The commodification of the female orgasm is a distinctly unsexy and unscientific business.
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/ 9 September 2008
Lawal, a young Muslim woman from Katsina State in northern Nigeria, became an international cause celebre last year when she was condemned to death by stoning after being convicted of adultery.
I have never really understood why so many people felt personally affronted by Sex and the City. The 1990s TV hit that charted sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw’s navigation of life, love and the latest shoe styles in New York never claimed to be a documentary about contemporary women’s lives.
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/ 18 February 2008
On a recent trip to New York, I passed a pleasant afternoon watching a series of unsavoury males being violently separated from their penises. The movie Teeth is an entertaining enough comedy-horror update of the myth of vagina dentata, or the toothed vagina. It tells the story of the teenaged Dawn, leading light of her local chastity chapter but struggling to contain her burgeoning desires.
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/ 19 February 2007
Kylie Minogue is not, I acknowledge, Everywoman. Everywoman does not regularly sport exotically draped jumpsuits, or find her outfits being displayed at an internationally renowned museum and art gallery. But since her diagnosis with breast cancer in 2005, Minogue has inadvertently come to encapsulate the dilemmas of modern middle-class womanhood.
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/ 21 December 2006
Christian Bale began his acting career as a lost little boy in Empire of the Sun. Now he’s a murderer in American Psycho, writes Libby Brooks.
I’m not a fan. Which made it even more surprising, that whump in the stomach when I heard Kylie Minogue had postponed the Australian leg of her world tour after being diagnosed with breast cancer. There’s something disingenuous about feeling terribly distressed when an attractive, 37-year-old celebrity has breast cancer.
Jane Campion has made an incredibly sexy movie, and she knows it. In the Cut is being hailed as her finest work since The Piano. She tells Libby Brooks about the delights of working with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s stomach — and why she had to hire a gigolo.
Barbara Trapido left South Africa in 1963, but she revisits her homeland in her new novel, writes Libby Brooks from London.
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/ 11 February 2003
Seven kids are swept to their deaths on a skiing trip. Seven astronauts are lost when a space shuttle breaks up over the United States. Only one story captures world attention. Why?