What women want when they pay for sex: ‘Just kindness’

In his four years as a sex worker, Dan Moon saw women whose needs were more than physical. He brought a listening ear – and an open heart – which led to him ‘falling in care’ with his clients

It’s not that men never noticed Ellie*. “I was just not one bit interested,” she says. While her friends were out collecting “horror stories” and boyfriends, then later, husbands and children, her focus was “finish school, go to uni, get a job, do all that stuff”. That focus paid off with a career in science, but by the time she turned 37 she was still a virgin, “and I felt like a part of me was missing”.

Sally* was never interested in marriage or children, but she has had “some lovely relationships along the way”. Her struggle has always been with monogamy. “Because for me, that was never important.” For the past decade, the 54-year-old marketing executive has been happily partnered to “a really open-minded person”, which meant she “didn’t need anything more than that newness of sexual adventure”.

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‘Gay life is better now. Absolutely’: five generations on coming out and what came next

From a student in the 60s for whom sex was illegal to a recent arrival on the gay scene, four men and a non-binary queer person on how their lives – and sex lives – have changed

Plus six high-profile queer figures on their experiences

‘We didn’t realise we were killing each other’

George Hodson, 73
I went to university in London in 1967, the year the decriminalisation bill went through. It was no longer illegal to have gay sex in England and Wales if you were over 21, but it was still frowned upon. I was 18, so it was still illegal for me, but I never thought much about the legality. I was too busy enjoying myself.

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My cheating boyfriend told me he was a sex addict. Was it a disorder – or just an excuse?

When I found out my partner had been lying for years, my whole world shattered. Did calling it an addiction mean I had to forgive him?

The vacuum cleaner is laid out like a snake on the living room floor – an image of domesticity I will come to remember as representing the unravelling of that home. I have always loved this room for its large, south-facing windows that could bring warmth to my face even on the coldest of winter days, but the summer sun today is suffocating. It is one of those mornings when the leaves are perfectly bright and the sky clear light blue. The outside world is beautiful, but mine seems to be breaking apart.

Just moments earlier, I was arguing with my partner about the division of household labour. Frustratingly, I have fallen into a stereotype – vacuuming around him while he’s on his phone. But this morning is different. He asks me to sit with him on the sofa; he wants to tell me something big, something personal. I leave the vacuum cleaner on the floor.

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Purity culture is dehumanising – it’s consent that should be at the centre of sex education | Chanel Contos

If we are educating young people for the purpose of safety, our concern should not be if they are having sex but if they are doing so consensually

Many would have been surprised on Monday night when an ABC Four Corners episode reported that for some schools in Australia, their form of sex education included placing a piece of sticky tape on different surfaces around the classroom. An inspection of the tape after the experiment concluded that it had picked up dirt along the way; and it was no longer able to “stick” or “bond” with anything (anyone) any more. The schools have denied teaching misinformation and said they complied with the New South Wales curriculum.

Unfortunately, I was not surprised hearing these allegations as I’ve heard the same before. It would be nice to believe these lessons were limited to the four schools under investigation, but also seriously ignorant.

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‘It stopped me having sex for a year’: why Generation Z is turning its back on sex-positive feminism

The movement championed the right to enjoy sex and was supposed to free women from guilt or being shamed. But now many are questioning whether it has left them more vulnerable

Lala likes to think of herself as pretty unshockable. On her popular Instagram account @lalalaletmeexplain, she dishes out anonymous sex and dating advice on everything from orgasms to the etiquette of sending nude pictures. Nor is the 40-year-old sex educator and former social worker (Lala is a pseudonym) shy of sharing her own dating experiences as a single woman.

But even she was perturbed by a recent question, from a woman with a seven-year-old daughter who had caught her new partner watching “stepdaughter” porn involving teenage girls. Was that a red flag?

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Our long-term relationship is stale. Is this something that happens to everyone? | Leading questions

It doesn’t matter what is normal, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith, you have to decide what you want for yourself

I’ve been with my boyfriend for almost seven years, and our relationship has gotten stale. We both feel that we are not very happy, but we don’t want to break up, as we love and care for each other.

We’ve both been working from home throughout the pandemic, and work long hours. No doubt this has impacted our relationship, and our sex life is poor. I just feel like relationships should be more than this, that they should add something to your life. Right now we are more like flatmates.

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The secret to great sex? It’s not what you think …

There’s more to good sex than complicated positions or wild lust. The authors of a groundbreaking study explain what really makes it great

Far from what films and TV shows might tell us, truly magnificent sex has very little to do with daring feats of seduction or screaming orgasms. In fact, according to the latest research, erotic intimacy is more a state of mind than a physical act.

In a recent study, Magnificent Sex, psychologist and sex therapist Dr Peggy J Kleinplatz and her colleagues at Ottawa University in Canada realised that, while whole library sections were dedicated to bad sex (and how to make it better), there was almost no literature dedicated to great sex. What did it feel like? Who was having it? And what made it so great?

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The Lovers’ Guide at 30: did the bestselling video make Britain better in bed?

It featured an erect penis, and could be bought on the high street. The groundbreaking film changed attitudes to sex and censorship – paving the way to the Pornhub era

The second sexual revolution began 30 years ago, on 23 September 1991, with the release of an educational videotape called The Lovers’ Guide. The revolution’s unlikely figureheads were a film producer who had been making how-to videos about gardening and pets and cooking, and a 56-year-old doctor, while their ally was an American former TV and theatre director who had become Britain’s chief film censor.

The producer was a man called Robert Page, who had been approached by Virgin – which had recently started making condoms – to make a sexual health film for men that explained how to use one. There were two difficulties with that. The first was that no erect penis had been shown on screen in Britain. The second was that Page had no interest in making a film about penises. The censor – James Ferman, the director of the British Board of Film Classification from 1975 to 1999 – took care of the first issue.

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‘Sex isn’t difficult any more’: the men who are quitting watching porn

Addiction to pornography has been blamed for erectile dysfunction, relationship issues and depression, yet problematic use is rising. Now therapists and tech companies are offering new solutions

Thomas discovered pornography in the traditional way: at school. He remembers classmates talking about it in the playground and showing each other videos on their phones during sleepovers. He was 13 and thought it was “a laugh”. Then he began watching pornography alone on his tablet in his room. What started as occasional use, at the beginning of puberty, became a daily habit.

Thomas (not his real name), who is in his early 20s, lived with one of his parents, who he says did not care what he was doing online. “At the time, it felt normal, but looking back I can see that it got out of hand quite quickly,” Thomas says. When he got a girlfriend at 16, he started having sex and watched less pornography. But the addiction was just waiting to resurface, he says.

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‘I don’t want sex with anyone’: the growing asexuality movement

Asexual representation is becoming more common – but the orientation is still widely misunderstood. Not wanting sex is not the same as not wanting romance or intimacy – something, its advocates say, the rest of us would benefit from learning

Yasmin Benoit realised she was asexual around the time her peers in Reading figured out they weren’t. “Everyone seems pretty asexual until puberty hits and then they aren’t. But I didn’t feel the same way. I realised something was up,” she recalls.

But when the then-teenager came out as asexual, no one believed her. “They were, like: ‘You don’t look asexual, you’re probably just insecure, or you must have got molested or you must be gay… Maybe you’re a psychopath and can’t form proper connections with people.’”

You can have an intimate life-altering relationship without sex or romance

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