Giving sex a good name since 1995
When researching the stress of buying a house, online mortgage broker Habito found “1 in 10 couples say that getting a mortgage made their sex lives go limp.” Thus, they came up with the idea of creating an erotic novel to reassure prospective property purchasers that conveyancing can be more of a come-to-bed than it might be assumed.
PVT Chat is the feature debut of New York City-based independent filmmaker Ben Hozie, starring Julia Fox, the knockout star of 2019’s Uncut Gems, as cam girl Scarlet and Peter Vack as the innocuous Jack, an online gambling addict who develops a school-boy crush on Scarlet that at intervals threatens to get out of hand.
They say love is blind, but had the Queen been to Specsavers, she might have spotted quite how awful, sleazy and deeply stupid her favourite son is. Prince Andrew’s life began promisingly enough: blessed with good looks and an innate confidence, he was the apple of his mother’s eye.
As four years of a Trump presidency come to an end and Brexit negotiations crawl towards increasingly unsatisfactory conclusions, Ian Dunt’s latest comment on the power inherent to liberalism is a breath of unpolluted air. Never has nationalism been more pressingly on the global agenda, especially in the wake of a pandemic that has resolutely ignored geopolitics and cross-border controls.
Invented and designed by women, its blurb boasts that it can produce an orgasm in sixty seconds.
It is conventional wisdom that men don’t read books by women very much. I am not sure of the basis for this belief. It may well be true and is probably because in our prejudiced way, men are not much interested in women’s ideas. Or it might also be because it is a bit frightening to know what they really think about life and their experience of the male. The female gaze can fall far short of romantic.
My father was born in 1904 to Russian-Jewish refugee parents. They had fled one of the repeated and murderous Russian and Eastern European pogroms carried out in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The following year Britain enacted its first real immigration legislation with the Aliens Act. This had been specifically drafted to deal with the Jewish migrations. Prior to that there was no official barrier to migrants and the country had received, (though without enthusiasm) the Huguenots in the C16th and the Irish following the famines. We managed to accommodate thousands of Poles and Hungarians in the post-war, Cold War 1950s and Ugandan Asians in the 1960s – though again to popular disapproval.
The history of how humanity developed its social and political institutions has never been free of violence. Much of this has been to do with power struggles, initially between competing cliques and subsequently between nation states – as evidenced by centuries of international wars. In the European west especially however there has been a parallel struggle for social justice – itself far from pacifist in expression.
Sex, death and madness …are continuing themes that resonate even when diminuendo in so many of our efforts to express understanding of the human condition. More than anything else they unite art and science as a source of endeavour in that enterprise. Reflect for yourself if you will on what the basic questions of science (including social science), the celebrated works of culture and philosophy, are about. This is merely a book review.
I love America. Especially when I am there, where the good things about the nation are more in evidence. Simply because you are physically connected to place and people. The main thing is that the USA does everything bigger and in brighter colours – even the sleaze and squalor. Of course, being white and speaking English makes life easier; possession of money even more so.