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    Are US women protesting Trump by ‘swearing off sex with men’? | Arwa Mahdawi

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    Have rumours of a US sex strike been greatly exaggerated?Sex sells. Sex strikes, meanwhile, make for an irresistible headline. Ever since Donald Trump overwhelmingly won the election, there have been endless headlines about how American women are emulating South Korea’s fringe 4B movement (which encourages heterosexual women not to date, procreate, marry or have sex with men) and “swearing off sex with men” in protest.“A Sex Strike Is a Losing Strategy for American Women,” a recent op-ed in the New York Times proclaimed, for example.“No sex. No dating. No marriage. No children. Interest grows in 4B movement to swear off men,” a PBS headline declared.“Ahead of Trump’s Second Term, Calls for a Sex Strike Grow Online,” the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) wrote.It’s certainly true that there has been a spike in US interest in the 4B movement. Voluntary celibacy was growing in popularity long before the election but Trump’s victory gave it a huge boost. There are more than 100,000 videos about 4B on TikTok and there has been a surge in Google searches relating to it. There have also been various viral calls for women to withhold sex in order to protest against Trump. (Just in case you’re wondering if you have a severe case of deja vu, there were also calls for a sex strike during Trump’s first term.)But is this online chatter actually translating to offline action? It doesn’t seem that way yet. There is zero evidence that there are large-scale sex strikes protesting against Trump happening in the US. All the hand-wringing by the likes of the New York Times seems to be over something that doesn’t actually exist. The headlines treating women as some sort of monolith also obscure the fact that, according to AP VoteCast, 53% of white women voted for Trump this year.Still, that doesn’t mean that growing interest in 4B should be written off as some sort of meaningless fad. On the contrary, engagement with the movement points to the fact that many women are not taking Trump’s victory lying down. While there may be no proof of widespread strikes in the sheets, there have been plenty of demonstrations on the streets. Meanwhile, online sales of emergency contraceptives and abortion pills are rocketing before the “reproductive apocalypse” that will be Trump’s second term. With rights being rolled back and pregnancy growing increasingly dangerous in the US, women are also reconsidering whether they want to have children.Let’s say that sex strikes did actually take off, however. Might they be effective? The most famous sex strike certainly was. In the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes, women withhold sex in an attempt to end the Peloponnesian war and the ruse pays off: peace is declared. Since then, there have been plenty of other real-world sex strikes with varying results, waged everywhere from Belgium to Liberia. A small town in Colombia held a “crossed legs” protest in 2011, for example; women refused sex with their husbands until the government paved a road linking their town to the rest of the province. The protest is widely considered to have been successful.Less headline-worthy forms of protest, however, tend to be rather more effective. This, by the way, is the rather less talked-about message in Lysistrata itself. As the cultural critic and classicist Helen Morales told the Guardian back in 2022, the play isn’t just about sex strikes: “There are elder women seizing control of the treasury and the younger women withdraw their unpaid labour at home. They’re much more a model for effecting political change.”How the Taliban are erasing Afghanistan’s women – photo essay“It was important for us to look beyond the traditional representations of Afghan women as passive victims of the Taliban and show them as active players in their own lives,” say journalist Mélissa Cornet and photographer Kiana Hayeri in this piece for the Guardian.Argentina votes alone against UN resolution combating misogynistic online violenceWhich is not a huge surprise as Argentina’s President Javier Milei is incredibly rightwing and a vocal critic of the UN.Gender-fluid Mary, Queen of Scots ballet to debut at Edinburgh festival 2025It’s the latest example of a trend of gender-neutral casting in artistic productions. You can guarantee that this will drive the usual suspects completely bonkers.Armie Hammer’s mother gifted him a vasectomy for his birthdayThe disgraced actor, who has been accused of sexual abuse by multiple women, has returned to public life via a podcast. He seems to be having trouble rustling up guests so recently had his mum on the podcast, where she shared this little snippet of info.What happened to Palestinian-Egyptian actor May Calamawy’s role in Gladiator II?When Calamawy was originally cast (long before 7 October 2023) it was reported that she’d have an “important” or leading role. Now it seems like she has been all but cut from the movie – relegated to a tiny non-speaking background part. There has been a lot of speculation that this is punishment for her pro-Palestinian advocacy. As we have seen, talking about a genocide and ethnic cleansing can be a real career-killer.Sydney Sweeney says female solidarity in Hollywood is ‘fake’Wait, you’re telling me that Hollywood – a place that fetishizes unrealistic beauty ideals and where women over 40 struggle to find roles – isn’t a utopia of intersectional feminism? You’re kidding me!Iran announces ‘treatment clinic’ for women who defy strict hijab laws“It won’t be a clinic, it will be a prison,” one young woman from Iran told the Guardian.Sweden’s minister for gender equality is terrified of bananasAs someone who also hates bananas with a passion, I would like to extend my solidarity to Paulina Brandberg, whose banana-phobia has made international headlines. As one of her colleagues noted, we should be focusing on her work to help vulnerable women rather than her hatred for an alarmingly yellow fruit.The week in pawtriarchyJust in case you were wondering whether the US could get any more dystopian, it turns out that robot dogs are guarding Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. Still, probably better to have robots rather than the real thing considering how close Trump is to Kristi Noem. The South Dakota governor, whom Trump has just picked for head of homeland security, famously wrote about shooting and killing her family dog, Cricket, and an unnamed goat. More

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      Teens Think Movies and TV Shows Have Too Much Sex, Study Finds

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      At least that is what they told researchers at U.C.L.A. The high popularity of romance plots in movies and shows suggests otherwise.Movies and television shows about rich people are the last thing we want to watch. And skip the sex: We prefer content that focuses on platonic relationships. (There’s enough porn online as it is.) We do like fantasy as a genre, increasingly so. But please, pretty please, fix how you incorporate social media into story lines. It’s cringe.That is what young people — ages 10 to 24 — think about movies, television shows, video games and social media, according to a study released Thursday.The study, Teens & Screens, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that 63.5 percent of participants said they wanted content that depicted platonic relationships, as opposed to romance and sex. That is up from 51.5 percent last year. (Questions involving romance and sex were not shown to participants ages 10 to 13.)Of course, what study participants say and what they actually do can vary wildly. There is ample evidence to the contrary among shows that are popular with younger audiences, including “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” a raunchy comedy; “Emily in Paris,” an impassioned romance; and “Tell Me Lies,” a steamy soap.Movies like “Poor Things,” which found an insatiable Emma Stone romping through a Paris brothel, and the sexually frank “All of Us Strangers” attracted a surprisingly large audience of people in their early 20s, according to box office analysts.This year’s study was conducted in August and included 1,644 young people.“We’re trying to shift the culture by giving storytellers better information,” said Yalda T. Uhls, the founder and chief executive of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers, which is based at U.C.L.A. “The problem is often that Hollywood storytellers use their own memories of their teenage years or what their children in Los Angeles are doing, and that does not remotely represent what young people really want.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The US lost its shame muscle’: why sex no longer scandalizes in politics

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      Earlier this year, at Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, adult film star Stormy Daniels told jurors how at age 27, she met a 60-year-old Trump, whose wife had only recently given birth to their son, for what she thought was dinner. She arrived to find him in satin pyjamas and, during an encounter that included very “brief” sex, the business magnate told Daniels that she reminded him of his daughter, Ivanka.I’m not dragging all this up again to put you off your dinner. I’m bringing it up to remind you that, while all these sordid details made headlines and generated jokes on late-night talkshows, they didn’t move the needle with Trump’s voters at all. His base, which includes evangelical Christians, simply didn’t care. Nor were they bothered about Trump’s association with Mark Robinson, the disgraced Republican candidate running to be North Carolina’s next governor who was allegedly once active on a porn forum called Nude Africa where he boasted about being a “perv”.The 2024 US elections may have provided a constant stream of revelations ranging from the mildly salacious to the downright disturbing. It’s not just Trump: there’s the recent reports of New York magazine star reporter Olivia Nuzzi having a personal relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr during his presidential run and sitting representative Matt Gaetz being investigated for human trafficking and paying for sex with minors. Yet despite the many lurid and often unpleasant details, political sex scandals just don’t seem to have much bite anymore.“We have lost our shame muscle in the United States,” says Dr Alison Dagnes, professor of the political science department at Shippensburg University. She argues that because politicians aren’t shamed into retiring from public life, details of these scandals remain mostly rumors and fade from the public memory. “Certain politicians are realizing that if you don’t apologize for something, then nobody can use it against you again. For those who are shameless, that is a very effective way to get through life.”It hasn’t always been like this. Being embroiled in a sex scandal used to swing an election or destroy a candidate. In 1987, Gary Hart was the presumed Democratic presidential candidate – until reports of “womanizing” and being caught in an affair derailed his campaign. In 2008, North Carolina senator John Edwards, a star in the Democratic party, was on a path to the presidency until he was caught covering up an extramarital affair that resulted in a child. His career imploded and he vanished from public life.In 2014, the Washington Post analysed 38 sex scandals going back to 1974 and found that “just 39 percent of officeholders won reelection after coming under scrutiny for sexual harassment, affairs or prostitution, while the rest chose not to run, resigned or lost”. While Bill Clinton may have survived his affair (if you can call the most powerful man in the world preying on an intern an “affair”) with Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s, he seems to have made the US a little less tolerant of impropriety. “The survival rate [for sex scandals] has plummeted since Bill Clinton’s presidency. In 15 scandals since 2000, just three officeholders (or 20 percent) facing personal scandals have won reelection,” the Post noted. It added: “It’s unclear why personal scandals that were once shrugged off … are more consequential today.”Clearly, things have changed again since then. Partly this is due to the fact that America’s trust in media has fallen to historic lows in recent years – a phenomenon that is linked to growing polarization. Jay Van Bavel, a professor of neural science at New York University and an expert in “the partisan brain”, notes that “people don’t trust institutions and media sources that aren’t aligned with them ideologically”. Many of Trump’s supporters simply don’t believe his accusers, and don’t believe the media sources reporting on his actions.Even if people do believe allegations about a politician, says Van Bavel, “they’re willing to excuse bad behaviour and continue voting for a person or party member because they don’t want the other party to take power”. A 2020 study that he worked on, alongside 14 other prominent researchers, looked at survey data since the 1970s and found that, for the first time, contempt for the other political party is greater than affection for one’s own. Voting behaviour is now essentially driven by who you hate the most.Trump, of course, is well aware of this. In 2016, the former president joked that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and he still wouldn’t lose any voters.But Trump is a unique case. There may have been a loosening of America’s moral compass but there are still lines that most politicians can’t cross.Some of these lines are dictated by a cultural moment. See, for example, Democratic senator Al Franken, who resigned in 2017 because of sexual misconduct allegations. Were it not for the fact that it was the start of #MeToo and Franken was a Democrat, he could probably have weathered the accusations, suggests Jodi Dean, a professor in the political science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. But “it seems like a Democratic base want purity”. And “Franken had a sense of shame”, so he stepped down.Mixing sex and taxpayer money also makes a scandal more difficult to weather. “If it is an issue that’s a private matter, the American public is more likely to let it go,” Dagnes notes. “But if there’s some sort of official corruption involved, then they’re less likely to.” Dagnes references the recent case of Republican Anthony D’Esposito who, according to a New York Times investigation, put his fiancee’s daughter and a woman with whom he was having an affair on his payroll.“I would expect D’Esposito to really take a big polling hit,” says Dagnes. “This isn’t just: ‘My fiancee and I were going through a really difficult time’ – it’s a case of: ‘I feel so emboldened that I’m going to put my mistress and my fiancee’s daughter on my payroll,’ which is paid by the American taxpayer. That makes voters feel duped.”Gender also plays a part in how sex scandals are received, with women routinely being held to far higher standards than men. Dagnes notes, for example, that the right has been trying very hard to manufacture a scandal out of the fact that Kamala Harris, who was single at the time, had a relationship with San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, who was also single at the time, in the 1990s. Somehow they think this makes her “a slut”. There is, for example, a lot of merchandise for sale with the phrase “Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go”.This isn’t to say that women, particularly attractive young white women, are always held to higher standards than men. While Nuzzi has been put on leave by New York magazine following news of her previously undisclosed relationship with RFK Jr, she has also been cut a surprising amount of slack for what is clearly professional misconduct. “Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources,” shrugged Ben Smith from Semafor. “The most compromising of all, and the most common, is a reporter’s fealty to someone who gives them information. That’s the real coin of this realm. Sex barely rates.”That said, Nuzzi is certainly getting dragged through the mud for the affair more than RFK Jr, who is well-known for what he has called “wild impulses” and “lust demons”. Previous reports about Kennedy’s private life suggest he detailed extramarital encounters with 37 women in a 2001 diary. That didn’t stop him from trying to run for president, of course. But neither did allegations he once assaulted a babysitter – to which he responded by stating: “I am not a church boy.” Kennedy also hasn’t let brain worms or dead bears get in the way of his political ambitions.The fact that sex scandals no longer seem to register with voters seems to be linked to a wider acceptance of outrageous political behaviour. “Politicians can now go out and say that they’re in favor of nuking Gaza [as Senator Lindsey Graham and Representative Greg Murphy have hinted towards],” Dean observes. “Politicians are openly bloodthirsty and genocidal. That’s permissible speech right now. Ours is now a time where genocide is not a major scandal, where climate change is not a major scandal. We really might be over the age of where an individual’s act is going to gather the same amount of tension as it once did. We’re seeing a sense of right and wrong totally breaking down.” More

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      Dr. Ruth’s Tips for a Happy Life

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      Ruth Westheimer loved to give advice — and often strayed from her area of expertise as she tried, in her words, “to make the world a better place.”Ruth Westheimer spent a lot of time talking about sex. She did so with her own brand of frankness and good cheer on her pioneering radio show, “Sexually Speaking,” and on her daytime TV program, “The Dr. Ruth Show,” as well as in her column for Playgirl magazine, in her many books and in countless interviews and public appearances across more than four decades. It’s possible that Dr. Ruth, who died last week at 96, talked publicly about sex more than anyone else. Ever.But since her specialty touched on so many other aspects of the human experience, she also gave plenty of general life advice. Some of those lessons were pulled from her own difficult experience as a German Jewish refugee who lost her parents during the Holocaust. Or from her unhappy early relationships, though she found lasting love with her third husband, Manfred Westheimer, an engineer, after two brief marriages.In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, she spoke of the importance of turning a terrible experience into something positive. “I was left with a feeling that because I was not killed by the Nazis — because I survived — I had an obligation to make a dent in the world. What I didn’t know was that that dent would end up being me talking about sex from morning to night.”To describe her sense of purpose, she often used the phrase tikkun olam — Hebrew for “repairing the world” or, as she put it in a speech, “making the world a better place.” “I knew I had to do something for tikkun olam,” she said in a 2014 interview with Hadassah Magazine. “You can take horrible experiences you will never forget, but you can use the experiences to live a productive life.”In a 1984 interview with The New York Times, she noted the importance of humor in teaching. “If a professor leaves his students laughing,” she said, “they will walk away remembering what they have learned.”Dr. Ruth made her first appearance on The Tonight Show in 1982, when “Sexually Speaking” was catching on. When the host, Johnny Carson, said that many people are bashful talking about sex, Dr. Ruth offered a lesson in how to approach delicate subjects: “If you do it in good taste — and if you do it properly, then it can be — everything can be talked about. Everything.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Woman Sleeping With Her Stepson? This Director Knows It May Shock.

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      The French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has been exploring relationships between girls and older men since the 1970s. Her latest, “Last Summer,” flips the script.When the French director Catherine Breillat was 40, her then-husband and the father of her first child ended their relationship to be with a much younger woman. Soon after, Breillat started dating a man 12 years her junior.“Men want to repudiate their wives of a certain age by saying they couldn’t be loved by anyone anymore,” Breillat said in a recent video interview via an interpreter. “But for me that’s not true. I want to tell other women there’s no cause for despair.” In “Last Summer,” which comes to theaters Friday, she probes at this realization through an incendiary premise.Since the 1970s, the lauded director, now 75, has repeatedly focused her unflinching gaze on the troubled sexual awakenings of girls, often in the uncaring hands of older men, but in “Last Summer,” that dynamic is inverted: A middled-aged lawyer, Anne (Léa Drucker), risks her career and marriage by having a clandestine affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher).In “Last Summer,” Anne, played by Léa Drucker, risks her career, and her marriage to Pierre, played by Olivier Rabourdin, by having an affair with her stepson Théo.via Sideshow and Janus FilmsThe film, Breillat’s first in a decade, joins several recent movies concerned with the power dynamics of heterosexual couples in which the woman is older, including the lighter Anne Hathaway-vehicle “The Idea of You” and Todd Haynes’s divisive “May December.” (Haynes’s movie was inspired by the true story of a teacher who started a relationship with one of her students.)According to Breillat, this wave of films reflects a simple reality. “It’s the truth,” she said: “Young people are attracted to older women.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to Do About Erectile Dysfunction

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      Sooner or later, most men will experience a problem achieving or maintaining an erection. But today, there are more treatments than ever.Erectile dysfunction is more common than one might think. More than half of men over 40 will experience some kind of erectile problem, and the prevalence increases with age (though men in their 20s and 30s can be affected, too).The experience can have a devastating effect on a man’s well-being. Yet a shocking number of men don’t seek help. One industry survey suggests that just 51 percent of men with erectile dysfunction had discussed the issue with their doctor, and even fewer had spoken to their own partners about it.There is “not a medical condition that I’m aware of that affects more men’s lives,” said Dr. Mohit Khera, a urologist and the president of the Sexual Medicine Society of North America.But there are effective treatments, he added, beyond well-known medications like Viagra. These can include vacuum pumps, injections, implants, lifestyle modifications, testosterone-replacement therapy and sex therapy. Some combination of these options, experts said, almost always improve erections, even in the most severe cases.However, before men go anywhere near a pill or pump (or the “natural” male supplements commonly sold at gas stations), they should get a health exam to understand the causes of the dysfunction, which might point to a more serious health issue.“The penis can be seen as a barometer for the whole health of the person,” said Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist and sex medicine specialist in Maryland.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Your Body and Mind Change in Midlife

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      Midlife, typically defined as ages 40 to 60, is an inflection point. It’s a time when our past behaviors begin to catch up with us and we start to notice our bodies and minds aging — sometimes in frustrating or disconcerting ways. But it’s also an opportunity: What our older years will look and feel […] More

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      Stormy Daniels Tells of Her Encounter With Trump in Tahoe

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      Stormy Daniels on Tuesday told jurors her account of a sexual encounter with Donald J. Trump in 2006, an episode that ultimately resulted in the former president’s criminal trial.Despite the objections of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Justice Juan M. Merchan ruled that it would be up to jurors to decide on the credibility of the porn actress, whose $130,000 hush-money agreement with Mr. Trump before the 2016 election is at the heart of the charges against him. Prosecutors said she would not, however, describe his genitalia, as she did in her book “Full Disclosure.”Mr. Trump denies they ever had sex.The fateful meeting of Mr. Trump and Ms. Daniels nearly 18 years ago took place at a celebrity golf tournament on the banks of Lake Tahoe in Nevada. Mr. Trump was competing there, and Ms. Daniels was working at the event to promote a porn studio, Wicked Pictures.This account is drawn from versions of her story that Ms. Daniels has told in the past. She first described her interactions with Mr. Trump in a 2011 magazine interview. The magazine, Life & Style, agreed to pay her $15,000 for her story, but she never collected because Mr. Trump’s then fixer, Michael D. Cohen — who is now expected to be one of the prosecution’s primary witnesses — had the story killed before publication.The interview was eventually published in a related publication, In Touch Weekly, in early 2018 after The Wall Street Journal revealed her hush-money deal. She described the episode again in her book, which was published later that year.Ms. Daniels has said that at the tournament she rode with Mr. Trump in a golf court while he was playing, and he later asked for her phone number and invited her to dinner.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Older Daters are Coping With the Surge in S.T.I.s

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      Older daters are not getting adequate screening and protection from S.T.I.s. Here’s how to be a safer sexually active senior.Since her marriage of more than 20 years ended in divorce, Amy, a 62-year-old Texan, has had a couple of committed relationships and a handful of sexual partners.Amy is currently seeing a man she described as a “friend with benefits,” but it’s nothing she takes too seriously. What she does take seriously is talking to him — and every partner — about safe sex practices amid rising rates of sexually transmitted infections in seniors.“I’m very aware of it,” said Amy, who asked to use only her middle name to protect her privacy. “I require proof of negative testing before I become intimate with anyone.” She also insists on using a condom.Between 2012 and 2022, rates of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia more than doubled among those 55 and older, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Research suggests many older people are unaware of these risks, and that’s keeping them from adequate screening and practicing safer sex.Joan Price, a sex educator who focuses on senior sexuality and who is the author of “Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex,” said she was struck by the variety of reasons older daters may not practice safe sex, or even talk about it with partners.She often hears some version of, “Oh, I can’t get pregnant,” she said, or “Our age group doesn’t get S.T.I.s.” Men have told her they were reluctant to talk about barrier methods of protection because their erections were unpredictable, and using a condom made them go away.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More