Sex

A Pennsylvania grand jury report released last night has revealed that the Catholic Church in six dioceses systematically and sneakily covered up sexual abuse by priests on a horrifying scale. The American Church has now been plunged into the worst crisis in its history. The 884-report comes less than a month after the revelation that ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington DC, was a compulsive predator. His serial molestation of seminarians was an open secret, and cannot possibly have come as a surprise to some of his friends in the US hierarchy. The grand jury report – which examined only a tiny fraction of America’s nearly 200 dioceses –

Sir Christopher Chope is not, perhaps, a household name, but he is a man of quite considerable courage. By raising an objection to the preposterous private member’s bill, brought by Wera Hobhouse, a LibDem MP, to make upskirting – taking pictures up girls’ skirts –  a specific criminal offence, he has seen off a bill which was a preposterous waste of time. The Government and Wera H has been hoping to get through the bill on the nod but it could only happen if no one in the chamber had the bad taste to object to it being passed without debate. Sir Christopher, one of parliament’s tough nuts, took the

Quite a long time, five seconds, when you count it. And ever since Netflix reportedly warned its employees not to stare at a colleague for longer than that, the paradoxical effect is, inevitably, to make you stare and count. The company’s new guideline is, of course, all part of corporate America’s response to the #MeToo scandal and if the Netflix directive is anything to go by, it’s going to result in the human race dying out in the US, because no one will be able to make a pass at anyone else, ever. It’s not that the individual prohibitions are onerous or particularly unreasonable; it’s that the collective effect can

When you think about Peter Stringfellow, aka ‘Stringy’, it’s hard to think about anything other than topless women. Stringy, who’s just died aged 77, made a fortune first out of music clubs – early bookings included the Beatles – and then out of women who’d mislaid their tops. Not the most salacious of pursuits, you might think. And the sleaziness of the image wasn’t helped by the foot-long mullet and the taste for leopardskin-print outfits. Certainly, on the outside, all those trashy clichés rang true in 2000, when I interviewed Stringy for The Spectator shortly after his 60th birthday. On his birthday, he sat on a gold throne in his

When Facebook and co stop selling on our details to third parties, will it be the end of spam? For half an hour every evening my otherwise chatty husband is lost to me as he deletes hundreds and hundreds of emails. My PA does the same, and so do I. The waste of time is criminal. But I doubt the spam will stop. If junk through the front-door mail box isn’t illegal, I guess junk through a virtual mailbox can’t be either. Grrr… Technology was supposed to save us time, remember? What a joke. It just frees you up to deal with more junk. Desperate for sun and time for

I’ve never shied away from discussing sex with my children and they’ve always been precocious enough to ask probing questions, usually in public. So when the letter came home from school announcing sex education classes for my then ten-year-old, I was relaxed. And when I later asked him, ‘Did you learn anything you didn’t already know?’, I expected a bored ‘no’. In fact, he said, ‘Yes. Oral sex and masturbation.’ Clearly sex education has moved on since I was at school. Schools have traditionally covered reproduction in science lessons and, since the 1960s, sex education as a discrete subject has dealt with contraception, sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy. David