Good morning. Last week I took a train to Ashton-in-Makerfield to chat to men about who they were voting for in the by-election (you can read what it’s all about and why it matters here). I hopped from pub to pub and drunk a million diet cokes and ate maybe the best fish and chips with mushy peas of MY LIFE (I was excited to discover that locals have their own word for mushy peas - which I don’t believe is used anywhere else in the world - “pea wet”).

I was interested in speaking to young men in particular, because British Gen Z men are becoming increasingly conservative in their political views (while women are becoming more liberal). In Makerfield, early opinion polls revealed a stark gender divide: Labour’s Andy Burnham has a 17 per cent point gap over Reform’s Robert Kenyon among women and just 2 per cent among men. This widening male-female disparity is seen among Reform supporters nationwide. I wanted to understand why British male voters were shifting towards the right. What was it about the two leading contenders that young men found appealing or off-putting? And what did all this mean for Labour?

We spoke about unemployment, immigration, sexual violence, family values, men’s mental health and more. You can read what I found out in British GQ here. Polls opened at 7am today and results are expected early tomorrow morning.

And in other news… Canary Wharf invited me to the launch party of their new floating open water pool and saunas (I am famously OBSESSED with both London’s financial district and its saunas). The city is about to get BOILING HOT next week and I would suggest hanging out there (you can also get cocktails around the corner at Bar Lina for under a tenner😛).

Subscribe now

Good morning. I’m currently sitting on a hot train headed outside of London, drinking a Pret latte and a fizzy water. I forgot my AirPods, which usually make me feel cocooned in a dark and private writing bubble. Instead I am getting SUCKED IN to the world of the train carriage. A businessman wearing a pale blue shirt caresses his laptop keyboard. We catch eyes. The toilets splutter a scattershot sound which I mistake for a Skee Mask track. The train conductor tells everyone to “sit back and try and relax,” but the emphasis lands on the word “try” - like he’s about to yank out my wisdom teeth or slide a copper coil up my vagina - and his words hang in the air, curt and intimate and off-kilter.

I am on assignment — about to do some POLITICAL reporting in Ashton-in-Makerfield. For my non-UK readers, Makerfield was somewhere that many Londoners hadn’t heard of until a few weeks ago, but has rapidly become “the epicentre” of British politics. It all kicked off when Makerfield’s Labour MP resigned his seat in the House of Commons, triggering a by-election. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, is now running to become Makerfield’s new Labour MP. This is important because if Burham wins, he will likely challenge Kier Starmer for the position of Prime Minister. But it’s all up in the air, because it’s going to be a close call with Reform… so the future of the country really hangs in the balance with what happens in Makerfield over the next few days. I’m going to hang out in some pubs and do a vibe-check.

In other news, I wrote The Observer’s cover story this weekend, which explored why Gen Zers were opting to be in monogamous relationships as polyamorous relationships shift into the mainstream. Why was Gen Z - the most LGBTQ+ generation and the most likely age group to have fantasies involving kink and BDSM - also the most likely age group to want to be in a sexually exclusive relationship ?? (according to data from Feeld). So I interviewed nine young monogamous couples about why they decided to become exclusive, what keeps them together, how they were keeping traditions alive and how they were rewriting the rules. Their stories were juicy and cosy and vulnerable and silly and sexy… and you can read the article here.

I was going to tell you some things I’ve been reading recently but the train is pulling in so I’ll tell you soon and I’m sorry if there are typos in this !

One of the hardest parts of being a freelance journalist is not being part of a team. You need to build your own reporting protocols, trust your own judgement and navigate moral and ethical decisions alone.

But not having an in-built network is also very fun, because you end up weaving your own community. Nearly every day I speak with writers and reporters - who live everywhere from Dahab to Devon to Delhi - about our respective conundrums and sticky situations (and unpaid invoices).

One of these writers is Tiléwa Kazeem.

I first came across Tiléwa’s work in Dazed. He’d written a piece on Nigeria’s adult content industry boom, dissecting how homegrown platforms like AllAccessFans offered financial independence for women but also carried risks of piracy and public shaming. Despite reporting on sex for a living, I realised I knew nothing about sex work or porn in Nigeria (and honestly… I had limited knowledge about the beat in Africa as a whole).

Tiléwa journalism is lyrical, perceptive and important. He’s taken readers inside Nigeria’s drag scene and trans support networks; interviewed queer people who decided to out their attackers (and themselves) on social media; hung out with herbalists concocting homebrew viagra dupes. He gets intimate access to private moments, notices quiet details and builds scenes that are vivid and visceral and tactile.

But when we spoke over Instagram earlier this month, he told me that he was struggling to get his latest reporting published. “It’s been crickets,” he said. “They just aren’t as interested in our stories and it sucks.”

I wanted to hear about the sex stories that were slipping through the cracks; the stories that the world’s most read publications were missing. So I caught up with Tiléwa over Zoom about what’s being left out of the sex and gender beat — and the challenges in bringing these stories to life.

Here’s our conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you get started in journalism?

Before I became a freelancer, I had a sex column in THEWILL Downtown. I was 21, the youngest in the office. The magazine was very conservative, so I had to use softer wording. I think the first story I ever wrote was about how to give head properly.

A lot of the stories were based on my own personal experiences — thinking about how I could have handled situations better. I wrote about deflowering (having sex with someone for the first time). Bloody Mary (period sex). The most controversial story I did was about pegging. It raised a lot of eyebrows.

Why did you start writing about sex and gender?

There are laws in Nigeria that criminalise same sex marriage. People use this as a sword and shield to harass and kill people. If someone is beaten up for dressing androgynously, people will stand and watch. They’ll say: “Why is he dressing like that? He deserves it, because he’s dressing like a woman.” I wanted to be a part of the few people who talk about that.

What obstacles do you encounter when reporting on these topics in Nigeria?

There’s deeply entrenched homophobia. I recently wrote a story on ‘kito’ [the entrapment of and violence against queer men]. I spoke to a lot of police officers on the phone and about four of them denied knowing anything about it. One said he couldn’t talk on the phone because he was scared that I was recording him. At the end of the day, these are crimes against people. They are violations of human rights. Seeing that pushed to the side because of sexuality is just sad.

How have things changed for LGBTQ+ people in Nigeria in recent years?

Gen Z are a lot more welcoming of LGBTQ+ people. However, raves in Lagos that were once considered safe spaces for queer people have now become increasingly unsafe due to commercialism and gentrification. There are more straight people, which, by proxy, means more homophobic people. I’m working on a story now about the welfare of these raves. What if the people in charge of keeping attendees safe are straight men, who have a cultural bias against queer people? What are the conversations we need to have with them?

And this is just Lagos. Lagos is woke, but it’s one of 36 states in Nigeria. In the Northwest, things like Sharia law exists. The South side of very religious. For the ‘kito’ story, I spoke to several initiatives that operate within the Southern states. One of them told me that married men there are closeted. The stories like the ones I tell can improve the odds of change.

Where do you find your stories?

I haven’t had the privilege of traveling out of the country or to other parts of Nigeria. But I have a plethora of diverse friends and Lagos is such a melting pot of ideas. Wherever I am, I find it intriguing to just sit down and listen to people talk. I think: what’s a story that I could bring out of this?

You get such intimate access in your stories. In your story about homebrewed viagra dupes, you hang out with Segun, the 19-year-old university student, as he downs an elixir, waiting for the girl he likes to come over. You also interview them both after they have sex. How do you get your sources to trust you?

I think it’s being bold enough to ask the right questions and being human enough to listen without judgment. Every guy that I know takes one of those elixirs. Being able to share stories of how I’ve been a victim, or a friend’s been affected, puts the sources in a place where they feel safe to be honest. When people tell you stories, they look at your face for reactions. Are you actively listening? Are you judging them? A part of me is in a lot of the stories I tell.

We’ve spoken before about how the sex and gender beat is missing non-Western perspectives. What’s being left out of the conversation?

I wish there were more African stories. There are so many stories that are not being told or paid attention to. There’s been a boom in sex toys in Nigeria — and a boom in porn creators, which is creating jobs for a lot of Nigerian women. There are so many dots to connect but nobody’s investing in research. We need human stories — not statistics.

Do you have any advice for aspiring or early career journalists who want to report on sex?

Fucking write it. Find a way to tell it, and if no one is listening, keep trying.

Follow Tilèwa Kazeem on Instagram to keep up with his work.

If there is a journalist covering sex, gender and relationships that you would like to hear from, let me know in the comments.

Good morning. Something happened when London’s streets started frothing with miasmic pink blossom. I started writing, obsessively, about scrotal subcultures. First, it was men who were devoted to getting bigger loads, taking supplements like celery seed extract and Swedish flower pollen in pursuit of meteoric quantities of ejaculate. Then it was men who were into ginormous genitals, inflating their scrotums with fluids like saline and glucose to balloon their ball sacs. One 57-year-old man told me that he got his scrotal sac up to 14.5 inches (about the size of a small cantaloupe melon).

Spermaxxing and ballmaxxing have proved to be awkward topics of conversation when a family member or a sweet old man in the British Library asks me what I’m working on at the moment (like, yes sir, I am writing about celestial cumshots and elephantine balls!!!). But I think there’s a lot we can glean - about the human condition and the cultural forces that shape it - by dissecting the pursuit of things that aren’t culturally-coded as a ‘normal’.

In pop culture, it’s common to come across depictions of men who are insecure about their penis size or men who struggle to get it up or ejaculate too quickly. You don’t tend to come across characters in TV shows or films who are insecure about the size of their balls or the quantity of their ejaculate. These scrotal subcultures complicated what I knew about AMAB (Assigned Male At Birth) sexual anxieties. Porn is certainly a factor here, with synthetic spunk and fake cum pumps sometimes deployed for more ‘impressive’ loads. But while it’s clear how hyper-staged adult films are impacting ejaculate expectations, the pursuit of humongous, uber-bulbous balls seemed to fall into its own category.

Any time I interview people who are into a particular kink, my preconceptions about it shatter. There is no single reason why someone may enjoy being urinated on or stomped on with stilettos or dressed up in nappies. The possibility of a coherent narrative implodes. That was the case with scrotal saline inflation, too. Some men craved the sensation of bodily autonomy. They wanted to feel in control of their lives when things otherwise felt crazy. Other men wanted to feel more masculine, or they wanted to subvert the expectations of gender identity. They wanted their genitals to look freakish or abnormal. Defying normative body ideals turned them on.

You can read my piece on ballmaxxing — and what it reveals about kink, desire and masculinity — in Men’s Health. And in other penis-adjacent news:

• Condom prices could hit £13 a pack due to the Iran war as material and shipping costs surge across the industry. The UK sexual health retailer Condoms.uk warns that the price hike may have wider health consequences: “If protection becomes more expensive, it risks becoming something people cut back on - and that has clear public health implications.” The hashtag "condom prices rising" has more than 60 million views on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of X, with some users encouraging stockpiling.

• Match Group announces $100 million investment in Sniffies, sparking backlash. Users of the map-based cruising platform have expressed concerns that partnering with the parent company of Tinder and Hinge could lead to the “straightification” of the platform. IRL cruising may be on the rise. One Redditor said: “Bathhouses are making a comeback!”

• The Cut published a feature on men who want their foreskin back, highlighting a drop in circumcision rates in the US. Around 80% of American men were circumcised in the mid-1960s. In 2022, that figure had dropped to 49%. Meanwhile, the demand for expensive foreskin-restoration surgery is rising. Foregen, an Italian nonprofit, has crowdsourced hundreds of thousands of dollars for foreskin transplant research.

• AI-powered tech is locating sperm cells in AMAB people previously told they were infertile. Columbia University researchers behind the Star (Sperm Track and Recovery) system said they were inspired by the techniques used by astrophysicists to find new galaxies and planets. Dozens of couples have benefited, including one couple who were trying to conceive for 19 years.

• Kyle MacNeill wrote about living with a desensitised penis following antidepressant use for Esquire. It’s a brilliantly visceral piece about sex, pain and pleasure, that also highlights important data about the lesser-known, long-term effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). One review estimated that up to 73% of SSRI users would experience adverse sexual side effects. I’ve previously written about Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction for Dazed.

• Meta deleted Butt Magazine, citing a violation of their “account integrity” guidelines. The Amsterdam-founded queer magazine had a following of nearly 150K. Follow butt_news for updates.

slut(n.)

c. 1400, slutte, “a dirty, slovenly, careless, or untidy woman,”

It was a hot September evening and I was at a party in West London with a different-to-usual-crowd. The function had an open bar, and a few strong margaritas in, the conversation had become loose and stringy and collective. Suddenly, I was very tipsy, talking to a man wearing a suit about his ex-girlfriend. “It’s not like she was a slut or anything,” he said — and all at once my languorous haze imploded. I was no longer drunk.

“What?” I said.

“I mean, it’s not like she’d slept with a lot of people before me,” he offered.

I still wasn’t sure if I’d misunderstood him, or if he was doing a bit. The last time I’d heard someone use the word ‘slut’ derogatorily (outside of the internet or during sex) was when I was at school. That is: the conservative, orthodox Jewish secondary school I left in 2015. Surely this man, who was in his twenties and adjacent to my friendship group, was joking??

He wasn’t — I’d learn throughout the evening, as I kept going back to this man for more slut-shaming sexual politics (I was, on reflection, getting a very specific kick from talking with this man I disagreed with so much, but that’s another story).

More! More! More! I hounded him. Yes, he explained, he would find it off-putting if a woman had had a lot of sexual partners before him. And no, he doesn’t feel the same way about men.

Ok, this man was unhinged. But the weirdest thing happened later that night, when I regaled the interaction with another suited bloke at the party. He laughed with me, then paused; serious. “Well,” he advanced, “Within reason.” Turns out this respectable man was all for women having their fair share of fun. But let’s not push it. There’s having fun. Then there’s being a slut!

A few weeks later, out for dinner with a male friend, the story YET AGAIN fell flat. After breathlessly relaying the jaw-dropping West London party revelations, my male friend looked at me, unperturbed. He liked that his ex hadn’t slept with a lot of people, he said.

☹

It takes about two seconds of scrolling on X to find men berating women who have lots of sex. What shocked me about these interactions was how closely sexual conservatism orbited my sexually liberated social life. These were men who existed outside the manosphere. Young men. Liberal men. Men who were tangential to my friendship circles in London. How many of the men I knew - and loved - were gauging the suitability of prospective girlfriends by assessing their sexual pasts??

I hadn’t thought about this whole palava until Spring, when I came across some posts on X about a new website. Checkhercount.com claims to use AI to estimate a woman’s body count (a word which, by the way, was coined by the US military during the Vietnam War to quantify enemy combatants killed). Enter an Insta URL and the site will ‘analyse’ a girl’s followers, photos and DMs, then churn out her sacred number.

Needless to say, the website was just generating a random figure. AI cannot (yet) work out how many times you’ve fucked. But the fact that the site went viral says something about our propulsion to pour meaning into each others’ quantified sexual histories, to use the number of people who have been inside us as a portal into who we are.

On TikTok, there are 83,000 posts hashtagged body count. Many of them are misogynistic. “One to three is wifeable,” one content creator wearing a backwards cap says to the camera, in a video captioned ‘Acceptable Body Counts for Men and Women Explained. “Four to seven for women is like an entry-level hoe.” Some men are particularly fond of a padlock analogy: proof that promiscuous women are inferior. “If you have a lock that can be opened by any key. It’s a shitty lock.”

☹☹☹

It’s tempting to dismiss these views as fringe or ragebait. But a new, widely circulated study by Ipsos in the UK and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s Business School has confirmed that sexual conservatism among young men really is on the rise.

According to a poll of 23,000 people across 29 countries, 31% of Gen Z men agree that a wife should obey her husband; nearly a quarter think a woman shouldn’t appear too independent or self-sufficient and 21% feel that a “real woman” should never initiate sex. Gen Z men were more conservative on their views about gender and sex than men aged between 62 and 80 — or any other age group included in the survey.

All of this reminds me why writing about sex is important. Because it feels so incredibly trite to be writing that the fantasy of the ‘untouched woman’ is misogynistic, that a woman may be having a lot of sex because she wants to. And yet we are sliding back in time! Sexist double-standards about intimacy are prolific and pervasive, and they might be closer to your friendship circles than you may think.

We need nuanced conversations about sex. Because while slut-shaming reinforces gendered power dynamics, it’s not like sexual liberation necessarily frees you from them. Casual sex doesn’t always make you feel good. It may leave you feeling lonely or empty or degraded. We can acknowledge this, without moralising it. Because sex can also be affirming and empowering and transcendental — and we should be wary of a culture that dismisses the pursuit and enjoyment of (non cis-male) pleasure.

☺

Here are some things I’ve been thinking about recently:

• The “Angry Young Women” New Statesman cover story, which makes the case that a “a radical new feminism” or a “femosphere” has emerged. The article draws on a poll of 2,000 Brits aged 18 to 30, revealing that three times more women than men had a negative view of the opposite sex. This is interesting, but I would have liked to have read more about a shocking statistic briefly mentioned in the piece: 1 and 4 women in England and Wales have been raped. I wasn’t sure how the “left-wing female influencers” in the piece were “similarly radical” to manosphere influencers, who promote misogyny and homophobia.

• wrote a deliciously vivid Playboy story about a six-night fantasy swingers cruise — and what it reveals about sexuality and desire in America.

• The New York Times has a new Opinions series on the intersection of culture and politics. The ‘Older Women Are in Demand by Younger Men’ episode explores what the rise in young men seeking older female partners tells us about power, desire and masculinity (according to data from the dating app Feeld, the number of men who exclusively want to date women who are older than them has increased by 64%).

• wrote a brilliant piece about “growing up in Paedo Britain,” nailing the weird ambiguity/ambivalence surrounding experiences of sexual exploitation, which stops you talking about them, and abuse is perpetuated “unseen, unchallenged, and consequence-free”.

• An i-D story about The Whitney Review, subheaded “We went to a diner with Whitney Mallett and the hot literati reshaping criticism” sparked a debate about our obsession with creatives being hot. I actually like the word ‘hot’ because I think it transcends physicality and is about so much more than adhering to normative beauty standards (I recently made this argument in The New Statesman). However, I did enjoy ’ critique of the “hot writer” trope, arguing that this obsession with self-image upholds the oppressive systemic forces that entrap them (e.g. misogony).

Happy Easter. Last week, GQ published an article I wrote about the men who are obsessed with maximising their sperm count. I learnt a lot about male infertility (and the egregious systemic failures to diagnose it) in the reporting of this piece. But I also made another discovery. Some men care A LOT about the amount of ejaculate they produce.

Apparently there’s a lot to think about when it comes to the ideal ejaculation. On the subreddit, r/cumbiggerloads, which has 42,000 weekly visitors, people with penises confess their disappointment with their ejaculate — that it is placid or pellucid, watery or not watery enough, that there’s not enough of it or that the crescendo is anticlimactic — a dribble rather than a meteoric shoot. “I want to have nice white cum,” one Redditor said. “I want sperm the size of goldfish,” said another.

Spunkmaxxers, it seems, will go to great lengths in pursuit of the perfect load. They’re quitting masturbation. They’re doing yoga and “sexual KungFu”. They’re taking supplements like celery seed extract and Swedish flower pollen, popping pills like SEMEN MAX and SEMENAX and LOAD BOOST.

Like frenzied scientists, some particularly dedicated spunkmaxxers militantly track their pursuits of bigger loads with meticulous spreadsheets and colour-coded graphs. The average person produces about 2 and 5 millilitres of ejaculate, but on this thread, committed ejaculate-optimisers claim that their ‘personal bests’ double, even triple this, soaring as high as 16ml.

Of course the big question is: why??

The more cum, the more manly

Apparently, for some people with penises, producing a small quantity of ejaculate can conjure up a whole array of negative feelings. One 31-year-old truck driver, who lives in Philadelphia, told me that while it wouldn’t ruin sex for him, a smaller load would linger on the back of his mind post-ejaculation.

“If you have a whole sexual experience, and then you have an orgasm, and then at the end of it, there is just a small volume, even if the experience is good, there is a side of you that’s going to be a little disappointed by that fact,” he told me over the phone. A bigger load, on the other hand, can feel powerful. “It gets at a more primal, innate nature, a self-actualising kind of way to see that you are fertile,” he explained.

Fertility is one reason why some spermaxxers are devoted to the pursuit of bigger loads. But for the trucker, something different was going on. It wasn’t that he wanted to have children, but that he liked the feeling of being fertile. Shooting bigger loads was not a means for impregnation but an elevated end in itself.

This was true for many members of r/cumbiggerloads. Some subreddit members liked the physical sensation of producing more ejaculate or the machismo performance of ‘shooting’. “It feels incredible to cum, and the more that shoots out, the more incredible it feels,” one Reddit user said. Another said: “The more I give, the more [my wife] feels desired.” For some spermaxxers, more spunk meant feeling more masculine — an externalisation of their gender identity, a pearly reification of their manhood. “For me it’s bravado,” a Redditor said. “The more cum, the more manly.”

Weakness rather than relief

Writing about spunk feels improper (and unserious?), but I think there’s a lot we can glean from analysing how our bodily fluids are perceived and culturally-coded. Because while spermaxxing may feel like a particularly 2026-flavoured pursuit, cultures have long ascribed symbolic importance to semen, infecting it with prevailing ideas about sex, gender, morality and power.

Aristotle believed that semen was the purest bodily secretion, that too much sexual activity at a young age could limit growth by spending energy. “For the majority of men,” he wrote around 350 BCE, “the sequel to sexual intercourse is exhaustion and weakness rather than relief”. Qigong and Chinese medicine also viewed ejaculation as a potential loss of energy, referring to it as an “energy suicide”.

These ideologies are thousands of years old, but they’re not worlds away from ideas about sex that proliferate in the manosphere. Clavicular, who has been heralded as the ‘king of Looksmaxxing’ (a movement of men obsessed with optimising their physical experience), recently told The New York Times that abstaining from sex is “a big time saver”, while the self-proclaimed misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate claims to be anti-non-reproductive sex. “Sex is for making children,” he wrote on X. “Any man who has sex with women because it ‘feels good’ is gay.”

@jimmy.motivates1 day no gooning clears your head. 7 days makes you confident. 30 days turns you into a machine. I use @quittr.app to stay locked in every time temptation hits. Are you ready to change your life? #nofap #lust #dopaminedetox #christiantiktok #xyzbca

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Meanwhile, abstaining from ejaculation has gained traction online. The subreddit r/NoFap has accrued 336,000 weekly visitors, with members discussing the benefits of refraining from porn and masturbation. Fapstronauts, as some members like to call themselves, believe that semen retention can increase productivity, mental clarity, even attractiveness. “Nofap is the gateway to taking control of your life,” said one Reddit user. “I'm oozing with energy, confidence and masculinity.”

Controlling your orgasms is certainly a way to exercise control in your life when things otherwise feel surreal and crazy. But I’m reluctant to distill either spermaxxing or nofapping into a single narrative. Instead, I think that these subreddits are portals into male psyches - maps of complex, contradictory sexual desires - evidence that male sexual anxiety is so much more than memefied fears about penis size and stamina (and why straight men, who famously don’t talk about sex, could gain a lot in doing so).

2026 has been CURSED. It was off-kilter from the moment I decided to join a prehistoric ex-fling at an afters in Bethnal Green at 4.30am on 1st January. Then bad thing after bad thing started happening. Things like an article getting killed and losing £600. Things like having a whole month turned upside down by a whirlwind one-date Hinge frisson (the app is now, yet again, banished from my iPhone). Things like doing something to my back while dancing at Dalston Superstore, which meant I couldn’t stand upright (possibly the least chic thing that’s happened to anyone, ever). The vibes have been gross. And I am GAGGING to return to the marshmallowy vibes of December when life felt fun and light and sparkly.

In the days following my unbridled, dyspraxic dance moves at Dalston Superstore, as the pain in my back radiated to my abdomen and neck, I hobbled around my flat, thinking about aging and the inevitability of bodily decline. A friend texted me to say they were worried about ending up alone, and I said I’d spent a lot of time thinking about that, too. I started scrubbing the black mold speckled over my bathroom walls, listening to Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, All the Way to the River. It made me feel even more spirally.

The book is about what happened to Gilbert after writing the book that dominates the shelves of South East Asia hostels: Eat Pray Love. Following the best-selling memoir’s happily-ever-after ending (Gilbert meets the man of her dreams in Indonesia), life gets messy. Gilbert’s best friend, Rayya Elias, is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Gilbert realises she’s in love with her, she leaves her husband to take care of Elias until she dies. Really it’s a book about addiction. Elias’ addiction to opiods, and Gilbert’s to love. “I have used other people’s bodies as drugs, both sedatives and stimulants,” Gilbert writes. “My addiction manifests as a sincere yet misguided belief that somebody outside of myself will miraculously be able to heal me on the inside, thereby making me feel safe, cherished and held at last.”

Doesn’t everyone feel this? I wondered.

Neuroscientists have long compared the feeling of falling in love to being on cocaine. Neuroimaging studies show that early romantic love activates the brain’s reward system, triggering a cocktail of euphoria-inducing chemicals like adrenaline and oxytocin and dopamine. But psychologists are divided about whether “addiction” is an accurate way to talk about love. Unlike other addictions, such as to drugs or alcohol or gambling, love and sex addiction is not a recognised clinical diagnosis in the UK or US. And yet love — or the cessation of it — can still physically impact the body. At least two per cent of patients thought to be having a heart attack are in fact experiencing ‘broken-heart-syndrome’, a condition triggered by acute stress that changes the shape of heart muscle and rapidly weakens it. In rare cases it’s fatal.

Since the noughties, a lucrative industry has sprung up catering to the pain of lust and love and heartbreak. Kusnacht Practice, reportedly the world’s most expensive rehab centre, hosts sex addicts in lakeside villas for close to £112,656.68 per week. You can go on break up bootcamps in California. Heartbreak retreats in Mexico. There are AI “break up buddies”. “Get your ex back” coaches. “Break-up Boss” apps. Every time I go on Instagram, I am bombarded with infographics and videos about limerence — a state of intense and obsessive infatuation with someone whose interest in you isn’t clear. While it isn’t a clinical diagnosis, there are 40,400 videos hashtagged “limerence” on TikTok and Google Searches for the term have surged since 2022.

It’s clear that there is an appetite for self-pathologising our relationship with love. And whether there’s scientific consensus among psychologists or not, I do think the language of addiction is useful here. Because loving and being loved is exhilarating. It’s dizzying and transcendental and terrifying and disembowling. I also wonder whether smartphones and social media/dating apps have made the dance of dating particularly addictive, because we can whip up intensity without commitment (or even leaving our bedrooms). We can open our mouths and shower each other in an endless stream of delicious dopamine-dinging notifications — then turn off the tap without explanation. Or maybe it’s always felt this maddening...

⋆.𐙚 ̊

I have lots of articles coming out soon that I can’t wait to share with you. In the meantime, I’ve been delving into the New Yorker archives and loved Rachel Aviv’s dizzying, cerebral profile of Elizabeth Loftus, the psychologist who challenged the idea that we can trust our memories and has testified for defendants like Harvey Weinstein. I’m obsessed with everything Rachel Aviv writes. I also have been thinking a lot about Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine piece on the moral and legal complexities of sibling sexual abuse. And on a lighter note, I loved Ari Schneider’s article in Playboy about quitting Hinge and getting a Jewish matchmaker — the type of article my Jewish mother dreams I’d be writing (I’m late to the game but I had no idea Playboy has such good writing… and they’ve also recently launched a Substack).

Have a gorgeous Sunday ! March is going to be a good month, I think

This winter, I’ve noticed a shift in London’s dating scene. Pubs have long reigned supreme as the optimum spot for romantic rendezvous in the capital. But with booze-fuelled debauchery on the decline in Britain (UK adults are officially drinking less per week since when records began and the majority of Gen Zers don’t drink alcohol on first dates), pubs may be losing their monopoly over British romantic culture. Welcome: the sauna date. One and a half hours of sweating and shvitzing in the presence of a new, prospective or long-adored lover.

According to exclusive data from Tinder, a rising number of Brits are mentioning “sauna” in their bios on the dating app, with a 35% increase year on year among UK users. Benji Teare, co-founder of the music-focused Social Sauna Club in Peckham, says that he reckons that there’ll be at least one first date every day at the sauna. “Every Ambient Sauna shift I used to work, I’d be aware of at least one couple that were, if not, a first date. It was early doors.”

The number of Finnish-style public saunas in the UK doubled between early 2023 and 2024, rising from 45 to 90, according to the British Sauna Society. Canary Wharf, the city’s finance bro capital, has become an unexpected hub for steamy date nights and meet-cutes. “The energy inside a sauna is hot,” says Ruby Harwood, a guide at luxe wellness centre ARC, which is home to Britain’s largest sauna. Couples often sauna together, she says, and some can be “very canoodly”.

But apparently, the icebaths are where the flirting is really at. “The boys will stay in longer if there’s a girl there,” Harwood laughs. The venue hosts parties with DJs on Fridays and Saturdays, where Harwood says she often sees groups mingle and get drinks together after. “I think people generally feel a bit more open,” she says, “there’s no preconceived conceptions.”

Meanwhile, Georgia Campbell, the brand and marketing manager of Skuna Boats (also in Canary Wharf) says that about 56 couples book floating hot tub experiences every month, and that Skuna members have requested sauna dating events.“That’s definitely on the horizon,” she says, “There’s a big shift in wanting to do dates where there’s no pressure to have alcohol, or places where you can get that buzz but in a different way.”

When I asked my Instagram followers who went on sauna dates what they enjoyed about it, I got a range of responses. Some said that they liked the time cap (usually about an hour and a half — a good trial length for a first date). Others liked the fact that in a sauna you’re not directly looking at each other.

“People think [sauna dates are] intense but I’d actually argue it’s not at all intense,” says Josh, the founder of Cold Club UK, which organises sauna meet-ups. “You leave your inhibitions at the door.” Josh had his third date with his now girlfriend at the Hackney Community Sauna. Nowadays, they go together once a week. “Our sex life after doing sauna is better because we’re literally full of serotonin.”

Scientists are yet to study the impact of saunas on sex lives (as far as I am aware) BUT regular sauna use has been shown to reduce symptoms of depression. What’s more, Czech researchers found that cold water plunging can boost the concentration of dopamine in the blood by 250 per cent — apparently comparable to a line of cocaine. Contrasting temperatures can make you feel tingly, transcendental, teleported, transformed — all without clouding your mental clarity and judgement.

So yes… partial nudity, a bodily high, a sort of looseness for social interactions: I think saunas have all the ingredients for fun and hot dates. Of course, we can quickly achieve all these things with intoxicants. But I find it incredibly cool that the primal sensations of hotness and coldness can get us here too.

Good morning! I’m working on something BIG, so in the meantime, I thought I’d take you behind the scenes of one of my favourite stories I’ve ever worked on.

A couple of autumns ago, when I was living in New York City, I started hanging out uptown with a woman named Hattie Wiener.

Hattie was an 87-year-old OnlyFans performer who lived in a sunshine-yellow painted studio in Hell’s Kitchen with a cat named Beauty. She had electric white hair and sparkly hazel eyes. She had expensive taste. She loved attention. She was beautiful and beaming and naughty. She’d say things like “I can only be with younger men, darling” and “I’m a boner queen” and “If you were a guy, you’d have a hard-on.” She’d strip naked announced and dance to Klezmer music and give me sex advice I hadn’t asked for.

“Fucking is a great gift,” she told me over coffee one afternoon, “It’s the best thing to do.”

But she was also in pain, and when I’d leave her apartment, tumbling into Manhattan’s chaotic streets, I’d feel grateful to be alive, to live in a body that wasn’t painful. Hattie made me question all the ways in which I’d come to conflate beauty with simply looking young; how much the capitalistic pursuit to be beautiful was in so many ways an ontological crisis; a self-flagellating quest to stay young forever.

In November, Hattie booked a one-way ticket to Anguilla, because she loved the sun, and she wanted as much of it as possible. I saw her for the last time at the very end of the month. As I was leaving, she told me that she had no interest in Botox (that using it “is trying to control reality”, when we should really “surrender” to it) and that I should send more nudes (“just say my pussy asked me to send you a picture of it”). She died a few months later. I felt lucky to have briefly known her.

Here’s an extract of my article, featuring my photographs, which was published in Huck.

In the week Hattie Wiener spends a copious amount of time alone in her Manhattan studio, propped up in bed with a heating pad. On Sundays, however, the 87-year-old transforms, prancing around her apartment in her laciest lingerie, while a friend snaps photos of her to post on OnlyFans.

“You would think that perhaps my oldness would be a turnoff sexually. But it isn’t to young men,” she said. ​“It’s heartening to know that so many young men allow themselves to be admirers of older women’s bodies.”

Hattie is one of a number of women who have launched OnlyFans accounts in their later life, fulfilling a plethora of needs that are otherwise lacking in their daily lives. The platform provides mature content creators with a space to demystify their sexuality, demonstrating that old age is not just ​“Alzheimer’s and wheelchairs” and ​“nursing home and smells,” but that it is also ​“interesting and adventurous and exciting and beautiful.”

I first came across Hattie on Instagram. She was performing topless with DJ and artist Joni on the opening night of Intima, a new performance art space in Queens. Hattie was nearly naked, wearing purple lipstick and snorkeling goggles. ​“I went from being a committed virgin to a committed slut,” she said, when we first spoke over the phone in November. ​“If my bra strap showed in my day I was a slut. It was so tight-ass.”

We arranged to meet in her apartment that Saturday morning, a sunshine-yellow studio in Hell’s Kitchen. Hattie was barefoot, wearing a white sleeveless jumper and cream trousers, her fingernails painted mint and her toenails magenta. She ushered me inside, where two professionally-shot portraits of her were hung up on the wall. ​“I’m a boner queen,” she told me as we sat on her sofa. ​“They get hard-ons for me in a minute. If you were a guy, you’d have a hard-on.”

As we spoke, her phone lit up with messages. She read them unphased, sending back thumbs-up emojis in response. ​“The guys are so nice,” she said. ​“They’re so appreciative. And they thank me, because they get off on it. You know, when are you gonna see attractive old pussy?” A licensed sexologist, Hattie loves talking about sex (she used the phrase ​“ass-fuck” three times in our initial ten minute phone call). But at the core of it all, she was lonely. It was a loneliness that consumed her, a loneliness that no amount of anal sex or dick pics could fill.

“I’m a cripple here,” she said. ​“I wake up in the morning and I say what should I do? And the answer is nothing.” With arthritis and hip replacements, Hattie is constantly hurting (the pain temporarily yields when she is having sex — or when she is performing for her OnlyFans — ​“The endorphins kick in,” she explains.) ​“I have such a young spirit and young thoughts,” she said. ​“My body — as much as I never thought it would happen — it can’t keep up.”

Read the full article in Huck. I’ve also written about OnlyFans (and how the platform can become addictive) for the iPaper.

Good morning! A few weeks ago, GQ asked me to put together a guide for how to write a better dating app profile. It was a lot of fun, but there was one drawback. I’m now back on Hinge.

For a brief window in December, I was blissfully dating app-free. I was doing mindful things like going to the sauna on my own and drinking pickle juice martinis on weeknights. Gone was the drip-feed of likes, the constant stream of conversation, the perpetual flirting and firing of dopamine. Without Hinge on my phone, I was spending less time thinking about dating — which meant less time thinking about myself and how I am perceived — and more time thinking about other, more important things (working out how I was going to split New Year’s Eve between two friend groups, for instance).

The timing also made things easier — December being the busiest, most serendipitous month. My diary was crammed with Christmas parties that threw random crowds together (the perfect kind of party) and London was feeling better than ever: fun, fuzzy, glittery, incandescent. Then the GQ article came up. So, for research purposes, I redownloaded it.

Cut to January and the app is still on my phone — and I have no excuses. I check it religiously as I’m trying to write, even though I have no desire to meet up with anyone. Partially it’s because it’s so cold outside and I spent so much money in December. Partially it’s because I’m too busy doing smug things like watching whole films without going on my phone and batch cooking coconut fish curries. But mainly it’s because I’ve lost faith in an app in connecting me with someone I fancy (never mind someone I want to be in a relationship with).

On dating apps, I find myself focusing on quantifiable markers of hotness and desirability, which have little correlation to what makes me fancy someone in real life. Nothing can predict the ineffable combination of qualities that makes an interaction with someone at a party sparkly, that makes you get each other, that makes things exciting, that means you make each other laugh. And I doubt I’m alone when I say that some of the hottest, funnest intimate experiences I’ve had are with people I probably wouldn’t ‘like’ on the apps.

I’ve also become incredibly distrusting of my own judgment. Like what does it say about me that the last person I dated from Hinge had on their profile that that they were ‘looking for chaos’, or that I’d sooner match with someone who says that their ‘ideal Sunday’ is ‘substance abuse’, than someone who describes weekend activities I’d actually like to do (lying in bed drinking coffee listening to NTS, going to a community sauna, long walk, pub, etc)?? Maybe it’s a British thing (earnestness-fearing etc). It’s probably a me thing. But maybe, in the final year of my twenties, the drama and the chaos is all ok??

Anyway, I have also been busy being a serious journalist. Yesterday, The Guardian published a story that had been in the works for months. In September, I flew to Vallejo, the city where more young adults live with their parents than anywhere else in America. I wanted to understand why Vallejo, which is far from the poorest nor the most expensive city in the US, came out on top for this living arrangement. And with so many young adults (particularly men) cooped up with mum and dad, how were the traditional markers of adulthood and masculinity changing?? I’ll share some thoughts on the reporting of that story soon. In the meantime, thank you so much for reading. It means the world to me!

Is it just me or is this post-Christmas pre-New Year’s netherworld feeling particularly loose and lawless?? So much juicy stuff has happened recently and I want to tell you EVERYTHING. Of course, being a journalist, I am always mining my life for material, ossifying off-kilter interactions into article fodder, weaving intimate nights and weird mornings into stories. There are so many recent frissons that I am GAGGING to anthropologically dissect with you (some of which you’ll be reading about in 2026). But I’m also wondering how much I want to divulge about myself here, how much to separate my job from my personal antics, how loose I can be without feeling flooded with anxiety (/as if I’d just published the internal monologue of some sort of mental breakdown??).

Substack queen Emily Sundberg once described this platform as “a really good way for women to monetize their diary entries” — which is true. Reading someone else’s diary feels like entering into a forbidden world, bejewelled with ugly feelings, sprawling with secrets. We’re all hungry to feel less alone in our twisted feelings, to feast off each other’s unkempt selves. Monetizing our diaries is a smart idea on a macro-level, with global audiences increasingly distrusting of legacy news organisations and eager to form parasocial bonds with vivacious podcasters, TikTokers and livestreamers.

Since the noughties, women have developed a particular knack for confessional writing — dissecting the ‘private’ parts of our lives. One 2013 study of opinion pieces published in Australia found that men had written close to three-quarters of the political op-eds. The only subjects dominated by female writers were related to relationships, parenting, and gender.

Critics are divided on whether this is a good thing. Female-written personal narratives have been described as “consciousness-raising”, reifying the invisible parts of women’s daily lives. Others have dubbed it as navel-gazy and narcissistic. One HuffPost journalist described the oversaturation of women blogging about their “latest sexual escapades” as the Carrie Bradshaw Effect. “We can’t turn a page, web or paper, without reading about a young woman over-sharing details about her love life,” Courtney E. Martin wrote, “The Carrie model is not going to get women writers recognized -- it's going to keep them in the stronghold of a lineage that doesn't produce many Pulitzers.”

I don’t think that writing about sex is vapid. We can glean a lot about ourselves by examining what we desire and how we connect to each other in private. But I’m not sure what I think about oversharing — or, as Jia Tolentino put it in the New Yorker, “the commodification of personal experience… placing a delicate part of your life in the hands of strangers.” I’m sure my thoughts on all this will evolve in 2026 (and please tell me what you’re interested in reading about!). But in the meantime, I’ll tell you about last December, because it feels less messy to talk about my mess with distance:

• I’d moved back from Brooklyn and in with my parents (after a stint living with my ex in East London, then breaking up).

• I was spending a lot of time in my dressing gown in my Cath Kidston-themed bedroom, wondering how things had gone so downhill.

• I got into a shouting fight with my mum because I’d eaten too many of the tomatoes in the fridge.

• I was dating a man who told me that he’d “probably cheat” if he got into a relationship again and that he was finding it overwhelming having “so many cuties” asking him out on Instagram.

• A copywriting gig that felt too good to be true was. The guy who’d commissioned me ended up ghosting me, owing me hundreds.

• 40ish job rejections deep, I was ready to give up on trying to do journalism full-time.

I won’t get into the weeds of why life is soo much funner and sparklier now, because that would be boring, but it is. Maybe next December I’ll tell you about this one. In the meantime, here are the pieces I’m most proud of this year:

Two girls fell in love at a camp for ‘troubled teens’ and made an audacious escape. Their captors weren’t far behind - The Guardian

This story took about a year to report. Two summers ago, I heard about an institute called Re-Creation Retreat (RCR), a hellish-sounding therapeutic treatment center for teenage girls with “behavioral problems” in Arizona (girls say they weren’t allowed to look each other in the eye or look out the window). I started interviewing girls who went there. Then, a few months into my reporting, I heard a story I couldn’t stop thinking about. It was a story about two girls, Ashley and Cassia, who met at RCR, fell in love and managed to escape. A few months after my article was published, RCR was shut down by the Arizona Department of Health Ser­vices.

A Finasteride Nightmare: Inside the Dark Side of the Hair-Loss Drug - GQ

My other big reported story this year was on the anti-hair-loss drug finasteride, which some users say has wrecked their lives. I conducted interviews with numerous men who had taken the drug and were reporting horrible symptoms. Insomnia. Brain fog. Genital shrinking. Suicidal ideation. I focused on the story of one man, Marc Turner, who took finasteride for hair loss in 2020 and died by suicide in a hotel room less than two years later.

My Awkward Night in an AI Sex Doll Brothel - VICE

I wrote a lot about sex dolls this year. I think it’s because I spend so much time thinking about intimacy and loneliness our inherent unknowability to each other… which naturally brought me to people who wanted to ejaculate inside silicone dolls. My sex doll adventures began in February, when I flew to Berlin to spend the night at Cybrothel, the world’s first AI sex doll brothel. I spent the night cuddling up to a doll called Techno Babe (when in Rome!) and watching a ton of psychedelic VR porn. It was surreal and kaleidoscopic and existential and lonely.

The Hidden Lives of Guys With Sex Doll Girlfriends - Men’s Health,

Another sex doll story. Off the back of my sleepover at Cybrothel, I started conducting interviews with men who had formed romantic relationships with their dolls. The story grew to be about so much more than sex, but loneliness, isolation and what it means to be a man in Trump’s America.

The rise of India’s first kink fashion brand - A Fucking Magazine.

I started writing for Feeld’s sexy magazine A Fucking Magazine this year, which kicked off in Jaipur! I came across a designer called Randhir Singh, who said he’d launched India’s “first kink fashion brand,” SUBCULTURE, working with a family who had been making leather products like slippers and diaries for 150 years. Today, they create blindfolds, bite gags, hard and soft leather handcuffs.

Sauna Raves Are Coming to London - i-D

A couple of winters ago, I photographed and wrote about Sam Liebling’s iconic bathhouse rave, Steamroom, for Brooklyn Magazine. Since then I’ve written a tonne about sauna/bathhouses, including in Finland and Sweden, where I learned loads about sauna lore — how they are portals with unique social rules (kind of in the same way nightclubs are). I think I’m so interested in saunas because I’m always thinking about our desire to temporarily escape ourselves and extreme heat provides a way to do this without drugs and alcohol… If you’re in London the rooftop saunas in Hackney is one of my faves.

Thank you so much for reading this and Happy New Year! I can’t wait to take you to some exciting places in 2026! 🫧🫧🫧

Hello! This summer I watched my first wrestling battle (a kinky one, of course), and wrote about it for AFM, Feeld’s magazine. All the performers were sex workers, some of whom performed in fantasy wrestling competitions or ran private combat sessions with men. I spoke to them about the particular pleasures of dominance and submission — and what we can gain by surrendering control.

Here’s an extract from the article:

Black Venus thinks that wrestling is “quite similar to sex.” We’re talking on the phone, a few days before the Iron Fist Tournament, a lesbian wrestling competition taking place in a secret location on the outskirts of East London, and Venus, a sex worker, educator, and martial artist, was preparing me for what to expect. “The primality of it, the rawness, that skin-to-skin contact—just sweating on each other. It’s very physical.”

Venus and I have met once before, at a “Sex and Rage” lesbian strip club party she’d organized in an arts centre in Dalston, a dazzling night of maximalist razzmatazz: glittery stilettos, flashes of diamenté, fake dollar bills flickering like moths in the floodlights. Friday’s event, she warns me, was going to be different. “It’s very chaotic,” she explained, “The messiness of it just allows people to enjoy their bodies as they are, without overthinking and hypersexualizing every aspect of themselves.”

Venus began hosting kink wrestling battles last year, following the release of the romantic thriller Love Lies Bleeding, when “there was this surge of interest in strong women,” yet wrestling games seemed to only cater to a straight male audience. In the UK, a number of venues, such as The Submission Room in London and The Wrestling Factory in Manchester, host session wrestling competitions, but Venus hadn’t come across any events that were run exclusively for lesbians and bisexuals. “We wanted to do something that allowed us to be more free,” she told me.

A few days later, on a balmy Friday evening—the beginning of the UK’s sunniest spring on record—I took two trains to the secret location (which is revealed to guests after booking). I arrived at the East London high street just after 7pm, and zoomed into Google Maps, trying to locate the elusive gym, somewhere between a car repair shop and a tattoo studio. Eventually, I zigzagged down a gritty alleyway, where a Euro football game was blasting from the back of a restaurant, and noticed a concrete-slabbed building with a door ajar.

There I spotted Venus—warm and radiant—dressed in a white sports bra and shimmery black shorts. The gym is deliciously kitsch: a wrestling ring is surrounded by bright blue and red padded mats; walls draped in union jack bunting, decorated with pin-ups of butch female wrestling legends and printed photographs of amateurs.

Venus told me that she keeps the exact location of the gym private to protect the safety of the performers, but the venue is well known among wrestling communities on a “if you know, you know” basis. “A big part of the events, for me, is creating a space where people can just have fun, not take themselves too seriously,” she said.

The event kicks off with a kinky wrestling workshop. By 7.30pm, London’s lesbians and bisexuals have filled the room, and are stripping into gym gear.

Read the full story at AFM, Feeld’s Magazine. And thank you to Pixie Levinson for the beautiful photos.

Andrew Tate thinks that a lot of things are gay. The self-proclaimed misogynist edgelord, who is banned from YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, is frequently yapping to his 10.9 million followers on X about things he feels are homosexually-coded: BDSM. Being a Democrat. Wanting to be at the birth of your own child. Sleeping. Dolphins. Couscous.

But the most peculiar take? Tate thinks that straight sex can be gay.

The 38-year-old, who often appears online topless, smoking cigars and driving Bugattis, has built an empire of devoted male fans, peacocking a model of masculinity that is stacked, uber-wealthy and politically incorrect. He’s been described as the latest iteration of flashy, alpha-male figures like Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and influencer Dan Bilzerian — but there is one key difference. Where those men showed off their prowess with women, Tate is in many ways anti-sex (or so he claims to be).

“I really don’t find sex that great,” Tate told OnlyFans star Bonnie Blue on the Disruptors podcast. He says that the purpose of sex is getting a woman pregnant and having lots of children — otherwise it’s a waste of time. “If you were to say to me: ‘Andrew, you can come have sex here and there’s no chance of there ever being a kid, it’s just for fun.’ I would say: ‘Sorry, I am not gay.’”

So why does Tate think that straight sex can be gay?

The argument that non-reproductive sex is homosexual is so ludicrous that it could easily be dismissed as virality-seeking provocation. But I think Tate’s sexual politics are worthy of examination. Not least because he isn’t the only man on the internet who thinks that sexual pleasure is emasculating.

Other male influencers are preaching about the benefits of semen retention or NoFap (quitting masturbation) online. “I’m at the point where I’ve had my fun, bro. I’m 19,” said one fitness influencer, who hosts conversations on topics like “Having a girlfriend: advantage or setback for ambition.” “I think it’s time for me to focus more on building myself than it is time for me to have pleasure,” he told his fans.

@lifeofrljSaying this is easy, doing it is a different story. Kinda posting this for personal accountability to try my best not to ho3 around 💀 and maybe inspire others to do the same

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

In 2024, 9 per cent of men reported that they were “single by choice”, and not sexually active, with men aged 18-24 the most likely to be voluntarily celibate, according to a Kinsey Institute survey. Comparatively, women who were voluntarily celibate were most likely to be aged over 65. In the eyes of some young men, sexual pleasure is at odds with masculinity because it means surrendering control of the body, becoming defenseless.

@thedefntribe30 Days of Discipline. Retain your Energy 💪🏽🗣️

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Unlike incels, who tend to describe themselves as rejects, NoFap influencers frame themselves as high-achieving and attractive. Where the hyper-masculine icons of the past — Joey Tribiani, John Tucker and Chuck Bass — had the primary aim of getting women into bed, these men view promiscuity as a liability. They voluntarily renounce their sexual pleasure in pursuit of macho self-optimisation. Like lifting weights or bulking on high-protein diets, refraining from jacking off is part of being a bro, part of the grindset.

So where does this idea come from?

While this all may feel like a particularly novel flavour of masculinity, the aversion to bodily enjoyment has ancient roots. Babylonian “sex omens”, believed to have been written as early as 1100 BCE, cautioned against surrendering to bodily pleasure.

Around 419 AD, Augustine of Hippo began writing about “concupiscence,” bodily desire that was intrinsically sinful. Lust, he theorised, was immoral because it disabled rationality and self-control, hindering the nobler pursuit of knowledge-acquisition. “Nothing so casts down the manly mind from its height as the fondling of a woman,” he wrote.

In 2011, a college student named Alexander Rhodes launched a Reddit forum called NoFap, where members discussed the benefits of abstaining from masturbation. Like ancient philosophers, NoFappers say that restraining from masturbation helps them focus on more worthy goals. Men described feeling more productive, more handsome, more strong (none of these claims are medically proven).

The subreddit, which now has 1.2 million members, is described as a peer support group for porn addiction and compulsive sexual behaviour, but the fringes of the movement are decidedly misogynistic. “Pleasure is for women. Control and dominance for men,” one Redditor, on r/semenretention, said.

@rob.rikerwhat day you on?😂

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

What does all this mean for men?

NoFappers say that ditching porn and masturbation helps them achieve their goals, and if their relationship to sex was previously unhealthy, this is probably true. But while I applaud anyone who is questioning their sexual behaviours and probing heterosexual cultural norms, I worry that something more sinister is at play.

With so many young men feeling lonely and like their traditional roles have been replaced, it is not surprising that Tate’s emphasis on self-empowerment is appealing. The majority of Gen Z men believe that feminism has gone too far and 69% of 18 to 23-year-old men feel that “no one cares if men are OK.” Manosphere influencers, preaching a narrative of stoic self-mastery, attract men who feel displaced and want to exercise control over their lives.

But having no sex, like having lots of sex, can be lonely. To be intimate with someone is to be both embodied and disembodied, transcendent and transformed, propelled beyond the confines of ordinary consciousness and the neoliberal grind. While celibacy might be the right approach for some, I fear that a sexual politics that frames pleasurable sex as a devilish temptation, a distraction from more worthy goals, is eroding our connection to our bodies and each other.

Subscribe now

Thank you for reading as always! If you’re interested in reading more about men, sex and dating, I interviewed single men living in London about their romantic lives for the The Standard this summer and men in relationships with sex dolls for Men’s Health in spring.

And talking of male loneliness… this weekend I devoured Daniel Koliz’s genius Harpers essay on gooning — an internet subculture in which men attempt to masturbate for hours on end while egging each other on with challenges, memes, clips and GIFS.

It sounds like a diametrically opposed community to NoFap, and yet reading Koliz’s description of gooners “abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone”, the online worlds of hypersexuality and abstinence didn’t seem to be worlds apart. NoFappers and Gooners want to control their experience of pleasure, to become the master of their sexual urges — and both movements have birthed a quasi-religious creed for dissatisfied men, offering a path towards transcendence.

I landed in New York City in September thirsty for hedonistic fun. After spending the summer watching my beautiful best friends marry beautiful people, I was ready to return to the city where it felt normal to be single at 28 and go out until 6 am on a Tuesday.

That was definitely the vibe last time I was in the city. It was autumn 2024, and I’d had back-to-back assignments in India and the US — a surreal reporting trip that kicked off in Delhi and wrapped in Vegas. Landing at JFK, I took the subway into the city, then tumbled into a Dunkin’ in the Lower East Side. I gulped downed a giant cold brew, ate an iced chocolate doughnut, licked my fingers, then ran deliriously between parties in Brooklyn and Queens and Manhattan for the next 24 hours. Everyone was single and fucking and getting fucked up and I thought, yes, this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.

This time I arrived in New York days after an article that had been in the works for months was killed, which left me feeling deflated and aimless. My single friends were out of town or engaged or in new relationships. Without my usual party friends readily available, I meandered between coffee dates and cocktail catch-ups — the type of boundaried plan that always leaves me feeling empty — and spent a copious amount of time wandering alone, jittery and existential. I thought a lot about my last relationship, which was odd, because it was a long-distance relationship with someone who lived in London. Probably it was because I’d spent so much time when I was living in New York missing him and being here again reminded me of that perpetual state of longing — and the future with him that didn’t happen.

I’m obviously cringing out while writing this because it’s embarrassing to write about being lonely — particularly being lonely in New York City — because it’s been said a gazillion times before (and people like Joan Didion and Carrie Bradshaw have said it so well). And yet… they have a point!! A city where you can drink sodas in every colour and party every day of the week does leave you feeling empty!

In Goodbye to All That, Didion writes about that feeling of being young in New York, when “nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach” — “I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.” That feeling faded, obviously, and so, she left. I definitely felt that rupture this time — the feeling of time having passed, of not being 21, when everything felt new, when the future didn’t real, when nothing mattered. Being back in the city where I’d studied journalism, I was reminded of all the ways the city makes you feel empty and alive, purposeful and aimless, how it is feral and sparkly and clamorous and lonely and beautiful and I’m so glad I left.

Anyway… I did get some article ideas when I was away… I went to the Queens club BASEMENT and spotted a vape HANDBAG, which had been doing the rounds during NY Fashion Week. I wrote about the frightening next stage of the vaping revolution for The New Statesman (and also about Labubu fever). And speaking of adolescent nostalgia… Time Out asked me to investigate whether Gen Z are *actually* bad at partying — you can read what I found here.

Thank you for reading as ever. I am cringing out <3 <3

On a recent balmy Friday evening, I went to a cake-sitting party hosted on the top floor of a lesbian-owned South London boozer, the Old Nun’s Head. The sticky soirée took place in a quaint, wooden-walled room with tall windows and red velvety curtains. Six performers took to the stage to squish, smash, smush — and be otherwise intimate with a cake.

As I walked home — high off hariboes and diet coke — I couldn’t stop thinking about this fantastical artform. Where does cakesitting come from? Who started it? Why do people do it? And what about cake — specifically — is so sexy?

Sploshing subcultures

The exact origins of cake-sitting are unknown, but the activity is thought to overlap with “wet and messy” (WAM) fetish communities, also referred to as sploshing (a term that originates from an adult magazine called Splosh! that ran in the ‘90s).

The fetish is centered around pouring, spraying, splashing and smearing wet and viscous, messy substances (like mayonnaise or custard or melted chocolate) onto the body. Like any kink or fetish, it’s impossible to pin down what exactly about the experience is arousing — and what it is titillating about it certainly differs from person to person — but psychologists think that a penchant for wet and messy play could originate from childhood.

"There are theories in the psychological and scientific communities that feel it's a kink that has developed through a feeling of joy a person held in formative years for playing with messy substances, also known as 'messy play theory'," sexologist and kink specialist Tiffany K. Chan told PopSugar.

Other theories posit that it could stem from a desire to rebel against societal norms of cleanliness, properness and order, or “simply [to] do something 'naughty,’” Chan added.

Lindsay Dye’s “chaotic and vividly unreal” creations

I wanted to learn more about what cake-sitting feels like — and how to do it well — so I turned to the queen of cake-sitting, Lindsay Dye. A Brooklyn-based multimedia artist and sex worker, Dye’s technicolor, maximalist cake-sitting performances blew up in New York City the late 2010s — in part due to the intricate, garish, elaborate qualities of the cakes themselves. We chatted about being a camgirl, anthropomorphic desserts and what colour cakes are a no-go for cake-sitting.

The interview has been condensed.

What gave you the idea to try cake sitting?

In 2014, I earned my Master of Fine Arts in Photography and Sculpture from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Soon after, I entered the world of sex work—both in-person and online—as a camgirl, seeking a more entrepreneurial path that would allow me to support myself while dedicating time to my art.

Streaming nearly 24/7, I was exposed to a wide range of client fetishes, many of which centered around food. One that stood out was cake-sitting—an act that felt like a perfect fusion of sculpture and performance. I began incorporating singing into these performances to shift the emotional tone, introducing elements that weren’t rooted in sex.

Over time, the work evolved. To fully engage with it as an artist, I brought this private act into public space—where it traditionally didn’t belong—forcing audiences to confront their own reactions and beliefs, side by side. My aim was to provoke confusion—sensual, emotional, psychological—to subvert and challenge perceptions of fetish itself.

What do you enjoy the most about it?

What I loved most was baking the cakes. As an artist, I approached each one as a sculptural project—putting my creative energy into crafting something singular and expressive. I gave each cake a personality, assigned it a zodiac sign, even made up a playful backstory. They became almost anthropomorphic.

Through Instagram Stories, I documented their journey, and the cakes began to feel more like beings than objects. That sense of life added weight to their destruction, making the act feel heavier, more tender, and emotionally charged.

What cakes work best for cake-sitting?

Of course, it varied—and over time, I learned what color palettes worked best. The choices often depended on the venue, the type of event, and the themes I was working with. But generally, I gravitated toward rainbow palettes for the insides—the reveal—adding to the sense of spectacle and chaos.

Chocolate was never an option for obvious reasons, and red velvet was reserved for raves—a clay-like, bloodbath of an experience. I often used artificial colors—pinks, blues, greens—because the less the cake resembled food, the more visually striking the result. Both inside and out, the cakes were layered, chaotic, and vividly unreal.

Because of financial constraints, I worked exclusively with white boxed cake mixes and store-bought vanilla or buttercream icing, dyeing everything myself. I’d also embellish the cakes with non-edible materials—rhinestones, silly string, flowers, stickers, glitter, even bits of home decor. However, I also realized I needed a lot of cake to sustain even a seemingly quick five-minute performance—so the more layers, the more towering the structure, the better.

What are you working on now?

After 15 years in New York creating, performing, and pursuing art, I returned to the 9–5 world. I now work as a Creative Project Manager at Magnum Photos, a world-renowned photography agency.

Performance had taken a toll on both my body and mental health. It affected me in complex ways—both positively and negatively. Eventually, I realized I needed a break from the constant hustle. There are still projects I hope to return to and ideas I want to bring to life, but for now, I’m on hiatus—focusing on stability, growth, and preparing for whatever comes next.

Check out my cake sitting photo story in Service 95, Dua Lipa’s magazine. And talking of sweet treats and hedonistic pleasure… I wrote about the pleasures of late-night dining for The Standard.

Thank you for reading ! 🍧🎀🍰🫦🎂

Subscribe now

One of my favourite things about living in New York City was feeling like I was in a metropolis of secret portals. The weirdest and wildest cults and cliques and freaks were crammed into the city’s shoebox apartments, piled into the dark corners of dive bars, squeezed into top floors of faded, glitzy hotels. Your neighbours were probably up to something crazy and there was definitely something fishy going on in the restaurant across your street. But unless you accidentally stumbled across it, you’d have no idea that these eccentric ecosystems exist.

Luckily for me, I’d moved to New York to study journalism, which meant dedicating two years to unveiling and untangling the phantasmagorical things that lay beneath the surface. It meant hanging out with Satanists in the after-hours of Brooklyn cafes, shvitzing at raves in Russian bathhouses, eating pancakes in uptown diners with scubadiving fanatics (who taught me about the shipwrecks and sharks and sunfish that traversed the city’s waters).

Entering these worlds was invigorating and electrifying. My beliefs were repeatedly challenged and the city was continually morphing, recalibrating itself before my eyes. This was particularly true when I met a group of taxidermists, who upended everything I thought I knew about the artform.

I’d bought a ticket to a taxidermy competition in Brooklyn, thinking that I would meet some interesting characters. I didn’t expect that a bulk of the performers would be LGBTQ+, nor that they would love animals. “When people think of taxidermy, they think of this very conservative straight guy,” Divya Anantharaman, who ran the competition, told me. “I can't think of anything queerer than turning a dead animal into a piece of art.”

I ended up spending months hanging out with taxidermists in their studios accross the city — in Bushwick and Harlem and Sunset Park. I saw neon raccoons, diamante foxes, BDSM cats. I learned from these artists that taxidermy is not just animal-stuffing but a philosophy of being — a way of rethinking the binaries that organise the world: natural and unnatural, human and non-human, male and female, and so on.

Here are some photos I took of Nick DelCastillo, who won the taxidermy competition in 2023, in his bedroom.

If you don’t want to see dead animals, DO NOT scroll down:

You can read a short profile I did of Divya Anantharaman in The New York Times and a dispatch from their taxidermy competition in Brooklyn Magazine. And you can see more of Nick’s work here.

LAID BARE is a Substack about sex, relationships and sexual culture for the overanalysers, overthinkers, fanatics and freaks. You’ll find immersive, investigative reported pieces, as well as unfiltered writing about things like exes, strip clubs, saunas, sex dolls, incels and more. I’ll dissect how the biggest news stories are trickling into the most intimate parts of our lives — how climate change is impacting our libidos; why men are using ChatGPT for relationship advice; how eye-watering New York City rent prices have got 87-year-olds relaunching their careers on OnlyFans.

Why should you read it?

At LAID BARE, you’ll find stories about the darkest, most private parts of ourselves. I’ll take you places you’ve never been to, like the Satanic Temple’s abortion clinic in New Mexico, AI sex doll brothels in Berlin, bathhouse raves in Brooklyn, lesbian strip clubs in London, booming sound system battles in West Bengal. You’ll meet queer taxidermists, erotic masseurs, BDSM blindfold-makers, feminist porn directors, men who are in relationships with sex dolls.

I’ll tell you secrets, like why I stalk my partners’ exes on Instagram and how I made it work moving back in with my parents aged 27. I’ll tell you stories that help you make sense of the world; stories that make you feel less lonely; stories that change your mind.

My writing has been published in the likes of The New York Times, The Guardian, GQ, Vogue, VICE, i-D, Cosmopolitan (and many more places), including a number of investigative pieces, spanning the troubled teen industry and the murky world of unknowing victims of sexual assault. If you’re interested in immersive reporting, salacious secrets and obsessive analysis, subscribe to my Substack. 😛

Subscribe now