“The idea I actually ‘pulled’ my wife couldn’t be further from the truth,” says Nick Cave in The Red Hand Files. “In actual fact, she passed by me one evening, over 20 years ago, as I stood beneath my favourite dinosaur, Dippy the diplodocus, in the main hall of London’s Natural History Museum and I was swept helplessly into the slipstream of her beauty, exterior and interior. I have been happily flailing about there ever since – not waving but drowning, as the great Stevie Smith would say.”
I miss the office love affair
The highlight of working life in the 1990s was the office love affair, says Rowan Pelling in Perspective magazine. That was before Covid, #MeToo and Tinder changed everything. Back then, “you either met sexual partners at work or in the pub”. Work dates were less likely to be psychos, unemployable or people who were going to ghost you: it’s hard to vanish if you’re due to be at the same meeting the next morning.
Of course, there aren’t many opportunities for “leg-tremblers” in the average office, but “too much choice makes most humans miserable”. It’s much easier to pick one of your three single colleagues – or even your office’s “least scrupulous spouse” – rather than searching for ever for a “golden” Tinder profile. At work, you can “suddenly find yourself enraptured” by someone unexpected. It certainly used to make office life “a lot less boring”.
Women on top?
The internet has become “a frothing sea of volcanic female fantasies”, says Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. A million sex-obsessed women spent last week lusting over footballers, tennis players, Love Islanders and even politicians. They’re behaving no better than “a bunch of horny, leering 1950s golf-loving bankers in a strip club”.
The power dynamic between men and women has shifted. If the England manager were a woman, would she be subjected to “the panting objectification” suffered by poor Gareth Southgate? No: the offending men would be flung from the highest tower. Yet it turns out “when women get in power, we’re just as lusty and aggressive as men”.
For proof, look no further than the hit Netflix show Sex/Life. The highlight is the “big penis”, which actor Adam Demos swears is not a prosthetic, says Kayla Kibbe in InsideHook. We’re used to seeing hot, naked women on television, but now we’re objectifying men too. This may not be the last “penis of the summer”.