‘A new motto: What have they done to you, poor child? But now enough of my filthy stories.’   (Sigmund Freud writing to Wilhelm Fliess on 22 December 1897).       Peter Whitehead and Niki de Saint Phalle’s 1973 film Daddy is an angry retort to oppressive regimes, particularly that most destructive one of childhood sexual abuse. But its power lies equally in its ambivalence and, in the end, its profound negativity. While Whitehead and de Saint Phalle resolutely sought to free

Is sex a ‘good thing’? Is celibacy dangerous? How can we understand the explosive violence of Incels, those young men (primarily) whose...

What do we mean when we talk about the ‘perversions’? Who gets to decide what is ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’? The concept of ‘perversion’ is...

Throughout human history, sexual danger has regulated social lives and subjectivities. From the ‘yellow press’ of the late nineteenth...