom this theory hangs makes sense. But evidence is mounting that it’s prone to the same pitfalls as many other efforts to replace normative rules with individual choice. That is, it may work if you’re a highly educated, well-adjusted adult with plenty of social capital. But it leaves those who are impulsive, emotionally needy or otherwise vulnerable at risk of abuse.

A poll conducted last year by BBC Scotland reported that two-thirds of men under 40 have slapped, spat at, gagged or choked a partner during sex. Maybe some of the women enjoyed it, but all of them? I doubt it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a growing chorus (mostly of young women) is complaining that for them, “kink” turned out to be less a mutually pleasurable exchange than a vector for abuse.

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By Sarah Ditum

The question of “consent” is further complicated by the fact that normalising “alternative experiences of sexualty and expression” creates perverse social pressure not to be “vanilla”. Even Women’s Health magazine has suggested its readership try choking if blindfolds and roleplay “have veered into vanilla territory”.

And here we get to the core difficulty with trying to liberate human sexual expression from social norms: it doesn’t work. Young women now feel the need to say “It’s okay not to want violent sex”. The fact that it’s now cringe to have “vanilla” tastes suggests normalising “kink” has not created an open space for free, tolerant self-expression at all, but a surreal inversion of “respectability politics” in which you’ll be shamed if you aren’t depraved enough.

Worse yet, this upside-down respectability isn’t even the promised nirvana of pleasure. De Sade summed up the problem in 120 Days of Sodom (1785): “If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.” So what happens when “dirty” proclivities are so normalised people are OK with their kids seeing them?

The most likely outcome is they will stop feeling “naughty”. This helps to explain the aura of naffness which clings to the kind of people who like to be “open” about their “BDSM lifestyle”. But it also points to a structural problem with the idea of normalising “kink”: it is (as someone once said of Brexit) less an event than a process.

The opponents of cisheteronormativity argue that the whole point of Pride is broadening what’s acceptable in the mainstream, which in turn means rejecting “respectability politics”. As Vox puts it: “Queerness, at its core, is a rejection of that respectability.”

But if you reject respectability politics, you’re rejecting the whole structure of social stigma that surrounds forbidden practices, and as such endows them with frisson. What, then, is even the point of such practices, when the campaign to destigmatise them has rendered previously dark and thrilling scenarios as exotic and forbidden as a trip to Asda?

We may have embraced wholesale the idea that “anything goes” provided it’s “safe, sane and consensual”. But if the excitement of sexual taboos is precisely their forbidden-ness, then sooner or later someone will come for the taboo of consent itself — and especially on violating the consent of those who aren’t deemed able to consent in the first place: children and animals.

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Why is bestiality so disgusting?

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A steady tap-tap-tap on that door can be heard today. When Tom Chivers mused in these pages about why we’re disgusted by people having sex with animals recently, the ensuing brouhaha illustrates the extent to which this remains, thankfully, a no-go area; but earlier this year Joanna Bourke wrote a whole book seeking to question the taboos around bestiality.

Elsewhere, the internet is full of edgelords seeking to “complicate” the boundaries of underage sexual consent. This also extends into academia: Allyn Walker recently published a sympathetic study of non-offending paedophiles.

In other words, the “slippery slope” is not a conservative bogeyman. It’s a structural inevitability. Kink without “respectability politics” has no endpoint; or rather, its endpoint is well beyond the tolerance of even your average whips-and-chains hobbyist.

History suggests it’s not realistic to imagine sexual depravity can ever be eliminated. Humans are simply too perverse for that. But if we’re not to chase the high of sexual transgression even further into the terrain of sexual abuse, or perhaps trigger a puritanical backlash so monumental it sweeps away even moderate gains in sexual tolerance such as the acceptance of normal gay and lesbian couples, we need to reclaim ‘respectability politics’.

This should be a win all round. After all, it’s in the interests of those who enjoy transgression to restore the thrill of the forbidden. This means, in effect, a pro-pervert defence of bourgeois hypocrisy; a kind of degenerate’s Fight Club, where the first and second rules are: you don’t talk about it.

Those who are ineluctably drawn to the dark side will find their way there anyway, in due course. And those who would not otherwise be tempted are well out of it. But no one who is incapable of discretion is mentally equipped to enjoy depravity – and besides, proper enjoyment of the forbidden means something must be forbidden in the first place.