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Love etc

Your sex life is written in the stars

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Star signs don’t just determine people’s character traits and fortune, says Jessica Estrada in Well + Good magazine – they can also reveal how lovers find “ultimate satisfaction in the bedroom”. Some signs of the zodiac “get steamy standing up”, while others prefer the slow, romantic, “always classic” missionary position.

If you want to satisfy an Aries, says “relationship astrologer” Anna Kovach, “remember they need to be on top and in control”. A Taurus needs to have “all senses engaged”, so try bringing scented oils or chocolate into the bedroom. If you’re with a Gemini, start out “up against a wall”, then move to a “table, the floor, a chair and so forth”. An Aquarius loves to “shock and surprise”, so Kovach recommends the “pinball wizard”. The receiving partner lies on their back and lifts their hips and legs into a bridge position, while the other partner kneels in front, as if they were standing up against a pinball machine.

Carrie and co crushed my male ego

Sarah Jessica Parker, centre, as Carrie Bradshaw in And Just Like That

I watched Sex and the City for the first time 22 years ago “under wincing duress”, says Simon Mills in The Times. I remember “squirming at the sight of thirtysomething women behaving like male predators”, commodifying men in terms of wealth, genital proportion, intellect and sexual technique. The four girlfriends dated more than 100 men between them over six seasons, bedding 45 – then chucking them, in “just the same way that we men had objectified women” for decades.

Being a “strutting, cocky, freewheeling” 1980s male, I had never considered that women talked about men in this way before. Thanks to Carrie Bradshaw and co, it was suddenly easy to imagine one’s “every move and performative failure” being judged by your wife or partner’s girl gang, slightly pissed on white wine. It was a real blow to the male ego. And then there were the vibrators. Largely due to Sex and the City – the latest reboot, And Just Like That, began on Thursday – there are said to be more Ann Summers Rampant Rabbit vibrators in Britain than real rabbits. In the Noughties, a woman asked me if I felt “threatened” by her Rabbit. To be honest, I wasn’t. “I was absolutely terrified of her, though.”

House of Gucci-coochie

Reviewers have panned Ridley Scott’s fashion film House of Gucci, but I was rather impressed by one scene, says Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. Near the start of the movie, Patrizia (Lady Gaga) lures her fiancé, Maurizio (Adam Driver), into a shabby office. They make love on a desk – “except ‘making love’ doesn’t begin to capture the pneumatic frenzy that ensues”.

Puccini blares in the background, while Driver and Gaga’s sound effects “suggest a jailbreak at the monkey sanctuary”. Funnily enough, Gaga told ITV News she studied animals to prepare for the film: “She was talking about the role in general, but in this scene the preparations definitely show.” The end result is mad, daft, raunchy and wonderful. It seems Hollywood’s prudish era is finally over.

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