In Martin’s head, however, it lasted forever. During those five years, we’d occasionally written to each other. I stuffed his nine, mostly brief letters into a dog-eared C4 envelope I secreted beneath a pile of cashmere sweaters. At times brimming with affection, and at others detached, his letters had an electromagnetic field of sorts, a humming energy that somehow never faded. Ultimately, I hated them for everything they’d come to represent — in particular, his lies and the betrayal of the intimacy we’d shared. So when, last year, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin expressed an interest in the letters, I didn’t hesitate. Amplified by secrecy, they’d come to feel like a burden.

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Commissioned to interview Martin for a music magazine, I first appeared on his doorstep in early 1985. I was 19 and he’d married for the first time only months before. As I clambered up the steep steps of his Leamington Road Villas flat, I was far from prepossessing. My hair, hacked with household scissors in the bathroom, was green. I’d attempted to restore it to its natural brown with box dye after experimenting with bleach and orange henna before that. My glasses were NHS. I wore my uniform: black polo neck, short kilt, black tights, black ballet flats.

Martin and I were never “together”, per se. After our first kiss, we connected when I happened to be in London. Over those years, I pinged from Oxford to Sydney to Cambridge to London to Sydney to London to Sydney again. I was twice engaged to other men, and dated various others. In between these relationships, I would return to Martin’s flat and for long, indolent afternoons we’d talk, play Scrabble, and read poetry to each other. We drank — almost always vodka — and smoked the countless cigarettes that, in 2023, finally killed him.

In his fiction, Martin imagined we did more. As he wrote in London Fields, published two days after my 24th birthday: “The only one she kept going back to, the only one who was half a match for her, ‘the only one I’ve ever been stupid for’, the handsomest, the cruelest, the best in bed (by far): he’s called MA. A resident of West London.”

In reality, I never once ventured beyond his kitchen — a metaphor, really. Martin and I only ever kissed; I never permitted him to go any further, as his letters confirm. For one, I was far too disordered. My grandmother, whom I adored and who helped raise me, had died after a long battle with cancer; my father, who had sexually molested me, would soon be institutionalized for paranoid schizophrenia. Unable to metabolize the grief, I’d attempted suicide a number of times. Martin, who knew this, wove it all into his fictional universe. “Now the little puppy lay in the arms of his mistress,” he explained in Einstein’s Monsters (1987). “His senses all had missions: to find his way through the veils of her grief and, perhaps, to assuage it.”

Over the decades, in fact, Martin would mine my childhood, my traumas, and my relationships for his fiction. As he explained in one of the letters, all he could write about was his life and, whether I liked it or not, I was part of his life. My anger sits in contrast to my memories of laughing beside Martin on the sofa as darkness fell, a bookcase at one end of the room and curtainless windows at the other. He remembered it all too. As he wrote in London Fields: “She would know what you could get away with in the curtainless room, what adulteries, what fantastic betrayals.”

Martin returned, time and again, to that room and to those afternoons in his fiction: the fundamentally inaccessible woman, often in black; the long, deliriously detailed descriptions of (actual) kisses and paradoxically truncated accounts of (imagined) sex; love as an internalized, rather than shared, experience, secretive, unrelated to marriage, predominantly experienced in recollection, and always, always ending in sadness.

“He loved her from his distance, a love instant and wordless and full of hunger,” is how Martin put it in Einstein’s Monsters. “He would exchange the pigments and the pain of life — and all its great presentiments — for a single caress of her hand.” It was, he added, a love he would never show. Christopher Hitchens, Martin once told me, was the only person who knew about us. In this hidden world, we danced like wild things by his record player. This was misinterpreted by Amber Heard in the film adaptation of London Fields as sinuous, performative. The reality could not have been more different. I would bounce about the room, whooping and waving my hands in the air, as he intently danced beside me.

In Attachment (2008) by Isabel Fonseca, Martin’s second wife, the protagonist discovers, through a note — written from “Thing 1” to “Thing 2” — that her husband is obsessed with a tattooed 19-year-old Italian-Australian from New South Wales. It was this that made me understand that Isabel, who, after I left for Sydney, became Martin’s mistress, had cobbled together an understanding of our relationship from my letters to him, letters for which she had clearly searched after intercepting a note I’d written. As it happens, the note was to “Thing 1” from “Thing 2” — our nicknames for each other.

In general, Martin’s letters were casually intimate, albeit in the cautious, characteristically paternalistic tone he always adopted with me. I’ll never forget the handwriting: constricted, neat, spiky. The Observer letterhead, plain typing paper, and his personal stationery. Inside the envelopes: a photobooth picture of Martin in his youth, magazine articles about him, the residue of rusting paperclips.

We never wrote each other love letters. Yes, he signed one of his letters “love, love, love”, but we never used the word in person. Why would we? Unlike Isabel, I was never in love with Martin, and nor did I want anything from him. I even refused the money he offered me for cab rides. Yet like so many other moments — when I mouthed “You. Always you.” through his car window to him outside Westbourne Park Station one wintry evening, or when I told him that my mother had said I had the mouth of a whore — this became part of his fictional universe.

Throughout Martin’s work, the number 19 in relation to women — not just my age when we met but also the day of the month I was born — features heavily. So too do the black dresses, the pale skin, the compulsive smoking, the inadvisable drinking, the humor, the pseudonyms, the love of music, the Catholicism, the lopsided smile, the small tattoo, the theme of death, details about my body, my lingerie, our kisses. Episodes from my life — the wet railway platform with a suitcase full of shoes, the unexpected white dress, the white bathing costume, my embarrassment at my handwriting, my sexual withholding, my appetites — hundreds of facts, words, and moments: intimacies appropriated by him without acknowledgment or consent.

“No one knew better than I did how hopeless she was at love,” Martin wrote in House of Meetings (2006). “The awful way she laid herself open. She was a totalist among men who dealt in fractions.”

Taken together, in fact, Martin stole so many details from my life that I could be accused of plagiarizing if I ever wrote a bildungsroman based on my late adolescence and early 20s. The pain this caused, his betrayal of our intimacy for profit, forever changed me. I became suspicious in relationships, untrusting, watchful. If a man I liked revealed himself as any kind of writer, I recoiled. I fielded comments by those who recognized me from his books. Whenever a new Amis novel was announced, I would be overwhelmed by dread: how would the tenderness we’d shared be further distorted by him for profit?

As a writer, I understand that it is impossible to avoid borrowing details from reality. As Martin correctly pointed out, I was part of the only life he had. But is it fair to be repeatedly — over the course of one’s entire adult life, as it happens — twisted, maligned, exploited in print out of vengefulness simply because his desires had not been fulfilled? Martin, after all, had never forgiven me for falling passionately in love with Michael VerMeulen, the late American-born editor of British GQ. I still remember his incredulity when I showed him my exquisite Tiffany engagement ring. In one letter, he half-jokingly asked what Michael was like in bed. Glittering with hostility, references to Michael thread throughout his later letters.

Martin was aware that I wanted no public connection with him. Had I done so, I would have behaved very differently, accepting the work he had offered me, seeking to strengthen our connection, sleeping with him, desiring to be associated with him — rather than, say, deliberately walking at a distance from him when he took me out to lunch. To me, Martin was, or so I thought, a hidden place of emotional safety, a dream I never wanted to become real.

Inside Story (2020), Martin’s last novel, changed everything. In it, he made the tattooed, Catholic, foreign-born anti-heroine — another character clearly based on me — a former escort. “I want you to know that you can say anything you like about me,” the character says. “Anything.” Of course, it wasn’t true. But realizing that media figures who’d heard about us would assume that it was, I snapped, enraged, and wrote a newspaper story. Industry insiders gleefully waited for what they assumed was the inevitable lawsuit, if only to prove I was delusional, a deranged fantasist. Our letters ensured that this would never happen. There was no legal action, then, only more of his lies.

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So was Inside Story‘s Phoebe Phelps based on me? As I asked in the piece: “Well, exactly how many unknown, five-year relationships with busty, slender, reckless, foreign-born, tattooed, playful, ravenously smiling Catholic smokers with hennaed hair and with whom he was obsessed for decades has Martin had?”

Despite my story, I do not appear anywhere in Martin’s biographical material. I remain the invisible woman, the Other Woman, whose existence must be erased in order to maintain the celebrated fictions of Martin’s life. This, then, is the antiquated covenant by which “muses”, reluctant or willing, must abide. Through art, as the writer Vanessa Springora observed, a woman may still be “owned” through the desire, even if it is not reciprocated, of a powerful man.

I ended my 2020 piece by stating I never wanted Martin to write about me again. He never did, nor did he ever write another novel. My fiancé and I were staying at the Radisson Blu Edwardian at Canary Wharf the night Martin’s death was announced. He broke the news to me, expecting tears, but all I experienced was an overwhelming sense of relief. I was glad Martin was dead. Four decades of literary obsession had come to an end. FedExing Martin’s letters to Texas felt like an exorcism. By becoming historical artifacts, they have, at last, liberated me from his lies.

I’d be inclined to rate my mother’s birds and bees talk as a five out of ten, if it weren’t for one key aspect. When she described the intimate business of making love, we three made the usual protests of, “Yuck!”, “No!” and “I’m NEVER doing that!”, at which point Mum said, “You’re wrong. It’s the most beautiful feeling in all the world.” I was watching her face and, 43 years later, still recall a fleeting moment of ecstatic reverie. It was clear to me she was telling the truth (her truth, in any case) and from then onwards I nurtured the idea that the end game of sex should be rapture.

Which takes us — as all discussions about sex do at the moment — to the Netflix series Sex Education. The local academy my sons attend thought it necessary to send a memo home a couple of weeks ago from their “PSHE Coordinator” (Personal, Social and Health Education) warning parents to be aware that their children were likely to be watching the new season, despite its 18 certificate, “due to its representation of a variety of different teenage issues and curiosities”.

Damn right. My 15-year-old had pretty much inhaled both seasons and was delighted to note that the main character’s mother, a sex therapist and writer played by Gillian Anderson, “is almost as embarrassing as you”. The chat also meant I learnt exactly when his classmates had discovered, courtesy of Google, that I’d edited two erotic magazines and appeared on programmes with titles like, “100 Greatest Sexy Moments”.

The geography teacher who wrote the school’s letter went on to say, “Personally, I will be making sure I watch the series to ensure I know what is being shown and therefore to support questions should I be approached at school by pupils.” Judging by Series 1, I hoped she was braced to discuss rimming, scissoring, alien-themed erotica and how to suppress the gag reflex while performing fellatio. Of course, many of the show’s themes are more universal: performance anxiety, consent, the perils of sexting, body dysmorphia and the pervasive influence of porn culture.

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There’s no doubt Sex Education has usefully broadened the debate about the kind of sex scenarios we might reasonably expect our teens to encounter. There’s wide acceptance outside religious lobby groups that current sex education provision at UK schools is woefully inadequate. Worse than that, it’s not even compulsory by law. That will change this coming September, and even then “parents and carers may withdraw their children from sex education until three terms before they are 16 in secondary school”.

But even when children do exit school knowing a modicum about consent, the clitoris, gender fluidity, masturbation and full-on intercourse, there are significant gaps. It’s one thing for a teacher to say oral sex is perfectly normal, and quite another to explain how it’s best performed. And they’re certainly not braced to argue whether sex could or should have meaning beyond being a pleasurable horizontal workout.

To return to my late lamented mother’s thoughts on sex, what none of the current educational provision deals with is the beauty. Or to misquote Woody Allen: is sex beautiful? Only when it’s being done right. This erasure of erotic value in our sex ed affects many people, whatever their age or level of sexual experience. If you don’t expect an ecstatic sexual experience, you’re more likely to accept the mundane or disappointing.

Take a friend of mine in her 50s, who’s just exited a long marriage to a stolid businessman who cheated on her with his tennis coach. She has just taken up with a sexy chef and their lovemaking is the stuff of revelation. She told me: “It’s a cliché to say it, but I didn’t know sex could be like this — an out-of-body, electrifying, almost religious experience.” Then her voice became wistful and slightly accusatory: “You knew this, didn’t you?” I had to admit, yes, I did. Not on a constant, smug or failsafe basis, but definitely as something to aim for.

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Of course, it’s hard to the point of impossibility to talk about the sublime in sex. It either sounds absurd or boastful — just dwell for a nanosecond on Sting talking about Tantra. The forces that have shaped our culture, from Protestantism to the Enlightenment and capitalism, aren’t too wedded to transcendentalism. And then we’re British, so inclined to snigger.

Our natural instinct is not to take sex too seriously. Some years ago the classified ads manager at Private Eye told me the most popular lonely heart in the entire history of the magazine was a woman who described herself as, “Lady doctor, who likes laughing in bed.” It’s a brave person in western society who tries to put sincerity and meaning back into sex. Naomi Wolf had a go in her book Vagina, which took as its starting point the author’s sudden diminishment of sensation at the point of climax. When the full force of her orgasm is finally restored to her she writes:

“Sexual recovery for me was like that transition in The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy goes from black-and-white Kansas to colorful, magical Oz. Slowly after orgasm I once again saw light flowing into the world around me. … I looked out of the window at the trees tossing their new leaves and the wind lifting their branches in great waves, and it all looked like an intensely choreographed dance, in which all of nature was expressing something.”

Cue a chorus of critics cackling like hyenas. To my mind, that passage was the best bit of the book: an unabashed acknowledgement that there’s something about great sex that resets all your dials, knocks twenty years off your face, and — yeah, let’s go full woo-woo — makes you feel at one with the planet.

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But wider society often seems far keener to embrace the spirit of porn culture — namely that sex is primarily a frenetic but largely meaningless shag-fest — than to imbue it with some form of greater resonance. Screen depictions of intercourse are almost invariably of the thrusting, pumping, sucking variety. Which is tedious if there’s no counterbalance — no sense that time can seem to slow down when you’re totally absorbed with another person’s heartbeat.

No one seemed perturbed that the first episode of Sex Education — to return there for a moment — opened with a sex scene depicting a young woman having an orgasm from doggy-style sex while receiving no clitoral stimulation whatsoever. I felt compelled to lecture my poor 15-year-old son (“Mum! Shut up!”) on the fact that it’s quite rare for women to experience an orgasm through penetration alone and research suggests that almost 80% of women rarely or never have a climax that way. According to TV drama, around 95% of women achieve vaginal orgasms with no problem whatsoever.

Perhaps I protest too much. Is sex really that sublime? Olivia Fane doesn’t think so: she’s written a book called Why Sex Doesn’t Matter— reviewed for UnHerd by Zoe Strimpel — despite or, perhaps, because of having an open marriage in her twenties. Sarah Vine has written that she values sleep over erotic intimacy, and Suzanne Moore has been bored for some time now.

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I understand their arguments and that it’s the columnist’s art to be provocative. Our culture is over-saturated by tedious images of mindless rutting and ersatz passion. When you’re married for many years — as Fane and Vine have been — erotic hunger fades and companionability is often more highly rated.

Still, it feels like a terrible swizz to complain from your 50s and 60s, when libido has often dampened, that sex is overrated. Imagine spinning that yarn to a younger self back in the days when you yearned for nothing more than to become one with the beloved. No citizen of a Latin American country would every say such a thing — to them it would be like saying you can dispense with food or water (but then they’ve never had to suffer Luther and a cold climate).

To disparage erotic intensity is to disown the most powerful feelings most of us (alright, not nuns and asexuals) will ever experience on this planet. Our love for our children tends to be more steady and steadfast. We would willingly die for our offspring, but we wouldn’t be so cavalier as to risk our livelihood for them. It’s erotic yearning that precipitates moments of madness that bring presidents to the brink — as so strikingly illustrated by Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

Sexual passion is unpredictable, unfettered and often takes on the quality of obsession, which leads to fear and censure. But living without boundaries in a stupor of the senses can give us some sense of the infinite and the unobtainable. The language of rapture belongs equally to lovers and God and it’s a dim-witted vicar who doesn’t acknowledge this. You can be sure they haven’t read the line, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God…”

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How can I back up any of these assertions? Not with statistics, as they’re notoriously unreliable on the subject of sex. That’s why the topic is such an alluring land-grab for anyone with a theory to pedal. But there’s plenty of persuasive evidence in myth, legend and literature — which is why novels, classic films and art should be employed in contemporary love lessons.

Since the dawn of narrative storytellers have known one thing for certain: sex matters. It really, truly matters. It’s the reason Paris of Troy started a war with the Spartans, having abducted and seduced the Spartan queen Helen. It’s why the Greek and Roman Gods were always quarrelling, finding themselves unable to resist illicit love affairs with stray nymphs, or mortals. Apollo had an impressive array of male lovers for starters. It’s why King Arthur was betrayed by his wife and the knight he most trusted. It’s why Scheherazade told so many erotic stories in the Arabian Nights, knowing few other themes would prove quite as compelling.

It’s why Romeo and Juliet defied their feuding families and why Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina enthral us a century and a half after publication. It’s why we return to Wuthering Heights despite Heathcliff’s barbaric behaviour that we’d now term domestic violence. There’s something numinous that speaks to a profound, hungry part of the reader when Cathy declares of Heathcliff, “he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”.

It’s why Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People met with such widespread critical and popular acclaim and is about to hit our TVs as a drama series. Few writers since Emily Brontë have captured so acutely the sense of jeopardy, ecstasy and narcotic intensity that results from two young people baring bodies, minds and souls.

And it’s why readers of all stripes delight in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty: the recognition that desire transcends gender and heterosexual clichés.

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There’s something all those bards, storytellers and novelists know as they turn their own experience into fictional narrative — that there are heightened times in most people’s lives when nothing matters more than the desire to drown in the physical perfection of the longed-for lover.

Commentators are always telling us we ask too much from sex, but I think it’s possible we ask too little. Why crush physical connection into a small space and say daft, but socially acceptable guff like, “I’d prefer a cup of tea,” or “Chocolate’s better than sex”? It’s impossibly hard to assert that there’s nothing wrong with seeking profound physical connection that leaves us quivering with rapture.

A good friend calls this uncanny bond quantum entanglement: the sense that if you and best beloved mate are on opposite sides of the planet your atoms will be moving in tandem, twinned across time and space. This may be more poetic than strictly scientific, but at least it transports sex to the realm of the imagination where all the finest human endeavours are nurtured. I can’t help feeling a great metaphysician like John Donne would embrace the concept. This Valentine’s Day, it seems only appropriate to quote the most sublime lines from the most sublime poem in the English language, “To His Mistress Going to Bed.”

Licence my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
To taste whole joys.

This is the erotic education I return to more than any other, because Donne’s sentiments are always freshly minted: reborn in the rapture I glimpse around me and anticipate for my sons when they come of age; relived in the beauty I have sometimes been fortunate enough to experience myself.

All manner of creatures are referenced in his song, from oysters to electric eels, hippopotami to dragonflies. That’s appropriate because sexual reproduction is remarkably widespread. In fact, it’s the norm in almost every branch of the animal kingdom.

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But why? After all, there is an alternative: asexual reproduction. In many groups, including the vertebrates, there are species that reproduce by parthenogenesis, i.e. from unfertilised eggs. Indeed there are some species of fish, amphibians and reptiles composed entirely of females.

Parthenogenesis has even been observed among some birds. However, it’s extremely rare; which is good news for cocks.

Still, the fact that asexual reproduction is the exception and not the rule does require explanation.

*

Consider two females: one reproduces sexually, the other asexually. The latter would appear to be at a huge evolutionary advantage. She passes on all of her genes to her offspring instead of having to share parentage with a male. So, in terms of evolutionary ‘fitness’ sexual reproduction comes with an instant 50% penalty. This should be more than enough to guarantee the rapid extinction of a sexually reproductive lineage — unless, that is, sex comes with offsetting advantages.

The most obvious one is that dad sticks around to help protect and raise his kids. Such cooperation between the sexes is observed in many species. That’s especially true of the birds who tend towards monogamy and, in some cases, lifelong monogamy — as with swans and parrots. This is why there are so many avian metaphors for true love.

The mammals, though, are no better than they ought to be. On the whole, they’re a polygamous lot. Males, with their abundant supply of cheaply produced gametes have an obvious interest in sowing their seed as far-and-wide as they can get away with. Thus occupied, they’re not going to make the best of fathers — so why do females put up with them?

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To begin with, there’s the fundamental advantage of all sexual reproduction, which is genetic variation. Asexually produced offspring are genetical identical to the parent. Sexually produced offspring, however, are genetically distinct from both parents, and also from one another (with the exception of identical twins, triplets etc). Half the genes come from each parent, but the particular halves vary from sibling to sibling. Furthermore if she mates with several males, that’ll mean even more genetic diversity among a female’s offspring.

To understand why this is so advantageous think of reproduction as if it were a lottery. In this analogy, each kid is like a ticket — a gamble that it has the right combination of genes to survive into adulthood and reproduce. Obviously, if you’re going to invest in multiple tickets, then picking different numbers for each one increases your chances of winning. Reproducing asexually is like sticking to the same number no matter how many tickets you buy.

*

But what about species of low fecundity, i.e. where each female has a small number of offspring — perhaps no more than one or two. When you’re making one big investment rather than making lots of little bets, diversity isn’t nearly so important. So when it comes to sex, what’s in it for females in species of this kind? Philandering, fly-by-night males who don’t help out with the childcare would appear to be a serious liability. Indeed, the conflict of interest between the all-your-eggs-in-one-basket strategy of the female and the scatter-gun tendencies of the male is at a maximum.

Except that females do have an evolutionary interest in this set-up. Though they don’t have an immediate opportunity to spread their genes far-and-wide, they might over several generations through their male descendants. If their sons are reproductively successful, then a small number of children can turn into a large number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren all carrying copies of the matriarch’s genes — which in Darwinian terms is the main thing.

Females in such species will therefore seek mates with heritable traits that will, in time, make their sons attractive to females. This is a positive feedback loop that leads to the evolution of exaggerated features like the peacock’s tail. It serves no other purpose than display — and what it signals is “mate with me and your sons will have a magnificent tail too.” If you’ve ever wondered why the male in so many species is more brightly attired than the female, there’s your answer. However, I do wonder if show-off males also serve as decoys — diverting the attention of predators away from better-camouflaged females and their young.

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The evolution of males can be driven by other forces too. Male displays might be communicating more than the message “I’m gorgeous” — they might be saying “I’m healthy and well-fed, my feathers wouldn’t be so nice if I wasn’t capable of looking after myself.” Alternatively, sexually-selected male traits might not be about display at all, but some more direct way of winning the competition for females. Sheer size and strength, for instance, come in handy when you have to fight off other males. Which is why males in a species like the elephant seal are so much bigger than the females.

Then there’s the icky business of sperm competition — in which the struggle between males is more post-copulation than pre. In species where females are polygamous, the males evolve features that maximise the chances that their sperm will win the race to fertilise the egg. For instance, the intromittent organ (in mammals, the penis) may evolve into a shape designed to scoop-out the ejaculate of a previous suitor. It can get much weirder than that. One of my zoology professors once told of us of a species of gnat where the male organ breaks off inside the female thus blocking off access to subsequent visitors. Now, that’s what I call commitment. 

A more common strategy is simply to up the volume of the ejaculate — flushing out the enemy, so to speak. That’s why testicle size to body mass ratio is an indicator of what kind of sex life a species is likely to have. The bigger the balls, the more promiscuous the species. Comparatively small balls tend indicate a monogamous lifestyle or a species where highly territorial males have exclusive access to the females they mate with.

*

OK, so at what point does zoology become anthropology? It’s a highly sensitive subject — and rightly so. Things that are merely behaviour in animals fall under a complete different moral category when they occur among human beings. That, unfortunately, hasn’t stopped some scientists from providing evolutionary ‘explanations’ for abusive and criminal acts.

Of course, on one level we are animals too and thus products of our evolution. And yet while we are influenced by our biology, we are not prisoners of it. Indeed the sheer variety of human sexual behaviour, which ranges from freely embraced celibacy to the most extreme promiscuity, is proof that alone of all species we have a choice — whether as individuals or as societies.

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There’s an old saying (attributed to Plato among others) that having a libido is like being shackled to a madman. That’s all too self-serving, especially of the madness of men. Biology is not an alibi.

In this respect, we are better guided by the Psalms than by Darwin:

“…what is man that You are mindful of him, or the son of man that You care for him? You made him a little lower than the angels; You crowned him with glory and honor.”

Whatever meaning you wish to find in these words, it is to the angels not the beasts that we should aspire.

As so the word has gradually crept into the vocabulary of every internet troll — partly I suspect because we still judge people by how much sex they have, or not in this case. We still view men who don’t have sex as failures in some way.

Incels are therefore an easy target. For men, calling someone an Incel implies something positive — a certain sexual abundance — about one’s own existence. For women it has begun to function as a putdown that ruthlessly dismisses unworthy suitors while simultaneously expelling them from the community of the good as misogynistic and creepy.

In the past decade there has been a three-fold increase in the number of men who have not had sex in the past year. In 2018 the Southern Poverty Law Centre added Incels to their ‘Hate Map’, describing them as “part of the online male supremacist eco-system”. Countless articles have appeared in the media equating inceldom with “toxic masculinity”, misogyny and violence. Most begin from the assumption that Incel ideology, so far as it exists, is a product of men’s domination over women. It is a backlash against feminism; the whingeing of men who have been taught by the tyrannical patriarchy to believe they are entitled to ownership of women’s bodies.

There is invariably some truth to this. The rise of the online ‘Manosphere’ is  a reassertion by men of traditional gender roles from which they benefitted immensely. The most notorious Incels, who have gone on murderous rampages, have indeed been narcissistic and entitled men. Elliot Rodger was a 22-year-old Incel who murdered seven people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014. Rodger epitomised entitled masculinity. Shortly before Rodger carried about the massacre, Dale Launer, a friend of Rodger’s father, gave the boy some not terrible advice for building relationships with women on his college campus. Rodger’s response is revealing. As Launer recounted to the BBC:

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“As I told him, ‘When you see a woman next time you’re on campus and you like her hair or sunglasses, just pay her a compliment.’ I told him, ‘It’s a freebie, something in passing, you’re not trying to make conversation. Keep walking, don’t make any long eye contact, just give the free compliment.’ The idea being you might make a friend if you make someone feel good.

“I said to Elliot, ‘In the next few weeks — if you see them they’ll likely give you a smile — and you can smile back and eventually turn this into chit-chat.’

“I got in touch with him a few weeks later and asked if he did it. He said ‘no’. And when asked why not, he said, ‘Why do I have to compliment them? Why don’t they compliment me?’” [emphasis mine]

Rodger felt superior to others and referred to a “Day of Retribution” when he would kill those he was envious of — ‘Chads’, men who sleep with lots of women, and ‘Staceys’, feminine and attractive — as well as those who did not see the value he believed he possessed. He probably had a narcissistic personality disorder.

However Rodger was an outlier. Most Incels are non-violent and use the forums they frequent as a support group, a place to vent — often toxically — against a society which they feel has rejected them (at least when it comes to intimacy). It is this which inceldom is largely concerned with: intimacy rather than sex. Most have given up on dating entirely. Some embrace an ideology they call the Black Pill — a spin-off  the red and blue pills from The Matrix — which contains misogynistic tenets but adherence to which is not a requirement to be an Incel. The Blue Pill is the existing state of blissful ignorance; the Red Pill seeks to understand the system and manipulate it to its advantage; those who take the Black Pill accept the Red Pill’s tenets about women and society but resign themselves to a life of frustration and alienation.

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Black pill ideology is often misogynistic and occasionally deadly. According to the Black Pill women are shallow and driven entirely by hypergamy — that’s to say the desire to hook up with a man of superior status to themselves whether in terms of looks, money or power. As with several other Black Pill assumptions there is an element of truth to this: women do tend to date “up”. However the Black Pill takes this concept to its deterministic absolute: on the forums Incels obsess over height and looks as if nobody who isn’t 6ft 4in with a six pack ever gets a date.

This is undoubtedly a convenient rationalisation for some. It’s easier to sit at home on the internet and lament the callousness and superficiality of wider society than it is to begin the long and arduous process required to become a more attractive man.

But the dating scene of 2020 is also radically different to the dating scene of twenty years ago, and this is a factor behind the growing number of Incels. The decline of traditional marriage has played a part. In the past there was greater societal pressure on women to ‘settle’ with men who they may not have been in love with or even sexually attracted to. The concept of arranged marriage, still popular in eastern cultures, where people pair up on the basis of suitability, is significantly different to our modern, Hollywood-style conception of idealised pairing on the basis of sexual attraction and finding ‘The One’.

Women are the sexual selectors on modern dating apps, where men are abundant and therefore of lower sexual market value (SMV). A friend and I ran an experiment on Tinder last year where we set up a profile purporting to be an attractive woman. In less than 24-hours the profile ran up over 2,000 matches. Tinder and similar apps are effective for the stereotypically good looking male. But the majority of men make do with few matches, often with women they are not attracted to. A recent study of Tinder found that “the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men”.

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As I recently noted for UnHerd, our promiscuous culture bends toward the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule whereby 20% of men date 80% of women. I wrote: “Women compete over the most desirable men, while the rest are increasingly turning towards porn and — before long, no doubt — sex robots.”

The sexual revolution and the gradual erosion of the pressure to settle down (what Jordan Peterson has referred to as “socially enforced monogamy”) has encouraged women (quite reasonably) to seek out the best partners for themselves. Some men refuse to reconcile themselves to this new reality. Others struggle in a digital dating environment where superficial qualities are prized to an extent that was not true in the past. In the world of online dating, which is how 40% of couples  in the United States meet, looks, height and social status are usually pre-requisites for matching with someone at all.

Offline, many Incels lack the basic social skills required to navigate relations with the opposite sex. According to an internal poll carried out on the website Incels.co, 26% of users of the forum said they had some form of autism. Flirting, which requires an innate understanding of nuanced sub-communications and unspoken sexual tension, does not come naturally to these men.

Moreover, mainstream dating advice for men is useless at the best of times and consists largely of feel-good bromides (often written by women) extolling men to ‘just be yourself’ or to let ‘fate’ take care of it. Real-life dating coaching, which takes clients out into bars and clubs in order to learn how to interact with women in a non-platonic way, is laughed at by the mainstream and dominated by charlatans calling themselves ‘pickup artists’.

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Inceldom touches a nerve in wider society, which I suspect is why we have few conversations about it. All of us treat people differently on the basis of their physical appearance, however altruistic we may believe ourselves to be. As a recent article in Vice, which drew on a comprehensive body of research, noted: “Attractive people are generally assumed to be more intelligent, more trustworthy, and have better social skills.”

We shy away from talking honestly about this because to do so would be to acknowledge that there are some areas where true ‘equality’ — the ideal we strive for in most areas of political life — is unattainable when it comes to hooking up. The topic of sex and dating is already a minefield where egos swim amidst the unspoken and adversarial mating strategies deployed by men and women. There is very little altruism and equality when it comes to finding a mate. The sexual act is discriminatory by definition.

And it is leaving increasing numbers of men on the scrapheap. Some identify ideologically as Incels out of frustration. Some out of entitlement. Many seek to blame women’s supposedly unrealistic standards for their inability to form an intimate relationship. For others the situation is still more complex.

Incels arguably have something in common with the Japanese hikikomori, defined by Japan’s Health, Labour and Welfare Ministry as those who have “remained isolated at home for at least six consecutive months without going to school or work, and rarely interact with people from outside their immediate family”. Japan has around one million hikikomori.

Inceldom fits within a broader trend towards alienation and reclusive behaviour in modern societies, fostered by technology, changing dating preferences and — among other things — easy access to pornography. We don’t have our own hikikomori problem in the west just yet, but Incels are a growing phenomenon that society would do well to better understand — even if that is less satisfying than throwing the word around as an online insult.

That is the problem identified by Olivia Fane, author of a new, furiously anti-sex polemic, Why Sex Doesn’t Matter. Her rage — directed at the state and status of sex today, as well as at those who she blames for getting us here — is both deep and wide-ranging. While her targets constantly rotate and multiply, the overriding beef is this: we care too much about sex, and know too little about love, and this has corroded our moral and psychological relationship to the world.

Using Pride and Prejudice as a reference, she describes how Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy, who lived in “unsexualised times” would have “married in Church”, and “lived in utter devotion to one another and to God”. But we, in “the modern era”, have “successfully managed to turn everything inside out. We cheer the brute beast in us. We egg it on, the brute beast is the ‘inner me’.”

For Fane, this belief that sex is great and important, interesting and powerful, is the biggest mis-selling scandal of the 20^th century. “Sex is neither moral or immoral,” she states, “it is a mere psychological drive which most of us have, and some more than others. Intellectually, it is utterly tedious and barren.” As she repeatedly asserts with reference to her dog Hector (to whom the book is dedicated), human sex is no different, really, from an animal humping a lamp-post.

However, humans are worse than dogs, because we pretend sex is something special. In so doing we turn our back on love, “the respect of another human being with the emphasis being on tenderness rather than desire”.

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There is much that is incoherent and offputtingly reactionary about this book. But it also gets some things right. It is right, to start with, to say that sex is everywhere, and that the “dominant ideology of the day … that sex is important and profound and you are obliged to join in” can be oppressive, psychologically damaging and, ironically, bad for intimacy.

Indeed, what sensate Bumble dater hasn’t felt the deadening anti-eroticism and anti-romanticism of the dating landscape? Transactional casual sex is certainly attainable — a third of 25-34 year olds report having had a one night stand with someone they met online — but it often feels like the only kind of offer. Codes governing male-female interactions have been scrambled, replaced by nasty, cold new practices such as ghosting, benching, haunting and the slow fade, all designed to aid in treating sexual partners like ad-hoc service-providers. Technology is to blame for some of this, but the root cause of the rot is, as Fane identifies, an overemphasis on sex for sex’s sake.

There’s nothing new about this disgust with a modern sexual ideology that equates sex with self. In The Sexual Fix, published in 1982, Cambridge literary scholar Stephen Heath expressed a yowl of frustration not dissimilar to Fane’s. “I’ve suffered and suffer and I think others must too — it’s difficult not to in our society — from ‘sexuality’, the whole sexual fix. To the point of nausea,” he wrote.

Unlike Fane, Heath also offered a rigorous analysis of the cultural and sexual-scientific landscape. Modern sexology had regrettably made “sexuality [the] key to our being…the grounds for our judgement for ourselves, our lives, our worth”. The result, as obvious to Heath 37 years ago as it is to Fane now, was a miserable emptying-out and dumbing down of what it means to be human.

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Attention to historical detail is handy when making arguments about sex and society — and would have helped Fane’s case a great deal. In particular, social history, the study of everyday life and experience, reminds us that prevailing ideologies are one thing, and how individuals navigate their private lives is another.

As the historians Kate Fisher and Simon Szreter found after interviewing people who got married in the 1920s and 1930s, new and ubiquitous external pressures to prioritise sex in marriage — trumpeted from women’s magazines, marriage experts and doctors — simply didn’t affect most interviewees, who barely mentioned orgasm or the drive for pleasure. Many saw “love as the primary purpose of sex”, indeed “the desire for orgasm was sometimes represented as a destabilising force in marital relations”.

One of the canards of Fane’s argument is that, where sex was concerned, the olden-days were ‘gentler’, wiser and more orderly, because thinking about male-female relationships was firmly rooted in edifying theology and men and women knew their roles. This is an idea that surfaces in much conservative thinking about gender and sexuality, usually to lambast feminism. But it is usually advanced without appreciation of the downsides. If sex in 19^th century Britain looks orderly to us now, that is because it was policed heavily; the threat of public humiliation and private punishment was terrifying, as were the physical horrors of unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease.

It’s easy to rage at the shameless slathering over sexual pleasure of us moderns, but doing so without considering the fear and brutality used to enforce anything else is noxious. By all means call for a less sexually liberal society, but don’t forget that keeping sexuality in its box almost always involves violence.

Middle class parents in the 1930s, suspecting their children of masturbation, beat them. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, in his study of nannies, recorded the testimony of a retired female doctor who described the approach of an “indomitable Lancashire” nanny she had before WW1. The nanny believed that ‘“self abuse was the evil rotting the world” and, according to the doctor, “‘insisted on supervision in the lavatory, and put us to bed with our hands tied, sometimes too tightly. I remember my piano teacher commenting on my scarred wrists’”.

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If, for girls in that ‘gentler era’, sex was polluted by the potential for punishment, shame and physical suffering, it was also an area of extreme ignorance. Information was not available, hard or perilous to find — and was often inaccurate.

We have gone too far in the other direction now, using sex education classes to promote ideological positions on matters such as consent and sexual identity, and normalising porn. Sex education organisations like Sexplain teach Year 8 “what LGQTIA+ means and why it’s important”; by Year 11 it’s “analysis of mainstream porn; framework of power”; “intersectionality and queer theory”.

But in those halcyon days of repression, long before any sex education at all, there was, as Fisher and Szreter found, a “pervasive culture of ignorance”. Knowing about sex, discussion or even mentioning sexual matters as late as the 1930s and 1940s was “lacking in respectability” and “verging on the immoral”. The result was that many women did not know that intercourse led to pregnancy; the belief that female genitalia were ‘dirty’ led to a dislike of one’s body, a reluctance to seek medical advice, maltreatment by doctors, and problems inserting tampons and diaphragms.

Most scholars agree that over the course of the 20^th century, Western societies swung from a repressive, phobic obsession with sex, to the more narcissistic idea that sex is key for self-development and merits constant attention. But by focusing too narrowly on this narrative, one risks overlooking equally important developments.

The rise of the ‘companionate ideal’ of marriage, for instance, was championed with particular vigour by sociologists and politicians after the First World War. Generally, sex was not a central component of this ‘ideal’, which focused on mutual understanding and true friendship. Rooted in the traditional separation of gendered roles, where the man peacefully won the bread, and the woman ran the domestic sphere, it was very like the idyllic life Fane herself describes as the home-maker wife of a consultant surgeon. One can, therefore, look at the 20^th century as the century in which love, not sex, got top billing.

Indeed, I’m often inclined to believe that it is in fact romantic love, not sex, that is the big mis-selling scandal of the 20^th century. But in the end, trying to parse where love ends and sex begins is fruitless. The two can and very often do go hand in hand. Insisting they have nothing to do with each other makes for a spirited provocation, but is not convincing. Love matters, and so does sex.

Although there is almost no historical evidence of St Valentine, the most common tradition is that he was martyred for marrying couples illegally. Desperate for troops, the emperor Claudius Gothicus had prohibited young men from being wed — and therefore escaping military service. Poor Valentine was foolish enough to disobey the Roman Emperor, and that rarely ends well.

Unlike most feast days that grew in popularity during the Middle Ages, Valentine’s survived Reformation and secularisation because it came to celebrate a popular ideal: romantic love. Indeed, it is about more than that: the idea of love as a choice; a choice made by two people that no outside authorities — not even Roman emperors — can stand in the way of.

We take love for granted (it being all around) but marrying for romance is quite a radical idea — a fairly recent one and, from a point of view of outcomes, not a very successful innovation.

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That the West is quite unusual in this matter is largely down to the medieval Catholic Church, making it entirely appropriately that a saint’s day is still used to celebrate romantic love.

For most of recorded history, marriage was seen as a contract, largely for the creation of children. If love — agape — developed as a result, all the better, but romance was not a reason for marriage. The Greeks and Romans essentially saw romantic love as a mental illness — “a sickness, a fever, a source of pain” in the words of historian Nigel Saul — while the medieval aristocracy thought of marriages as more like business contracts. Kings used their children as assets with which to make deals, one of the most ruthless being the 12th century Henry II, who had his heir Henry wed when he was five and his bride, daughter of the king of France, just two.

It was Henry’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who did more than anyone else to influence modern ideas of romance, introducing to England and northern France the love poetry of her native region in the south (which most probably originated in Islamic Spain, although no one can be entirely sure). Eleanor’s daughter, Marie of France, played a similar role as patron of Chrétien de Troyes, creator of many of the Arthurian romances.

This poetic tradition celebrated romantic love, but it was unattainable love, doomed by differences in social or relationship status. There was rarely a happy ever after, and no concept that people might marry because they were “in love”, which relies on an idea of individual freedom that didn’t exist. Eleanor’s own marriage was testimony to this ideal, ending with her imprisonment by her own husband for 15 years. Yet, producing four healthy sons, it was a success.

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One small illustration of the social values of the age comes via a poem celebrating William Marshal, a tournament star and member of Eleanor’s entourage. Marshal went on to serve four kings and helped save Magna Carta, becoming the epitome of medieval chivalry and also providing the inspiration for A Knight’s Tale and Ser Barristan the Bold in Game of Thrones.

Following Marshal’s death, his five sons commissioned a biographical poem to glorify their father, filled with his derring-do as loyal knight and all-round hero; it contains a passage that to modern eyes seems curious. On the road one day, our brave knight came across a young couple who had eloped because they were in love, but their families disapproved. Marshal, the poem boasts, simply robbed them at the point of the sword and, the reader is supposed to see, rightly so.

 This episode says much about popular attitudes at the time, when — like in most societies — marrying against your parent’s wishes put you beyond the pale. Marshal’s own wife, Isabel de Clare, had been awarded to him as a reward for his service to Henry II, when Marshal was 43 and his bride 17. Did she want to marry him? No one cared.

Yet four centuries later, attitudes had changed so much that William Shakespeare could write a play about star-cross’d lovers in which the audience’s sympathies were clearly with the protagonists — an attitude alien to Marshal’s world. Indeed, Karl Deutsch christened this change the “Romeo and Juliet revolution” and it was perhaps the biggest cultural shift in history.

That we came to think of marrying for love as normal is largely down to the Catholic Church. Christian theologians, following the thoughts of St Paul, saw marriage between man and woman as analogous to that between Christ and his Church. Marriage had to be consensual, willingly offered into — a rule the Church enforced with increasing determination from the 12^th century.

As Tom Holland put it in Dominion:

“Here was a development pregnant with implications for the future. Opening up before the Christian people was the path to a radical new conception of marriage: one founded on mutual attraction, on love. Inexorably, the rights of the individual were coming to trump those of family. God’s authority was being identified, not with the venerable authority of a father to impose his will on his children, but with an altogether more subversive principle: freedom of choice.”

Western Europeans came to see marriage not just as a business deal between two clans, but a bond between individuals; increasingly, stories about romantic love saw it as likely to lead to not to disaster, but to “happy ever after”.

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Along with rules about consent and age, the Church also became increasingly strict about the marrying of relatives, which had a profound effect on wider society. Once people were forced to marry out, their loyalty to their family declined in relation to wider society and this fostered more radical ideas. Maybe Romeo wasn’t just a member of the Montague clan but an individual with his own desires? Maybe his individual happiness was more important than the extended family’s status? The effects have been long lasting, with various studies showing a link between the Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage with corruption and democracy.

Yet across the world, and among Asian diasporas, arranged marriage remains the norm, while marriages rates in the west have plummeted since the 1970s. Maybe western ideas of love aren’t the only way forward.

Poor St Valentine was unlucky enough to live under a rare leader who discouraged marriage, since throughout history most social pressure has been exerted the other way. In medieval England, in Great Dunmow in Essex, a side of bacon was given each July to a couple who had been married for “a year and a day” and could honestly say they had not regretted it. Most societies wanted marriage because they wanted children (the word “proletarian” stems from “offspring”, denoting the social class who had no property but served Rome by having children). But most societies also recognised that people had to be nudged into making the plunge.

Since the final phrase in this great love revolution in the late 20^th century, when social pressure to marry early was relaxed, and with it the Church’s long-held prohibition against divorce, marriage rates have fallen dramatically.

There are now around a quarter of a million marriages a year in Britain, just over half the rate in 1969 when the Divorce Reform Act was passed. Marriage has also become a luxury good, with the gap between professional and working classes rising just this century from 22% to almost 50%. The results are huge numbers living alone, a figure that will surpass 10 million by 2040.

Many are happily single, but many others just don’t find the right person through a modern market that is far from efficient.

Maybe arranged marriage makes more sense. When westerners think of the practice they tend to think of forced marriages, and the horrific tradition of honour killings that often result, but arranged and forced marriages are not the same thing.

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In many traditional societies, arranged marriage takes the form of sons and daughters being given a short list of potential suitors from which they can choose (assuming the other person picks them, of course). Speed dating originated among Jewish communities in New York for this exact purpose, and mimics traditional practices in certain ways.

And arranged marriages do have better outcomes, on a purely measurable level.

Harvard’s Dr Robert Epstein analysed the phenomenon among south Asians and Orthodox Jews and, with an admittedly small sample, concluded that they were more successful than the secular western route.

There is certainly the argument — and the one made by matriarchs and patriarchs down the ages — that western romantics mix up love with lust, which is a reasonable criticism. There is probably something in the ancient Greek idea that being in love is a form of temporary insanity, and in no other area of life would we consider making a huge life choice during a period of temporary insanity a good idea. There is also the argument that even intelligent people make bad romantic decisions, taking a crazy salad with their meat, as that old romantic failure Yeats observed (bitterly).

Yet marriage survival rates do not necessarily reflect happiness levels, and even self-reported statements about happiness might just reflect rationalisation. Higher suicide rates among Asian women — as opposed to lower ones among older Asian men — suggest that strong families have their downsides, although suicide among western women has not declined since divorce was liberalised, while female happiness has overall declined.

And while marriage rates in the West continue to fall, especially in the US, young people in India are not spurning arranged marriages as that country gets richer. Likewise, in China and across the East “love” continues to play a far less important role in marriage than in Europe.

Western romantics might see that as cold or cynical, but then, perhaps our attitude is rather naïve and even silly. Love wins — but then sometimes it doesn’t.

Anyway, have a happy Valentine’s Day everyone; don’t forget to pick up some flowers at the petrol station.